The Daily - 100 Days

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

On Tuesday, the second Trump presidency officially reached the 100-day mark.It’s been a hundred days of transformation, tariffs, retribution, firings and deportation the likes of which America has never seen before.The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage sit down to assess President Trump’s record.Guest:Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times.Charlie Savage, who covers national security and legal policy for The New York Times.Background reading: 100 days into President Trump’s second term: What has changed?Mr. Trump’s 100-day report card.Eight charts that sum up Mr. Trump’s first 100 days.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Eric Lee/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. On Tuesday, the second Trump presidency officially reached the 100-day mark. 100 days of transformation, tariffs, retribution, firings, and deportations, the likes of which America has never before seen. Today, I asked three of my colleagues, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Charlie Savage, to assess that record. It's Wednesday, April 30th. Maggie, Jonathan, Charlie, welcome back.

It's been a while. Thanks, Michael, for having us. Great to be back. Yeah. That's what you've got, Charlie. Yep. Charlie, welcome back. Thanks for having us back.

We're talking to you all on Tuesday, which is, although there's been a little bit of dispute on our team, the 100th day of the Trump second term. And I want to start with a very basic question of why it is we talk so much about the first hundred days. It's a totally artificial metric as anyone in the Trump administration will tell you, even as they are touting it and looking at it because they know other people are. It is how presidents for a while now have measured the success of their agenda, how much have they accomplished in that period of time.

And it's a way to compare apples to apples to what previous presidents have done. I don't want to be like the Australian talking about American history here, but obviously- But here you are. Go on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously the benchmark is FDR's first hundred days where he pushed, I think it was 15 major bills through Congress and created a legacy that we still live with. So ever since then, presidents have used this, as Maggie said, artificial construct to measure

their self-worth at an early point in the administration. Charlie? Well, picking up on this and also the historical origins of it, there is one thing that isn't apples to apples here, which is the term first hundred days is coined by Roosevelt, but he wasn't actually referring to, as I understand it, his first hundred days. He had called Congress back into session after he was inaugurated for a special session to pass all these new deal bills.

And he was referring to the first hundred days of that Congress. Fascinating. And the accomplishments were 15 hugely important laws that created the huge pillars of getting the country back on its feet in the middle of the Great Depression through Congress. And it's remarkable that even with Republican control of both chambers of Congress here, Trump's first hundred days of his presidency has resulted in zero major bills. Mm-hmm. So that was all prelude to me explaining why we are bringing this august trio back, I think, for the third time on the show, which is that you were the group that prepared us for the second Trump

term in theory, before it actually became a reality, by doing a tremendous amount of reporting about what his plan was for 2.0. And so now that Trump's agenda has been rolled out, we want to assess this administration on a few metrics. And let me just spell out a couple of those. Firstly, you had told us that much more than in the first term, the second term would be more thought through. If there was going to be a master plan, it was going to be the second term. So has this administration stuck to that plan or have things veered off into something more haphazard? Secondly, have

the administration's approaches, whether they've been planned well or not, succeeded or failed? Finally, what does this administration, based on your reporting, make of the public reaction to what it's done so far? As our colleague Nate Cohn told us a couple days ago, most Americans think this White House has gone too far, and they think things have been disorganized. So with that three-part framework in mind, where do you think we should start? I mean, there's a million places you could start, but if you just look at the series of reporting that we laid out, the first big element that we talked about was expansion

of power and destruction of or elimination of any pocket of independence within the executive branch. I would put a big tick next to that one, maybe even a double tick. He's clearly done that firing checks on his power, getting rid of inspectors general and other elements within the executive branch. Another element obviously that we reported on in depth was immigration.

I think we can talk about that later, but it's a, I would say a very mixed scorecard. Well, let's talk about it now. They've effectively started to do what they plan to do. It just, in at least one half of their program, isn't going so well. So the first half, sealing the border, tick, record low border crossings. They've absolutely achieved that in a very short space of time. If you talk to people internally, they're almost, I'm not going to say frustrated by their success, but it almost came too quickly, too easily. And so now they're sort of, well, we need to send the troops down there.

And it's like, okay, but no one's really coming across. But the second part of the immigration agenda that has been far less successful is interior deportations, removing people from the country. In that sense, the numbers are nothing like what they said they would be so far. They promised the biggest deportation operation in American history, deporting millions of people every year. They're nowhere near on track to do that. Of course, very widely reported, they are jettisoning due process and sending people to prison for terrorists in El Salvador. At least one person sent there by mistake. They're running into a battle with the courts. So that side of the immigration agenda is very messy.

Can I talk about the second part? Because I think we can all agree that sealing the border and bringing down crossings, they have achieved that. But let's talk about why the administration is pursuing this very controversial approach of deporting undocumented immigrants without due process, as you mentioned, Jonathan, because from everything our polling has been telling us, that is not popular. And I wonder why the White House thinks it's necessary. What is it accomplishing and was it ever part of an original plan?

It depends on who you talk to about how extensively the planning was for this, but I think that there have been aspects of this in the minds of some of Trump's advisors for some time. Part of why they're doing it is it is a deterrent. It is essentially, we are going to move fast, we are going to move on what we think is our authority and if you talk to the Trump folks, they will tell you they like their chances with the court. In their minds, they think that it is going to be very hard for the Supreme Court to say no to them.

Now, we'll see if that's true, but in the mind of the Trump White House, this is still telling people who want to come here illegally, don't come, we're going to make things difficult for you, especially at a time when they are not having these mass roundups of migrants that they have been predicting. And which they promised. Correct. I think the problem they're encountering is that the normal process for deporting someone who's here illegally involves due process.

It just takes a long time and they don't have enough personnel to do this. So Trump is still deporting more or less the same number of people, actually slightly less I think than Biden was. And they are frustrated by that. And a lot of the stuff that they've been doing, expanding Guantanamo as a place to send migrants or now this prison in El Salvador, makes no sense on its face. It's expensive.

It's getting them flack in the courts. It's not resonating with the public. But in particular, they want the headlines about cruelty because they're hoping that huge numbers of people will simply go home on their own steam, and then they can take credit for that. You know, you're talking about administration where Stephen Miller, who was the architect of Trump's immigration proposals, is, as many administration officials will tell you, living his best life.

He's very happy. He is enacting the policies that he wanted to see for a very long time. They are at risk of making mistakes and have made some mistakes that will come back to haunt them. One is a brego Garcia Tell Salvador the other is some deportations of children who were sick last week I had cancer a very advanced cancer and was deported without medicine And so those were the kind of headlines that actually were a problem for Donald Trump in term one specifically family Separation policies that was a huge debacle for the administration. And I wonder, are we approaching with some of these deportations, especially of children,

something akin to the moment in Term 1 that feels like child separation, something that is beyond the pale for many people in the public? And as I recall it, Trump eventually signs an executive order saying, oh, right, I'm going to ban those child separations. Those are not right. He sort of acted like it was something out of his control and he wanted to end it. Right. But what got to that point was a broad public outrage and an outcry from a lot of elected

officials. And we are seeing that to some extent. But information doesn't break through in this media ecosystem the way it did even six years ago, seven years ago. That's fascinating. And so I don't know that it'll matter the same way. I can't speak for everyone in the White House, but for the vast majority of them,

any day that the public conversation is about immigration is a good day. Mm-hmm. Any time they're in trouble, like when their tariff strategy is causing huge anxiety in the public, the markets to crash, their safe space, their North Star is immigration. And the playbook is the same. Wheel out photographs of the most heinous criminals, put out the

most graphic, lurid stories of illegal immigrants doing awful things to American citizens. And I would say the majority opinion, and certainly Trump's own instincts, are that, you know, immigration is a winning issue. Whenever we can talk about immigration, we're winning. This is making me think about the other portrayed villains by this administration. And those would be elite universities, big law firms, and some individual enemies of the president,

who he has pursued with extraordinary alacrity in this second term. And I wonder, given how central that has become to 2.0 Trump, how much that is according to plan or how much it has started to veer into something that is just a kind of a personal project of the president and not according to the original plan. And again, I want to cite the polling that suggests that a majority of Americans are not comfortable with his pursuit of his enemies. It's a little bit of both, Michael. So there were a series of promises that Trump made

on the campaign trail that dovetailed with where the Republican Party and conservatives are generally, which is anti-DEI, anti-quote unquote woke, and anti-elite universities. So that is part of the plan. The retribution on law firms, I think, has been a more recent development. And that has just been something that has evolved pretty rapidly because they saw they had success. Then it moved into targeted, named individual presidential memos from the Oval Office.

One was Miles Taylor, who was a DHS official, and Trump won. And one was Chris Krebs, who was a cybersecurity official who said that the election voting machines had not been rigged, that it was a safe election. Which is true. Yes, it was true and that was his sin. His sin was stating the truth. And Trump ordered up investigations by his administration into these two after insisting repeatedly always with a bit of a wink during the 2024 campaign that success would be his

retribution after AIDS nudged him to stop talking about who he was going to get back at. Right, and success has not been. Success has not been his only retribution. Right, retribution has been his retribution. Actual retribution has been his retribution and is clearly a part that he is enjoying. Charlie, would you describe this campaign of retribution, which as Maggie just said, ranges from institutional to personal as a success.

And I guess if it is, what's the criteria for describing it as a success? Or if it's a failure, what's the criteria for describing it as a failure? Because it has definitely become a pillar of the second term. I guess I hesitate to pin the word success to something that dark. He has indeed, you know, messed with the lives of the people that he has targeted. Chris Krebs, who he ordered the Justice Department to try to pin a crime on, as you just mentioned, for the sin of accurately describing the state of election machines in 2020, had to quit his job because he had also targeted the company that Krebs worked for as collateral damage.

He had to quit his private sector job. Yes. Wow. And we should pause over that. That is something he said he was going to do. Our first major project of our series was about his claim that he would appoint a real special counsel to go after the Biden family. But the real thing he was doing there was saying

he was going to take control of the levers of federal law enforcement power from the Oval Office and blow through the post-Watergate norm that presidents don't politicize the enforcement of the law. And he was gonna proudly do so, and he has now. He has done that. Jonathan, it's hard to dispute the idea that this campaign of retribution has successfully changed the culture of several major institutions. I'm thinking about the state of pro-Palestinian

anti-Israeli protests on college campuses, which have very much been quieted. I'm thinking about how much DEI is on the way out of major companies and universities, and in a sense, values and practices and entire teams that had become deeply embedded at some of these institutions have now been forcibly excised at the insistence of one man, the President of the United States. I have no qualms about describing it as a success. I would say it's stunningly successful, perhaps the most successful element of his program so far. You can affix monetary value to it. He has extorted about a billion dollars collectively in pro bono work from these law

firms on behalf of his agenda. They've said, Mr. Trump, please don't hurt us. Please don't attack us. We will do all this work for you for free. $100 million worth of free work. Utter capitulation. The universities, as you say, are changing their policies. And then just look at corporate America. I mean, you had this procession of CEOs go down to Mar-a-Lago

during the transition, go sit down, have have dinner with him and then they gave him money They gave a million dollar check here for his inauguration and then his people his political offerings came back to him and said actually guys We need a little more money his political operation Maggie will know the figure better than me It keeps growing but you know We're gonna see probably a billion dollars plowed into this thing by the midterm elections. By the end of this year, he is going to have raised almost a billion dollars. It's extraordinary. It's shocking.

And Jonathan, you used the word extortion. I did. And I don't think that was an accident. What else would you use? There's no other word for it. I don't even know if Trump would dispute that word. I mean, he is like publicly boasting. I think he'd be proud of it.

He uses the phrase bend the knee about how people are engaging with him. It's this, from Trump's perspective, this virtuous cycle. Businesses are scared, they give the money. The money goes into Trump's political operation, which is designed to put the fear of God into any Republican who will step out of line, oppose his agenda. So it's this circle, right? Money comes in, money is used to intimidate, intimidation, you know, extracts more money,

and around the circle goes. On that note, we're gonna take a break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk about Trump's ventures overseas. And by that I mean tariffs and diplomacy. So we'll be right back. Welcome back, the three of you. Let us turn to an area where there hasn't quite been the same virtuous cycle for Trump like the one you were just describing before the break, Jonathan, and that, I think we

can all agree, is trade. So when it comes to the president's tariffs, to the untrained eye, this does not appear to have been the execution of a careful plan. There have been reversals galore, exemptions galore. My question to you three is, have you come to understand, based on your reporting, if it is really ad hoc or if there has been a plan all along for this program? No, it's really ad hoc and it's a total mess. And they're now desperately trying to find off ramps and ways of getting out of this

global trade war that Trump has started. And as one person said to me recently, Republicans might be afraid of Donald Trump, but the bond markets aren't afraid of Donald Trump and the economy is not afraid of Donald Trump and the stock market is not afraid of Donald Trump, but the bond markets aren't afraid of Donald Trump, and the economy's not afraid of Donald Trump, and the stock market's not afraid of Donald Trump. And he did run into something that he couldn't intimidate, that he couldn't threaten, and that created such a sense of panic on his senior team that they basically begged him to initiate that 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs. Begged.

They absolutely made a very strong case. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the Vice President even. Nobody, with perhaps the exception of Peter Navarro, thinks that Trump's plan of initiating a global trade war was well thought through and that it would create the Stipulated goal of a golden age of reshored heavy industry American manufacturing Well, so I want to raise something to the three of you because one of the great important lasting lessons of our Conversations during the campaign was that the president was going to surround himself with yes people who were not going to challenge him

Or get in his way What you're describing is a series of advisors trying to stop him and get in his way and say no moss and these are people who were Ideologically aligned with him and primed to support this agenda, but they said it went too far. That's fascinating It was never really a clear agenda said it went too far. That's fascinating. It was never really a clear agenda.

Certainly if you look at the remarks from Scott Besson and Howard Lutner in the lead up to election day, they suggested that this was more just going to be to get better deals. This obviously is not what they were talking about. And now as Jonathan said, there is no clear off-ramp and there is no clear end in sight. And that is entirely of one man's doing and that is the president. Charlie, it has to be a failure if your goal was to put up high tariff walls around the world in order to bring back domestic manufacturing and you're literally tearing those walls down or puncturing holes and walking through

them back and forth that cannot be anything other than a failure. You know Michael the discussion around the tariffs I think has been a little confused because there were multiple layers of tariffs that Trump imposed. And the thing that he put a 90-day pause on was this extra tariffs that he calls reciprocal, which are not reciprocal, but that's the label he attached to them, so we keep using it, for a country-by-country basis that now aren't happening. But there is still now a massive new import tax on almost everything coming into the country, 10%, that he did not unwind.

And he's basically made trade with China impossible by an enormous import taxes. Right, 145%. And so shelves are going gonna start to go bare in Walmarts and targets around the country pretty soon. And the global trade war sort of picking a fight with everyone simultaneously, while it doesn't have this extra kicker for now, is nevertheless raging.

All that's true, but they have clearly signaled that they are on a direction of retreat. Yes. He has blinked. And the only challenge for them is how to spin capitulation in a way that's not capitulation. They are desperate for an off-ramp with China, to the point where Trump is saying that he got a phone call from President Xi Jinping, which as far as we can tell is a phone call that doesn't exist and never happened. So they're desperate for off-ramps. And Charlie's right,

like that doesn't mean that the crisis is going to be unwound because so much damage has been done, so much uncertainty has been injected. But they're very clearly signaling that they realize this went too far and they're trying to figure out a way to get back to something closer to the status quo. All these trade policies have had another effect I want to talk through with you all, which is that they have really scrambled global alliances. And I think that brings us to our final big subject here, which is Trump's foreign policy

in these first 100 days. And that seems to be the story of impatience. And I wonder what that tells us about what the original plan was and how much he's sticking to it on areas ranging from Ukraine, Russia to the Middle East. Danielle Pletka I look at it a little differently, Michael. Yes, it's impatience that there's not a deal yet. Trump is now saying that he was kidding when he said that he could solve Ukraine and Russia's war in 24 hours.

I think Trump would very much like to have a peace deal that he can hold up and say that he put into place. I do think the administration is pretty close to walking away from all of this. But he offered something that just he clearly couldn't deliver on and is not going to anytime soon. If you talk to his aides, they will say that peace deals is going to be the focus of the next hundred days. But it was certainly not much in the first.

So foreign policy has not been an overwhelming success so far. Aaron Powell Can we talk about Putin for a minute? Because that seems to be a case where the president may have misunderstood or miscalculated his leverage. And I'm thinking about a quote he just gave to our colleagues over at the Atlantic magazine. He said what he relishes so much about these first hundred days of Term 2 is that I run the country and I run the world. But when it comes to someone like Vladimir Putin, he offered Putin almost everything Putin could have ever wanted in a peace deal with Ukraine.

And Putin is still not giving Trump an inch, which has required Trump to then take to social media and say, Vladimir, stop brutally attacking civilians in Ukraine to no avail. And so is that just a case of the president not understanding the superpower dynamics? I think it's the president realizing that he is getting played by Putin as he sort of acknowledged in a post that he did over the weekend on Truth Social. Vladimir's stop was I think his effort at looking like he is saying something publicly, but it didn't end up looking particularly strong since Vladimir did not stop. I think a couple of things have happened. One is Trump thought he had more leverage than he actually does over Putin and Xi Jinping. I know from talking to people who've talked

to Trump about this, that particularly with Xi Jinping, Trump had this idea that China would basically fold and that him and Xi Jinping would then get in the room together. On the tariff front. Yeah, on the tariff front and China's made clear that that's not going to happen. On Russia, when he came into office and in the transition, he had this notion that what he would say privately is that Putin is in real trouble, his economy is in real trouble, with additional sanctions or other financial measures, we can bring him to the table.

Again, looks like a miscalculation. Putin has built an economy based on wartime. Russia is one of the most sanctioned countries on earth. And when you have leaders like Putin and Xi Jinping, who are dictators, who are not as responsive to public opinion or any of the institutional pressures that a president leading a liberal democracy would be, there's a lot of pain that they can endure and put their populations through in order to achieve something that they portray

as a great outcome. So I think in those two cases, it's a misunderstanding of leverage. More broadly, I think it's fascinating what's happening with foreign policy right now, because really what's happening in Europe, in Asia as well, they are already operating on the basis that they can't rely on America, that this security construct that has existed since the end of World War II and that this world order that America built and this rules-based order, that that no longer exists. And not my line, but somebody writing in the Financial Times said, you know, he is so obsessed

with the problem of free riders that he forgets that it has been in America's interest to drive the bus. So regardless of whether you think what Donald Trump is doing is smart, prudent, foolish, whatever there are going to be real costs to America not having that position of trust and centrality. I mean what you're clearly all getting at is that these first hundred days have been pretty monumental in ways that we're not going to fully understand for quite some time. It's going to take us years to understand all of the fallout and implications of it.

And that makes me want to ask you all whether you think the first hundred days are prelude to what the next hundred days and the next hundred days and up to the next 1,300 days in the end of this term are going to look like, or if you think there are some lessons this administration has learned that means they're going to start to change course in a meaningful way. SONIA DARAGOS I think you are seeing a pretty unbridled and confident Donald Trump, and I think that lacking any kind of a change in curtailing his power in a meaningful way, either by the courts or by Congress, you are going to continue

to see more of that on a variety of fronts, not the least of which will be the retribution front. Hmm. I think until Congress changes hands, you're going to see what Maggie just laid out with the one exception being they are absolutely second guessing their trade war and their tariff policy. But in every other aspect, it's not like there's somebody in there saying, Mr. President, you need to stop doing X, Y, and Z.

That doesn't exist. And I thought it was a really good conversation actually between our colleagues, Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat. They got at something that Maggie and I talk about all the time, which is that for people who are working for him, particularly people who've been with him for the last four years, and they've watched this person be the pariah after January 6th, indicted in four different jurisdictions, criminally convicted, literally shot like an inch from dying. And then he wins the presidency and comes back to the Oval Office.

There is a mystical... There's a kind of mystical quality was what our colleagues said. And it's like, this guy must know something that we don't know. And so it's a different element when you have things that in the first term when Trump was like, let's tariff the world, Gary Cohn or Steve Minich would be like, no, that's insane. Let's not tariff the world. You don't have those conversations anymore. You have an argument within narrower

margins. Should we give this exemption? Should we give that exemption? So there is a deference to his instincts that is genuine and powerful and not just a bunch of like toady sycophants who are submerging their own views to serve orange guard. It's actually something much deeper than that. I would add one piece to that too, Michael, which is just that, as Jonathan said, they have all been through these various travails with him, and they feel incredibly bonded to him in a way that the folks in the first term, for the most part, just did not. And so it is not only that he must be seeing things on a level that they are not and hearing frequencies that they're not, it's that things are destined to work out for him. And they have seen so many people come at him who they think were acting inappropriately.

of alone out there and offering some resistance with Congress completely supine. And even if Democrats do get the house, he'll just ignore their subpoenas and Republicans will bail him out of impeachment again, like last time. So the courts is where to look for is this guy unstoppable, regardless of the chaos surrounding him. And for all the talk of defying court orders and stuff, we are speaking 100 days in. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the merits on any of the stuff he's doing. And a whole cascade is coming their way.

And they're seeing what it means to have an empowered president And they're seeing what it means to have an empowered president who doesn't have guardrails, who doesn't have traditional constraints. And so there are some big decisions they have to make that have not yet been made that will tell us a lot. We have to wait and see what to make of all this in terms of how they rule. Right. And that, of course, is for the next 100-day episode. So, Charlie and Jonathan and Maggie, as ever, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael.

Thanks so much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, President Trump once again walked back some of his tariffs, this time on carmakers. The change would remove some tariffs that companies like Ford and General Motors complained amounted to them being tariffed twice, in a way that hurt domestic manufacturing.

Trump's original tariffs forced some carmakers to pay 25% fees on imported cars and to pay additional tariffs on materials like aluminum and steel. A new executive order would offer temporary relief from the tariffs on those materials. And in a sign of just how nervous the White House remains about the cost of its tariffs on consumers, President Trump called the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and asked him not to display the impact of tariffs on Amazon's websites. Amazon had considered posting that information on one of its sites, but the White House quickly denounced the idea as a, quote,

hostile and political act. Amazon now says that the idea was never formally approved and will not happen. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Astha Chattervedi, Carlos Prieto and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Rachel Cuester, Paige Cowan, and Lexi Diao. It contains original music by Mary Lozano, Dan Powell, and Pat McCusker. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Baboro.

See you tomorrow.