Photo: Tom Brenner/The New York Times/Redux
It’s appropriate that Donald Trump will mark the 100th day since his second presidential inauguration with one of his signature MAGA rallies — indeed, in the same state, Michigan, where he had his last campaign rally of the 2024 presidential election 175 days ago.
Last November, Trump was challenging the party controlling the White House at a time of deep and pervasive unhappiness with the status quo, most particularly on the economy and living costs. That situation opened up huge opportunities for Trump to pose as the lesser evil to an electorate that had largely given up hope that there were any “good” politicians. And to his credit, he took advantage of that opportunity. Although he did not, contrary to his ludicrous claims, win anything remotely like a historic landslide, he did win a popular-vote plurality and a battleground-state sweep that put the results beyond question. There were also signs of cracks in the Democratic voting coalition, which gave Republicans hope that, with luck and skill, they could create their own governing coalition after failing to win a majority of the popular vote for 20 years.
That all looks very unlikely now. Trump had a basic choice to make in planning his second administration. He could have moved cautiously to consolidate his support, extend the public-opinion honeymoon any presidential-election winner invariably enjoys, register some early wins, and convince a skeptical and fearful country that Trump 2.0 would represent the sort of return to normalcy that Joe Biden once promised but could not provide. This approach might have sent the wounded Democrats into an extended wilderness and made MAGA Republicanism into the greatest political success story of the 21st century.
As we now know, Trump chose a very different approach that highlighted all his worst characteristics: a raft of extremist appointments rewarding loyalty rather than competence, a vast array of executive actions that stretched every known limit on presidential powers to the breaking point, an escalation in vituperative rhetoric and threats against anyone who dared to question him, a rapid reorientation of America’s international positioning to blow up alliances or any other restraint on aggressive assertion of unilateral American interests, and a trade war that spooked global and domestic markets and U.S. consumers alike. And typifying Trump 2.0’s radicalism, which exceeded already high expectations for radicalism, was his weaponization of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to run wild through the federal bureaucracy in search less of budget savings than of making federal agencies as dysfunctional as possible, a chaotic end in itself.
Even as each and every one of these actions has had its own negative impact on Trump’s public support, the 47th president has contemptuously pushed aside opportunities to moderate the pace and intensity of his agenda.
He could have boasted of radically reducing border crossings, but instead insisted on an extremely noisy, court-defying, and not terribly productive wave of immigrant deportations. He might have let the economy reach the “soft landing” of significantly reduced inflation and sustained growth that the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve had prepared for him. Instead he almost immediately (albeit as chaotically as was humanly possible) instituted a worldwide wave of tariffs that all but guaranteed higher consumer prices while destabilizing markets and threatening a recession. He also might have secured some legislative victories from the Congress controlled by his party while putting pressure on congressional Democrats to knuckle under, before going too far. Instead he has brought Congress to a virtual halt in part because he wants to usurp its powers for himself. Now he’s gambling everything on a gigantic and ramshackle budget reconciliation bill that is highly vulnerable to Democratic claims that it’s essentially a bid to cut popular federal programs like Medicaid in order to give his billionaire buddies a tax cut.
While polls show Trump bleeding support on almost every issue and in particular losing the independents who were so crucial to his 2024 victory, there’s something even worse about how he’s conducted himself during the last 100 days. All the light and heat and noise and fear and chaos he has engendered has put Joe Biden very far in the rear-view window of public perceptions. It’s now Trump’s unsatisfactory economy; Trump’s executive power grabs; Trump’s disorderly world; Trump’s despised and privacy-violating federal government; Trump’s arrogant, wealthy elites; Trump’s contempt for the struggles of working people — it’s Trump who’s in the news each morning, to the point that he can no longer embody the chronic hunger and thirst of the American people for change. And that’s very bad news for his party in both 2026 and 2028, and for any hopes he had of leaving office with the mantle of “greatness” he so desires.
For conservative Republicans who support many of Trump’s policy goals and who hope to build a party that can survive without him, the most frustrating thing is probably that he can’t or won’t “read the room” and understand the importance of changing course. That’s because he has devoted so much of his own astounding career — even before he entered politics — to creating a cult of personality insulated by a closed information loop in which all his worst traits are celebrated, including those that frighten and repel people outside the fun-house mirror of MAGA self-celebration and self-deception. It should be a bright red flashing sign of “Danger!” to the 47th president that his fans are happiest when his administration does something that is guaranteed to offend swing voters, like the FBI rushing in to arrest a local judge in Wisconsin who didn’t help ICE grab someone out of her own courtroom. Right now, even people who share a lot of the administration’s goals are concluding he’s simply going too far. Even if he had enough mental clarity and self-discipline to build an authoritarian regime, like Viktor Orbán’s, that used state power to make a temporary majority permanent, he’s lost the temporary majority before he rightly possessed it.
So Trump’s trajectory is right back toward the fever swamps from whence he arose in 2015 and into which he fell back again after January 6. Unless he changes his ways quickly, Trump’s last comeback has come and gone.
