Front Burner - How 100 days of Trump is changing America

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second administration have been turbulent, controversial, and transformative. Today we’re joined by Alex Shephard, a senior editor at the New Republic, to take stock of the most consequential changes, their impact on the United States and its place in the world, and to what extent they are irreversible.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Plesson. In an interview that aired on Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump was asked by NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker about his administration's deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador. Men the administration is accusing of being gang members without trial and, in most cases, without evidence. Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?

I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know. Well, the Fifth Amendment says it all. I don't know. It seems it might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or two million or three million trials The exchange on NBC's meet the press was part of a wide-ranging interview to mark the first hundred days of Trump's second administration a period of remarkable change Even if you've been following what's been happening in the u.s. Closely it can still be hard to make sense of the scale of disruption that's come since Trump was inaugurated on January 20th. So today I'm talking with Alex Shepard, senior editor of the New Republic, to take stock of the

transformation the United States has undergone in these few months and how lasting the impacts may be. A note, of course, there are a whole lot of other issues we might have addressed here today, but there is only so much we can cram into one episode. Alex Hay, it's always a pleasure to have you on. It's great to be back with you. So on Inauguration Day earlier this year, Donald Trump said, A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world. And America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.

Since he's been in office in his second term, he has signed a whopping 141 executive orders. More than any other U.S. president in the first 100 days of his first term, he signed 33, which I think was also considered a lot back then. We'll get into what some of those are, but before we do, can you just help me understand how he's been able to push the limits of presidential power this time around? Yeah, I think there's a couple areas. I think the story of Trump's first term in office is one of both the constitutional order

and the larger political order bending but not breaking. And it's culminating, of course, in the January 6 assault in the US Capitol. And what Trump and, I think, more importantly, a lot of his closest allies, most notably Stephen Miller, but also the right-, Think Tank, the Heritage Foundation. What they did really starting pretty much on January 7th was start to come up with ways to actually break that order.

And they've been helped by the fact that, you know, executive orders have been commonplace in US politics, particularly since the early 1990s when we entered this era of kind of hyper-partisan political stasis. Congress doesn't do a whole lot anymore. The only way to govern is via executive order. And these groups and individuals have figured out various pressure points, right? Particularly at agencies that they deem to be kind of left-leaning or more liberal in their approach. And they've aggressively targeted departments and agencies and people within those that they see as being contrary to their pretty far right or hard right priorities.

What sort of precedent do you think it sets for how the presidency operates moving forward? Yeah, I mean, the irony of this is that this is kind of how the presidency has been operating really since 9-11, maybe a little bit before that, that presidents have been granted thanks in large part to the conservative Supreme Court. They've been granted a huge swath of power that they didn't really have before and the Roberts Court, which is having its 20th anniversary this fall, has consistently sided on the side of the executive to give it more and more power. And both parties have kind of allowed this, right?

In part because Congress doesn't do anything. But Republicans have obviously been complaining about the size of government, let's say, since the New Deal. But the scope of the federal government has continued to grow. This Trump term is the first time that we've seen that really shift. Now, it's not going to change the size of the budget deficit, no matter what Elon Musk tells you, but what it is going to do,

where it's going to have really, really long lasting, and I think still unknown implications is in these agencies across the federal government that have just been totally decimated. Some of them have lost their entire staff, others have lost, you know, 20 to 50 percent. Entire agencies have been dismantled, such as USAID, CFPB, other agencies such as the FDA, HUD, Department of Education have all been affected. You know, you're seeing just a tremendous brain drain, both in terms of people that are doing concrete things

that, for instance, help poor people afford houses or get food, right? But I think also who just know how the federal government works. And that has just been totally ripped out in the last 100 odd days. Yeah, talking about those cuts from Elon Musk and Doge, in the meantime, I've read that actually government spending

has increased. I mean, just explain that to me. Yeah. So I mean, it has increased. And there have been some cuts. It's a little tricky because Doge lies a lot about what it cuts and claims that contracts have expired, count as cuts, things like that, or real estate that they haven't moved on from, et cetera.

But if you want to cut the federal budget deficit, you really have to start with military spending. And Doge hasn't touched it. There's been some reports that they're interested in going after it, but it seems like nobody has the appetite for it. Trump is actually trying to increase spending even more on the military. Again, a lot of the stuff that's been cut, for instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they actually are not just budget neutral. They bring in money because they go after corporations that are ripping off consumers. right? So a lot of what you're seeing is not actually about reducing waste and fraud, which is what Musk is saying. What you are seeing instead is a really concentrated any more examples of sort of the dysfunction or inefficiency that it's caused on the ground?

Yeah, I mean, you can look at a lot of, I mean, HHS is an agency where I talk to a lot of people there. The Department of Health and Human Services, it's a little bit different there because it's now being run by, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., probably the most notorious anti-vax conspiracy theorist in the country. We live in a democracy and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research. You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they're getting, and you need

to research the medicines that they're taking as well. But what you've seen there is entire departments of people that are working on researching communicable diseases, right? Or even just liaising with people who do research those kinds of, those sorts of diseases. And that is, you know, looked at through one type of lens, that's waste, right? Because that is research that doesn't directly result in profit. So if you're somebody like Elon Musk who has a kind of one track Silicon Valley, rich person brain, that's maybe how they're seeing it. But on the ground, you're one seeing,

oftentimes people that have 20 plus years of experience working in the government, working on these types of diseases, suddenly being out of a job. But you're also seeing an entire network of people that are working in science and medicine and building research capacity and medical understanding that also being torn up. More than 10,000 jobs getting slashed at the FDA, CDC, and at Medicaid and Medicare services. Obviously, what we've been doing hasn't worked. That's why we're making this dramatic overhaul.

The new cuts are in addition to the 10,000 people who have already left the agencies after taking buyouts under DOGE. The reason why the federal government funds a lot of this stuff is that no one else will do it, right? Because it's not profitable. And that's what they're really going after. I know that Elon has said that he plans on stepping away from Doge as Tesla sees, continues to see huge hits. The company reported a 20% drop in its

automotive revenues in the first quarter of this year compared to the same time last year and profits during that time fell more than 70%. What do you think his future with the administration actually looks like? Yeah, I mean, he's been telling everyone what they want to hear basically. So he had told Tesla, you know, Tesla stock was crashing. So he told their investors, you know, I'm stepping back from government because there's going to been this huge backlash, it's affected Tesla stock price, people vandalizing

cars, but most importantly, people aren't buying them, right. And I think that if Musk had hoped that a sort of new group of, you know, kind of conservatives would step in for the liberal base that defected, that just hasn't happened. But investors, I think, wanted to hear that. And what they ignored was what else he said in that same call, which was that... I'll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters

for as long as the president would like me to do so. Musk is just too intertwined with this administration to ever really step away. Doge is going to continue existing in part because Musk himself has set targets for it that are impossible to reach. He's claimed that he wants to cut $1 trillion, which would be, you know, almost, I think a third of federal discretionary budget, maybe half of the discretionary budget and that can't be done, right? So the other issue, right, is that he is the most important or one of the, say, three most important funders of Republican campaigns.

He has already promised to fund a primary challenge for any Republican who is deemed disloyal to the president. And he also, let's not forget, owns and is the biggest poster on X, the social media platform, where he spends several hours a day posting Republican propaganda and going after his enemies. So I think if there's this idea, particularly among big Tesla investors, that he can somehow just step back from the brink and things can go back to what they were.

I don't think that that's going to happen. I think if anything, the opposite is going to happen. Tesla is still in serious trouble. And I think you can easily see a future in which Musk is his political activities are increasing in part because he's got nothing else to do other than to go after the liberals that he is increasingly accusing of destroying his businesses. The protests that you'll see out there, they're very organized, they're paid for, but that is the real reason for the protests.

The actual reason is that those receiving the waste and fraud wish to continue receiving it. Now our change will honour the Supreme Court of Canada and its role in protecting the rights and freedoms of all Canadians. Its guiding motto of justice and truth has defined its decisions since 1875. The new one dollar commemorative coin features a semicircle of laurels Symbolizing the nine judges and the court's enduring commitment to justice. Find the limited edition 150th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada coin today. Have you ever finished a book and just needed to talk about it immediately

or wanted to know the wildest research an author has done for a book or even what book talk books are actually worth your time? Hi, I'm Morgan Book. Yes, that is actually my last name and this is Off the Shelf, my new podcast that covers everything related to books. Each Thursday I chat with other bookworms and authors

or sometimes it's just me rambling about my latest book obsession. From book screen updates to hot takes on new releases and, of course, our monthly book club discussions, I've got you covered. So get your TBR list ready and listen to Off the Shelf wherever you get your podcasts. Let's do tariffs in the economy because this is what has most contributed to his plummeting approval rating right now. I read he, his approval rating is now lower than any president in the last 70 years. The US economy shrunk in the first quarter, fueling fears of recession.

Trump, of course, posted that has nothing to do with his wave of tariffs against much of the world after Liberation Day. And just what has the impact of tariffs look like on the ground in the US at the moment? Well, I think on the ground, there's just what you're seeing is just the grinding anxiety that characterized the first Trump term, but times quite a bit because everyone is now just assumes it will be in a recession in the next few months but the United States is like position in the world its status as the you know reserve currency of the world it's you know Jen the general sense of it is still being a kind of stable economic power even with all of its political instability I think that that's been permanently ruptured.

And I think no one is quite sure what's going to replace it yet. But I think even if, let's say Trump's promise of somehow finding a way to win a third term fails, right? Let's say JD Vance or Eric Trump or whoever his handpicked successor is loses to, I don't know, Josh Shapiro in 2028. You know, I don't see America's place in, you know, a free trade world or, you know, or its relationships with partners like Canada or in the European Union, you know, returning to anywhere near what they were on January 19th, 2025.

Yeah. Let's do immigration. Trump has signed several executive orders aimed at overhauling the immigration system, mainly at the processing, detainment, and deportation of undocumented migrants. And could you just take me through how he's essentially removed due process and expanded what ICE can do? Yeah, I mean, this is this is an extension of sort of where his first term immigration policy ended up.

But a lot of what they're doing is just targeting anyone who could come into a sort of ICE dragnet and pursuing them with every possible remedy, let's say, that they have. So they're going after people on student visas for things like jaywalking or minor traffic violations. They are using an obscure law from the 18th century, which is currently, I should say, you know, has been, been paused thanks to a Trump appointed judge. In an unusual late night order, the Supreme Court temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants being held in Texas using an 18th century law called the Alien Enemies Act.

The brief unsigned order came in response to an emergency petition filed by the ACLU just hours before, just as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. But to, you know, accuse anyone that they deem to be a gang member of being part of an invasion of the United States and using that as impetus to deport them. And I think, you know, it's been noted that actually the rate of deportation is lower than it was under Biden at the same period. But what you're seeing is, you know, a new deportation system, a massive deportation system involving sending people with that due process to places like El Salvador involving expanding Guantanamo Bay.

I think there's a huge preparation to have a massive deportation machine. But I think more importantly, the failure to respect any form of due process is also aimed at deterring people from coming to the United States, legally or illegally. So you have people that are on student visas in ice processing facilities right now. And you have people who are, you know, there's no evidence of belonging to violent gangs being sent to El Salvador. And when I talk to both people in vulnerable immigrant communities, but also to immigration policy experts, people who work with immigrants.

What they're saying is what this is aimed at too is just to make it so no one wants to come to the United States in the first place. That's where we're seeing a huge implication going forward. Right, right. They're hearing the stories of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador and is still there. And last time I checked, the administration was showing no signs of trying to get him

back. El Salvador does not intend to smuggle a designated foreign terrorist back into the United States. A U.S. immigration judge in 2019 wrote that evidence shows Abrego-Garcia is a verified member of MS-13, and President Trump showed a photo of Abrego-Garcia's tattoos, he says demonstrate gang membership. But his family and his lawyers deny he is a gang member, arguing evidence against him has been discredited, and saying that, like other inmates here, he has been completely cut off from contact with them. And also there are cases of green card holders that we've covered on the show before, pro-Palestinian student activists

like Mamou Khalil and Mohsen Madhawi. Khalil is still in custody. He's threatened birthright citizenship too, right? Just tell me very briefly about what's going on there. Yeah, this has been a sort of longstanding priority among far right anti immigrant people like Stephen Miller for quite a while who basically accuse immigrants of purposefully coming into the country so they can have children and then those children can, you know, would gain access to benefits, welfare benefits essentially. It's a ridiculous idea. It's xenophobic. It's racist, but it guides a lot of far-right immigration. One of the executive orders that you mentioned was one that would essentially end the practice

of birthright citizenship that has been in place since the late 19th century. It's constitutionally protected. You can't change the constitution via executive order. Trump would certainly like to, but you're going to see Congress start to try to push at passing a constitutional amendment. I don't think it is totally crazy to see that effort being successful. I think Democrats have snapped back into life over the last, let's say, three to four weeks, but they're extremely squeamish about immigration still.

America was assumed to be a land of immigrants, a place that was open to refugees and people fleeing instability in search of a better life. So much of what the last 100 plus days have been, have been about just absolutely decimating that idea. I want to talk to you about the media, the press. The Trump administration shut out access to the Associated Press because they are still using the term Gulf of Mexico in their style guide instead of Gulf of America. The executive producer of CBS's 60 Minutes resigned saying he was under pressure from

the administration and its corporate ownership at Paramount. On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order to block all federal funding to NPR and PBS, the country's two biggest public broadcasters. These are just a couple of examples. Can you talk to me a bit more about how press freedoms have fared during his time in office so far? Yeah, I mean, Trump has declared the media to be the enemy of the people. That was something he said during his first term.

On the right, the idea that the press is the liberal media, that they're biased against Republicans has been gospel for long before his political career started. But I think what you are starting to see is one, I think a total refusal to respect any norms about, you know, journalism as the fourth estate or about any kind of cordial or professional relationship between the administration and the press. You've essentially seen, as you

mentioned in your question, the AP being stripped of all access, but it's not just that, right? They've been replaced by right wing influencers and sort of TikTok figures who are asking kind of these ridiculous propagandistic questions, you know, essentially, how, how did, how was your immigration policy so great, you know, I was wondering if you'd indulge me in a quick round of Trump trolling or Trump truth thing. Sure. Let's do it. Greenland joining America. Definitely Trump truth thing. Coming to 51st state Trump truthuthing. Oh. Canada becoming a 51st state? Trump truthing all the way.

And the Canadians would benefit greatly, let me tell you that. A lot of people in America are questioning if there's any possibility that names such as Barack Hussein, Obama, Hillary Rodeham, Clinton to ever just possibly get investigated for any of these questions from the American people, any of the wrongdoings they might have done? Well, it's refreshing to actually hear a question on election integrity because the legacy media would never ask such a question. They're so out of touch with. Alex, I saw on the other day there's this guy who was just asking the White House press

secretary about, you know, how she manages with young children. You're a very high profile young mother who seems to juggle and balance it all beautifully. What advice do you have young parents out there who are starting their careers, having kids, building families and trying to find that balance so desperately? Yeah. Well, it's a great question. And first to the heart of your premise, it's true. The president has empowered not just me as a young mother.

I honestly thought that it was a joke. Look, I thought it was a skit until until I realized it was actually happening. Yeah. And I think this is this is a lot of what they're trying to do. And you see this with some of the Doge cuts, but also in government departments as well. You see this with Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center, the federal performing arts center, is that they look at things that they see as having a liberal bias.

Like USAID, that was cut because they think that there's a bunch of liberals who work there. They don't like the White House press corps because they think it's a bunch of liberals. They don't like the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Arts because they're liberal. What you're seeing is that they're trying to replace all these things with conservative versions of it. And one, I think the idea that the press is this kind of group of, you know, New York Times is not full of a bunch of commies, you know? they're full of journalists who are trying to do journalism.

But you're seeing them try to do like institutional capture and replacement. Speaking of institutions that this administration believes to be too liberal, let's move on to the universities, shall we? Harvard is now suing the Trump administration. The university is claiming that the freezing of billions of dollars in federal grants is unlawful. Trump has now threatened retaliation, saying that he will strip them of tax-exempt status. We've talked on the podcast a few times about how the country's top universities have been in the crosshairs of this administration.

And just could you tell me a bit more about this Harvard case in particular and where experts think it could go. Yeah, I think what you're seeing is another instance of self-interested parties sort of taking over administration policies. So I don't think Trump cares a lot about Columbia University or Harvard University, but there are a lot of people that are close to him who are donors that are part of his administration

that care a great deal about this. And essentially, you know, this sort of wave of student activism you saw last year related to the US's support of Israel's campaign and military campaign in Gaza has resulted in under the guise of stopping anti-Semitism at Columbia and at Harvard, the administration has made a series of demands about what these universities can teach. They've demanded, for instance, that they get rid of their Middle Eastern Studies departments. They've demanded that students who took part in demonstrations against Israel or against America's support for Israel be disciplined or, in some cases, expelled. And they've also begun to make demands that these

institutions change their admissions process and the way that they hire professors to showcase quote ideological diversity, which essentially means that they should bring in more conservative students. At Columbia, when these demands were given, the administration quickly folded. There was a lot of pressure for them to do that. But Harvard has been fighting back. They've sued the administration because they basically said they would lose your tax system status. They tried to freeze billions of dollars in funding, most of which went to things like

research to cure cancer and other things. I think it's a really serious fight, because I think even if it's unsuccessful, and most of the legal experts I talked to think it will ultimately be successful, partly just on procedural grounds, but also because of its, you know, very clear assault on, on free speech and academic freedom, you know, there's going to be a chilling effect of these institutions, you know. I would argue there already is. And you're seeing, I think, Middle Eastern studies, as we know it, is not going to exist

in higher education. Alex, you talked earlier about kind of the irreversible nature of some of this stuff, the economic and trade stuff. But I would be interested to hear you talk a little bit more about the rest of it. How irreversible is the transformation that we're seeing right now, you think? That's a great question. We've entered a transitional moment now. I think it's one of the reasons why it feels so scary. But you're seeing somebody who basically is looking at the fabric

that has connected America to the rest of the world since World War Two. And he's just torn it all up. Right. And the rest of the world, I think, is as shocked as we are. And but I think when you listen or certainly when you talk to people in the EU, the new, you know, the Canadian government as well, there's a sense of like, okay, well, we have to build a new connective tissue in the world and the US's role in that is going to be different, it's going to be much smaller. And, you know, one way of understanding Trump's changes is as a kind of like temper tantrum over the US's decline in status since the end of the Cold War anyways. But, But I think that looking at it to me,

I think that the federal government is going to emerge different. It's going to look the same to some extent. There'll still be a Pentagon, there'll still be the Labor Department probably, still be a Department of Health and Human Services, but all of those things are going to be smaller and they're going to have less expertise guiding them. But the larger question is, what does the United States' role in the rest of the world look like?

What is its status as the preeminent educational center in the world look like? And I think that in every place you turn, you say, well, it's going to be less, right? It's going to be significantly less. So I think in some cases, the best case scenario is you say, well, this stuff is irreversible. But for the most part, the country that re-emerges will be very similar. It will just be diminished everywhere. Alex, thank you for this. This is great. Thank you for this. This was great. Thank you so much. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.