The Journal. - Trump 2.0: The First 100 Days

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

In our capstone episode, Kate Linebaugh and Molly Ball break down Trump's first 100 days in office with WSJ’s Aaron Zitner, digging into the highs and lows, where things stand with voters and what��s next for the administration and the country.   Further Listening: -Canada’s New Leader Is Ready to Take On Trump  -Trump 2.0: Where is the Economy Headed  -Taking Stock of the ‘Sell America’ Trade  Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey Molly. Hey Kate. This is it. We've hit a hundred days. We made it. Yay! Where are the crowd sounds? Where is the cheering?

Can we get like a sound effect? Fireworks? Something? Thank you very much. Hello Michigan. Hello. We love you Michigan. We love you.

We can't wait to see you. We love you. We love you. We love much. Hello, Michigan. Hello. We love you, Michigan. We love you. We just had the biggest victory in Michigan. They said. Yeah. Well, it's been 100 days. Wow.

Even more. Actually, a couple more. It has been like 103 days. So to mark the occasion, I've come up with a small pop quiz for you, something to test you on a few key points from Trump's first 100 days. Oh, boy. Okay. Let's see how we do. How many executive orders has Trump signed in these first 100 days? Ah, I actually looked this up recently. I believe it's about 140, which is a lot. It is a lot. The exact number is 142. Okay, I was close. It's a lot more than most presidents sign and, you know, they've been pretty substantive. They've really driven a lot of policy. It's

been his major way of running the government. How many bills has Trump signed into law? Well, this is quite a contrast. Very few. I believe the number is just five. So Congress kind of spin in its wheels while Trump is, you know, putting his signature on all kinds of things. How much money has Trump cut from the federal budget?

Ah, well, Doge, the Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency claims that they have cut about 160 billion, but actually because of the sort of chaotic way they've gone about the, the firings and cuts and so forth, they have actually increased the amount of federal spending. So the answer is a negative number. increased the amount of federal spending. So the answer is a negative number. And one thing that Trump was talking a lot about coming into office was mass deportations. How many people has Trump deported? I believe the numbers on this are pretty low. It's less than 100,000, which is not putting them on

pace to reach a million this year, which I think is one of their goals. And it's behind the pace of the Biden administration. In the first 100 days, nearly 66,000 people were deported. That's the number. Okay, so now that we've passed 100 days, where do you think the Trump administration is taking the country? It's such an interesting question because I think there's a really good chance that the next hundred days doesn't look very much like the first hundred days at all. I think we're at an inflection point where a lot of things are in flux and we don't really know what comes next. From the Journal, this is Trump 2.0. I'm Kate Leimbach.

And I'm Molly Ball. It's Friday, May 2nd. Coming up, a look back at Trump's first 100 days in office, and a look ahead to what's next. So, Molly, this week, Trump's been talking about all the things he's achieved in these 100 days. And one place he did it was at that rally in Michigan, where he celebrated with his base. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history.

And everyone is saying it was just... Well, you know, one interesting thing about a lot of Trump's comments recently has been how much he continues to blame his predecessor. You've got to think that if things were going really, really well, he wouldn't feel a need to do that, to say there are some things that people still don't like about what's happening, but come on, they're not my fault. Like they did with Biden, that guy was so bad. He was so bad under Biden. And remember this,

we were losing $5 billion a day on trade, and now we're making money. So he did spend a lot of time talking about Joe Biden, and he spent a lot of time talking about immigration. Democrats have vowed mass invasion and mass migration. We are delivering mass deportation and it's happening very fast. It's clear that, you know, this is what Trump and others see as sort of the centerpiece of his presidency. He believes it's his best issue in the eyes of American voters. And they really do think that it's his best issue in the eyes of American voters. And they really do think that it's a winning issue for them, you know, playing the videos

of these people who've been deported to that prison in El Salvador and really doubling down on the message that the border has been closed. We see that some of Trump's highest ratings are on this issue of border crossings, which have decreased by an incredible amount. So it's always revealing sort of what he chooses to emphasize. And to help us dig into this period, this first 100 days of the Trump administration, we're joined by our colleague, Aaron Zittner. Hi, Aaron. Hey there. Thanks for bringing me in to the final episode here.

I'm glad to have made it by the skin of my teeth here. It's great to have you. So on Inauguration Day, January 20th, Trump laid out a vision for the country, the golden age of America. How would you say he's executed on that? You know, if I had to do it in one word, it would be gamble. What a gamble. The president came in with a lot going for him.

He had solid approval ratings. He had a good economy that he inherited from Joe Biden, no matter what he says. The economy hasn't changed all that much in its conventional metrics. And he had a public that wanted the border to be secured and seems to want the criminals out. And he took this giant gamble with the tariffs. And amid all the disruption we could point to in our foreign security alliances and Doge and the disruption he's brought to the federal government, these tariffs really stand out as a giant gamble. And they've created a lot of anxiety. And we're living

in a moment now where a lot is being reorganized, disrupted, destroyed. And we don't know what's going to be built in its place, what's going to come from this, and what new gets built by this president. And that's where my head is right now is looking for what new structures, alliances, benefits to the American people come into place from all of this. You talk about this gamble, Aaron. How is Trump executing on that gamble? How is he exercising his power?

The first hundred days have really been marked by using executive power alone. This has kind of been a two-pronged thing. One is he's asserted executive authority. Wherever there's gray area in the law, he's moved to fill it. When Congress passes a law, they sometimes say to themselves, we can't see around every corner. What if we're at war? What if there's an invasion?

And they put into many laws the ability of a president to invoke an emergency and unlock enhanced powers. Donald Trump has been unlocking these powers in all kinds of ways. A number of his tariffs are being imposed not under the regular way tariffs have been imposed in the past, but under a law called the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. That's the law he's invoked to put tariffs on China and Mexico. It's never been used before for that purpose.

He declared an emergency on the southern border saying we were having an invasion and that allowed him to unlock features of law that waved away humanitarian relief like asylum. The other part of this besides asserting executive power has been disempowering other institutions in Washington. So when he goes to cut USAID and all the Doge cuts, he's disempowering Congress. Congress has the power of the purse under the Constitution, but he hasn't asked Congress for permission to redirect money and to cut the federal bureaucracy. The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs. That resides with the lawmakers. But they've given some of that power away through some of these laws,

and he's made full effect of that. He's gone after the media by suing the media and changing the way the press covers him. He's gone after other institutions that he considers liberal, Ivy League universities, big law firms. So he's tried to disempower a number of the institutions around him while filling in all the gray areas that exist in the law that allow him to have more power flow from the Oval Office. Well, and speaking of other branches of government, he's really challenged the judiciary, hasn't

he? Well, that's right. I mean, what power centers remain that could check him and put limits, put guardrails on? I only see really three out there. One is the judiciary and you're starting to see a lot of adverse rulings to both what he's done through Doge and the federal cuts and his immigration policy and the deportations. Another might be the investors in the markets and he's shown some sensitivity

to whether investors are gonna stick with him or whether they're gonna walk away from American equities and bonds. The third is the Republican Party itself because if in the end he chooses not to fully obey the courts, what happens then? And I think at that point it takes Republicans saying to him, hey, you need to obey the courts.

And so the Republicans are with him very solidly, but in the future, you know, they could be one of the institutions in Washington that puts a check on the president. Are we approaching this constitutional crisis that some people talk about? Well, I think that obviously depends who you ask. Certainly some Trump critics and scholars of authoritarianism point to things like these emergency declarations and say, look at other countries, this is how dictators act. They declare martial law, right?

They say, because there's an emergency happening, I get to do whatever I want. Obviously, I think the administration would take issue with that assessment. Aaron pointed to what a lot of people see as a red line, which is a defiance of a court ruling, particularly a Supreme Court ruling. And Trump has repeatedly said that this is not something he would do, that he respects the courts, that his administration is going to abide by the courts. At the same time, you know, he did an interview this week with ABC News where he was asked about this man who the administration has acknowledged it mistakenly deported to El

Salvador and courts have ordered the administration to bring him back. And the administration has basically said, well, we'd let him in if he came back, but we don't have any control over the Salvadoran government. He was asked, couldn't you solve this in a phone call? Couldn't you call your friend who runs El Salvador and just tell him to send the guy back? And he said, yeah, I could, but I don't want to. You could call up the president of El Salvador and say, send him back right now.

And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that. But the court has ordered you to facilitate that. I'm not the one making this decision. And so here's what seems to me like an important confrontation between the executive and judicial branches because it is testing the question of whether a judge can tell the president to do something he doesn't want to do. And the president is basically saying, I could do this, but I don't want to even if a judge tells me I have to. You also have now several court cases pending

with the Supreme Court that could be decisive and we'll see how the administration reacts when and if they get adverse rulings there. I think all of these are potentially important in this discussion. And Molly, you've reported on Trump rolling out big policy changes and then walking them back. Yeah, so I wrote an article recently about Trump seeming to retreat in small ways on some of these fronts. Obviously the big tariffs are still on pause

as they say they're negotiating all of these deals. That's something that the president has acknowledged. he did in part because of pressure from the markets. We have the administration saying if they don't get the deal they've proposed with Ukraine, that they could just walk away from the whole conflict. That to me seems like a real reversal from these very definitive promises that Trump made to solve this conflict, although it also could be a negotiating tactic. And we did see the administration make real progress

on the Ukraine front with the signing of the mineral deal this week. I think that's a very promising sign for where these talks may be headed. And on Doge, overall, you know, the work of Doge has not been particularly popular and it has caused some conflicts within the government. So while Musk says that it's going to continue, we do see a dialing back of that effort and particularly of Musk's role in it. So we see him pulling back a little bit in multiple areas, even if it is obviously still the case that he is still running a very confrontational administration on a lot of fronts.

You know, Molly, your observation about him retreating points to another big feature of this first hundred days. And that is everything Trump has done has put him in a position to be a decider on key things. When you put tariffs on the whole world, now all of a sudden, Trump is the decider. Everyone has to come to him. Hey, 70 countries have come and they're looking for deals. All these different parts of the US economy,

the auto industry, individual companies, are looking for waivers from these tariffs. He gets to be the decider. When he disempowers law firms and strips them of their security clearance, they now have to come and negotiate individual deals with Trump. When he goes after the universities, they have to come to the president and negotiate individual deals with Trump. He's caused everyone around the world to react to him and then come to him and he gets to be the decider

on all these things. And we'll see over the long run, is that a good way to run the government? After this quick break, we're gonna hear what the American public thinks about how Trump has been running the government. If only life had a remote control, you could pause or rewind. Well, life doesn't always give you time to change the outcome, but pre-diabetes does. Take the one-minute risk test today at DoIHavePreDiabetes.org, brought to you by the Ad Council and its pre-diabetes

awareness partners. So now we want to talk about how Trump's policy priorities are landing with the American public. Aaron, you run polls for the Wall Street Journal, so you've got your fingers on the pulse. How are voters feeling? I would say he has put America on edge. You look at the last nine, nine polls conducted by media in recent days, he is underwater on job approval by double digits, meaning by 10 points or more, more people disapprove than approve of what they're seeing from the president.

That said, there are a lot of signs in the numbers also that people are in wait and see mode. They're on edge. People fear disruption from the tariffs. They fear higher prices. But when we ask, are you feeling the effects of inflation, meaningful numbers of people say, I don't feel it now, but I worry about feeling it in the future.

When you ask, hey, President Trump has said, let's put up with a little bit of disruption now for a long-term restructuring of the economy that's gonna bring this golden age, a meaningful share of people say, okay, I'll give him some grace there. There's still a number of people willing to give the president latitude.

And so while the numbers for him are bad, I think a lot of Americans are in wait and see mode. So, Erin, do we see either the declines that you're talking about or the resilience of Trump's approval concentrated in any particular groups? I'm particularly interested in, you know, after the election, there was so much talk about the new groups that Trump had brought into the Republican Party, how well he'd done with young people, with Latinos, with African Americans. How is he doing with these different demographics? Not well. Not well. That is one of the curious features of the first hundred days. Donald

Trump won the 2024 election by expanding the Republican coalition in ways that were much more extensive than many people imagined. As you said, young people, minorities, voted for him in larger shares than we've seen in recent elections. He's forfeited a lot of that, at least for now. In fact, working class white voters, a lot of union members, trade people, people who are not part of the professional class in America. He's sunk among that group too, but that is the only group, working class white voters,

white non-college voters, where he has a positive job approval rating. And he has sunk with all groups to where he's below, you know, disapprove is more than approve among every other group. What about independent voters? Big turn there. They're significantly down. I mean, and one thing I watch, by the way, is a lot of polls tell you if you voted for Trump, what do you think now?

If you voted for him in 2024, if you voted for Harris. So he's going to start with 100% of 2024 Trump voters because he won them all. We found in mid-March that he was like at 93%. Now he's in the mid-80s in a lot of polls. In other words, among people who voted for him, you're getting up to 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15% who disapprove of what they're seeing now. So he's losing some of the people who voted for him. At a high level, what is the interpretation from these polls about what America thinks about his presidency?

I think they reflect anxiety. Look, the polls of people who actually voted showed that people wanted change. Our exit poll called AP Votecast, it's not exactly an exit poll, but it's a poll of people who voted, found that when we asked, how much change do you want in Washington? Nothing, a little bit of change, substantial change, or complete and total upheaval? About 93% of Trump voters wanted either substantial change or complete and total upheaval. 40% wanted complete and total upheaval and they're getting it. But for a lot of people, you know, it's probably too much. I would caution this. Let's wait

till August. In August, by then, Congress will have come in, they'll have either passed a big tax cut or not. The tariffs will either have an effect on inflation or not, and Republican members of Congress will go home and they'll hear what people are saying. And at that point, people's opinions can reflect taxes and tariffs in the economy in a more real way. And they're either going to be okay with what they see or they're going to freak out and they're going to worry about losing the midterm elections a year afterward. That's where I'm going to be really watching for what the mood of the country is.

And guess what? That's a hundred days from now, August 10th. Wouldn't you know? Yeah. So on the topic of approval ratings, we have a question from a listener, Jackson Oldham Navarro. Hey, Molly and Kate. A lot of recent polls seem to show a steady decline in President Trump's overall approval Navarro. to the GOP to stand behind Trump before starting to consider potential consequences from their own constituents. Also, best of luck in your new role, Kate. I'll miss you on the podcast.

Thanks Jackson. I'm going to miss it too. Molly, what are your thoughts? It's a great question. Thank you, Jackson. And this is why this whole discussion matters, right? Trump doesn't have to run for election ever again. He will not be on the ballot in the upcoming midterm elections. But those Republican members of Congress in swing seats, they are very much on the front lines of this. They are getting angry blowback from their constituents. And so the worry for the administration is if those people start to see political advantage in opposing Trump rather than going along with him, it will make it much more difficult for the administration to accomplish anything that they want to get through Congress. And we already hear some rumblings of nervousness, but you know, as Jackson says, most Republicans

still see the best political strategy as sticking with Trump and trying to help him be successful and hoping that that is what is going to ultimately reassure voters when they eventually have to face them. Look, we can ask, what are the consequences of this style of governance by having such an aggressive agenda and really governing for the base, not trying to be a president who brings America together. What do you give up? And one of those things is you can't put the president in a swing district, in a house district. He's going to not be welcomed there.

He's going to drive voters away. Let's go back to 2018. One of the senators up that year was John Tester of Montana. John Tester was a Democrat. And Donald Trump made it a priority to knock off John Tester and have a Republican win that Senate seat. He went to Montana four times.

And he was a controversial president then, and he got a lot of attention, and he drove turnout, but he drove turnout among Democrats. In a lot of counties in Montana, turnout in the 2018 midterm was higher than in the presidential election in 2016, and John Tester held his seat. In other words, when you govern for the base, when you govern as a divisive president, you forfeit the ability to bring the country together. And that gives you certain advantages.

You can excite the base. But in a midterm situation and an election situation, there are places where Donald Trump will risk pushing swing voters away where he goes. And that Montana election stands as a lesson to me of the consequence of governing for the base and not being a unifying figure. And of course, there were places Joe Biden couldn't go in his midterm. Absolutely.

Erin, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Well, thanks. Thanks for bringing your wisdom and light to these confusing times for the last hundred days. Yeah, and maybe we'll see you on August 10th for, you know, the next hundred days. There we go, day 200. It's coming. All right, I'll put it on the calendar.

All right, Molly, here we are. We've hit a hundred days. What are you looking for in the next hundred days? One thing that's interesting to me is, you might expect the first hundred days to sort of set the table for what's to come, but we actually seem to be at a real inflection point where the next hundred days could look very different from the first hundred days, where we don't know if a peace deal with Ukraine is imminent or if the administration is going

to, if Trump is going to walk away from the table. The Doge effort that consumed so much of the bandwidth of Trump's 100 days seems to be, if not winding down, changing very much in its sort of emphasis and leadership. The tariffs are mostly in a state of suspended animation where what could be coming is a flurry of deals that set things back to sort of something resembling the status quo ante or we could just be waiting for that deadline to hit and all the tariffs go all the way back up. So I think we are at a very uncertain point in this administration where a lot of things

could go in one direction or another. That big, beautiful bill that's working its way through Congress, the rubber is really hitting the road. It's going to be very difficult to write this bill in a way that will enable it to pass the House and Senate where Republicans have such narrow majorities. And that is very much sort of hanging by a thread and it could blow up and be a disaster or they could succeed in changing the face of American government through this big, beautiful piece of legislation.

So I think there's a lot that we're still waiting to see and a lot that we'll know more about when the second hundred days rolls around. So we've talked about a lot of ways that Trump has amassed power. Are there any cracks? Well, we saw a big crack this week with the ouster of the National Security Advisor, Mike Walz, who's, I think, the first major member of the administration to lose his job now Trump announced late yesterday that he's actually going to be nominated for UN ambassador But of course this comes after the signal gate controversy that he was involved in and after he had become sort of unpopular Within the White House so a lot of the same kind of infighting backbiting

So a lot of the same kind of in fighting backbiting palace intrigue that marked the first Trump administration also now seems to be a feature of this one and While the defense secretary Pete Hegseth is safe for now He has also who was also in the group chat. He was also in the group chat. He's been on thin ice for various reasons Some people think maybe he's the next to go but the upshot of it is that Now that someone has been ousted you cannot say that this is the same administration that came in on day one and everything is sort of intact and

I think you also see that the opposition is sort of waking up. The Democrats, you know, are still very disorganized, very unpopular. I think they still haven't really come to consensus on who's the face of the party or what they want it to stand for going forward. But the rank and file is not waiting for that. And we have seen, you know, in these town halls of Republicans and Democrats alike, where people are coming out of the woodwork to go out and yell at their member of Congress, there's a potential that, you know, you're going to have a sort of dispirited, discouraged Republican party, but a very awakened, energized Democratic base going into the midterms. And that is a recipe for Democrats to do well and potentially deliver another blow

to Trump a year and a half from now. But the midterms are far away. The midterms are far away. What I'm really looking at is the elections this November when Virginia and New Jersey will hold statewide elections. So that'll be really the first big bellwether before the midterms of what we're in for. Molly, this has been a true pleasure.

It has been so much fun. I'm going to miss you, Kate. I'm gonna miss you too. And I'll miss all of our listeners, but they have been so wonderful. We have had such a good time on this podcast. Yeah, thanks to everyone for sending in their questions. We appreciate you so much.

Yes. Awesome. Thank you, Molly. Thanks, Kate. Trump 2.0 is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. This episode was produced by Enrique Perez de la Rosa and edited by Catherine Whalen. Molly Ball is The Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent.

I'm Kate Leimwath. This episode was engineered by Nathan Singapok. Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard. Additional music in this episode by Griffin Tanner. Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher. Artwork by James Walton. This is the final episode of Trump 2.0.

We'll keep covering the Trump administration on our daily show. Thanks for all your questions, and thanks for listening.