A 100-Day Honeymoon from Hell
Whatever mandate Trump had, it’s become plain he dramatically overread it.
The kind of headlines we get to grit our teeth through in 2025: “‘A great friend’: Audio undercuts Trump US attorney nominee’s disavowal of alleged Nazi sympathizer.”
It’s not enough that Trump has his personal bagmen lined up to serve as U.S. attorneys. And it’s not enough that these bagmen are longtime lionizers of January 6th criminals. Now we’ve got to deal with U.S. attorney nominee bagmen who are longtime lionizers of Nazi-sympathizing January 6th criminals specifically. Happy Tuesday.
The Mandate That Wasn’t
by Andrew Egger
When Donald Trump stormed back into the Oval Office a hundred days ago, he claimed something he’d lacked the first time around: a sweeping popular mandate. “The golden age of America begins right now,” he told a cheering crowd in his inaugural address. “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal, and all of these many betrayals that have taken place.”
Under the bombast, Trump had strong reason to be confident in his support. He might not have quite cleared 50 percent in the national popular vote, but his 77 million votes and his sweep of every swing state felt like affirmation that Americans were so enamored of his political project that they were ready to look past his cruelty, his criminality, and even his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. He came out swinging, signing a blizzard of eye-popping executive orders on his first day in office. One week after inauguration, his approval rating was at 52 percent.
Roughly 13 weeks later, however, it’s obvious that whatever mandate Trump may have had, he wildly overestimated the strength of it. Americans may have been shockingly, unnervingly ready to let Trump do a remarkable amount of damage. But on issue after issue, his administration’s conduct has been so hamfisted, heavy-handed, and hubristic that it has already rattled millions of them back to their senses.
Take immigration. Between the end of Trump’s first term and his second inauguration, U.S. attitudes hardened considerably toward people in the country illegally. Polls were regularly finding that majorities of Americans supported at least the broad concept of mass deportations.
But Trump didn’t just aggressively ramp up deportations. Instead, he attempted to establish a whole new extrajudicial deportation regime. He skipped due process while shipping migrants to El Salvador to rot in prison, then shrugged when courts ordered them back. He deported law-abiding spouses and parents of U.S. citizens and, in some cases, their U.S.-citizen children as well. He revoked student visas for public critics of Israel, seizing them off the street and bundling them into unmarked vans. And he wildly overestimated the degree to which Americans were actively craving immigration-enforcement cruelty, releasing leering videos of “ASMR deportation flights” and AI-generated images of ICE arresting sobbing women.
The result: Despite delivering on a key campaign promise by slowing new border crossings to a near standstill, Trump’s approval rating on immigration is now below 50 percent and sinking.
Or take tariffs. Trump talked about the issue constantly on the campaign trail, and his election doubtless felt like a major endorsement of his protectionist instincts.
But Trump didn’t just implement tariffs. He went tariff-berserk, slapping insanely punitive duties on Canada, Mexico, China, and—for one wild, market-cratering week—pretty much every country in the world.1 He was plainly making up his policy as he went along. Tariffs went up, then down, then up, then down again. He did so buffoonishly, determining countries’ tariff rates with math formulas that made economists want to commit ritual mass suicide. And he openly set tariff rates with an eye toward which countries’ leaders were annoying him the most—picking a fight with Mexico and Canada over supposedly poor fentanyl-smuggling enforcement, then gradually orienting that fight more and more toward Canada after having a good-vibes call with Mexico’s president.
The result: Dropping markets, sagging consumer confidence, paralyzed trade, and a massive drop in public support for Trump’s economic stewardship.
You can go down the list. Voters plainly liked the idea of cutting the size of government—but that doesn’t mean they’ve loved seeing Elon Musk’s DOGE take a chainsaw to everything from the National Nuclear Security Administration to the Social Security Administration.
Voters plainly didn’t hate Trump’s “America First” posturing—but that doesn’t mean they’ve loved his betrayal of Ukraine, his embrace of Vladimir Putin, and his militaristic saber-rattling toward Canada, Panama, and Greenland.
A critical mass were ready to forgive his personal criminality—but that doesn’t mean they’re eager to see him prop up a meme coin and then use the White House to profit off it.
In an alternate reality, Trump could have come in and acted slightly more judiciously: an aggressive deportation regime that involved hiring more immigration judges to adjudicate cases rather than ignoring the law entirely; a trade regime that relied on hard-nosed tariffs against China and narrowly protecting a few favored forms of American manufacturing; a DOGE team that didn’t decide, as an opening act, to shut down an entire agency and to follow that up with a series of mistakes and misrepresentation.
In that alternate reality, Trump gets more of what he wants and doesn’t suffer politically for it. Perhaps The Bulwark shouts fruitlessly into the wind while he basks in the ongoing support of voters already bought in to his second term, whose good favor he has not yet given them reason to rethink.
But that’s not the world we’re in. Trump was incapable of understanding the true nature of his mandate. His honeymoon, such as it was, is over. His popularity is falling; his foes—at least some of them—are starting to find their spines. The blitzkrieg is finished; the time of trench warfare has arrived.
A Tip of the Hat to Canada
by William Kristol
Twenty years ago, the Weekly Standard published a witty cover story by Matt Labash. Its headline was “Welcome to Canada, the Great White Waste of Time,” and it went on—amusingly and hyperbolically—from there.
I will say it now: Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, mea Canadiana culpa. Because yesterday, our neighbors to the north succeeded in doing what we failed to do a few months ago: They rejected Trump and Trumpism.
After over a decade in power with decidedly mixed results, the Liberal Party was supposed to lose Canada’s next federal election. Indeed, the polls forecast a crushing Liberal defeat. But then something happened. Trump won the presidency here in the United States.
He promptly decided not just to insult Canada but to threaten its very sovereignty, and also to launch a trade war against it. The Liberal government changed leaders, fought back, strongly defended a liberal and—dare I say—globalist vision of Canada’s future. Yesterday, it rode a wave of Canadian patriotism to victory.
It wasn’t a landslide. The Liberals seem to have won the national popular vote by about 2 percentage points. The liberal candidate here in the United States lost the popular vote to Donald Trump last November by less than 2 percentage points. History is at times far more contingent than some deterministic social scientists want to believe. A few percentage points can make a big difference in the future of nations.
But if Canadians can rally to stand up for liberal and democratic principles, surely we in the United States can as well. Indeed, Canada’s excellent national anthem pledges allegiance to a Canada “strong and free,” and “glorious and free.” Perhaps we American liberals can learn from our northern cousins how to stand at once for freedom and strength, for liberty and glory.
Meanwhile, O Canada: Please accept my sincere apologies for that headline. I owe you one.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Pop Quiz time… BILL LUEDERS has a simple quiz to see how you’re keeping up with the madness, 100 days into it.
Trump Is More Likely to Get a Third Impeachment Than a Third Term… In 100 days, he has amply demonstrated he deserves it, JILL LAWRENCE argues.
Governor Vows to Make Trump’s Life Hell… On FYPod, TIM MILLER and CAM KASKY discuss the Trump administration’s latest immigration horrors, the political viability of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and the surprising lack of online literacy among Gen Z.
Are You Better Off Than You Were 100 Days Ago? We all know the answer, writes JOHN AVLON.
Quick Hits
PLANE OVERBOARD: When the Atlantic broke the “Houthi PC Small Group” story last month, the White House insisted it was a distraction from a broader tactical victory. “The real story here,” Karoline Leavitt said at the time, “is the overwhelming success of President Trump’s decisive military action against Houthi terrorists.”
But despite weeks of American bombardment, the Houthis have not let up their attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea. On Monday, U.S. officials said, the Houthis launched a drone-and-missile attack on the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman. While the attack seemingly did little direct damage, the vessel was forced to make such an abrupt evasive turn that the crew lost control of an F/A-18E fighter jet that was under tow. No one was killed and only one sailor was hurt, but the $60 million jet and its tow tractor were lost overboard. In this case, the Navy announced the news rather than sending it accidentally to Jeffrey Goldberg.
ANOTHER HIT AT THE PRESS: Back in 2020, in the course of their perennial hunt for leakers, the first Trump administration secretly seized phone and email records of a number of reporters, including journalists working for the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post. These cases came to light in 2021, prompting the Biden administration to announce new guidelines heavily limiting such seizures.
Now, however, the Trump White House is reversing that policy—making a public case for the some aggressive anti-leaking actions they pursued only furtively the first time around.
“Federal government employees intentionally leaking sensitive information to the media undermines the ability of the Department of Justice to uphold the rule of law, protect civil rights, and keep America safe,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a departmentwide memo last Friday. “Therefore, I have concluded that it is necessary to rescind Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks.”
Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have laws or legal precedents offering at least some protection shielding reporters from being compelled to testify about their sources in the same way attorneys, priests, and doctors cannot be compelled to testify about their clients, penitents, or patients. But no such privilege exists in federal law. In fact, a 1972 Supreme Court ruling in Branzburg v. Hayes found that reporters have no right under the First Amendment to refuse to testify before a grand jury.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? NPR reports that two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team got access to “classified networks that hold highly guarded details about America’s nuclear weapons.”
You may be wondering: Why does an agency tasked with cutting government waste need this access? To which we respond: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You may also be wondering: Who got said access? To which we would paste the facepalm emoji if we knew how. Here is NPR again:
Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern, and Adam Ramada, a Miami-based venture capitalist, have had accounts on the computer systems for at least two weeks, according to the sources who also have access to the networks. Prior to their work at DOGE, neither Farritor nor Ramada appear to have had experience with either nuclear weapons or handling classified information.
A spokesperson for the Department of Energy initially denied the story. But then that same spokesperson circled back to confirm that access was obtained but to stress that it was never used. Okay!
—Sam Stein
Cheap Shots
Reminder: These tariffs still haven’t actually been removed, just suspended, and the baseline 10 percent global tariff is still up everywhere.
The first 100 days has truly felt like 100 years.
I’m jealous of all the Canadians who got to wake up the day after their election and not sob in the shower for an hour. That must be nice.
"WHAT COULD GO WRONG? NPR reports that two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team got access to “classified networks that hold highly guarded details about America’s nuclear weapons.”
This one deserves follow-up - not relegated to "Quick Hits". I, for one, wonder where Elon's loyalties lie...