Tariff starts and stops, DOGE cuts, and misfirings — the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term as president have been filled with action and controversies.
“There are only 1,361 days to go of this journey,” MSNBC host and former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, as Tuesday marked Trump’s 100th day in office.
The term started January 20 with a series of executive actions, including Trump withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO) and pardoning nearly 1,600 January 6th defendants.
Days later, Trump went to task on culture issues that have animated the Republican Party. He signed an executive order to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. military (the courts have since blocked that move, although Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene), and ordered a ban on federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
“All those federally controlled DEI offices will be closed,” Fox News’ Peter Doocy said as he reported on the DEI order on Day 6 of Trump’s second term.
One of the most notable parts of Trump’s first 100 days has been his stop-and-go tariffs. As early as February, he imposed tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, only to pause them two days later. The president has walked back tariff actions nine times so far, including parts of his “Liberation Day” levies on much of the world that led to significant stock market drops, a rattling of the bonds markets, and Americans souring on his handling of the economy.
Perhaps the most notable part of the beginning of Trump 2.0 has been massive federal cuts and firings. Early in his term, the president tasked Tesla and Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has led the attempted, successful, or planned firings of more than 200,000 federal employees.
Musk’s experiment to take a chainsaw to the federal deficit — which has resulted in a disputed $160 billion in cuts so far, well short of his original goal of $2 trillion — has garnered controversy and made him a liberal target. But the Trump administration has since attempted to claim, against statements and evidence that demonstrate otherwise, that Musk is not the actual head of DOGE.
“It’s been assumed Elon Musk is running the Department of Government Efficiency, but a White House official says that’s not the case,” one news anchor said on Day 30 of Trump’s term.
Musk recently said he planned to limit his time with DOGE and focus on running Tesla.
The new administration has been rapid in cutting and overhauling the federal government — but that has led to it making glaring mistakes at times. Among those errors:
• The Defense Department removed a story about Black baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s military service from its website. The DOD said the story was “mistakenly removed amid a DEI purge,” and restored it after public outcry.
• Senior Trump administration officials accidentally added Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat in March in which they discussed impending war plans for the military to strike the Houthis in Yemen.
• The administration admitted it made an “administrative error” when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father with legal protection from deportation, to El Salvador.
Watch the video above to see the other numerous headlines from the first 100 days.
