The Next 1,360 Days
Trump had a genuine mandate. The extremism of his first 100 days in office goes well beyond it.
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On July 19th 2024, Donald Trump, his right ear still bandaged, walked onstage at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to rapturous applause. It was his first public appearance since an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, had come within literal inches of claiming his life.
The attempt against Trump was a stark reminder of how close the United States was to being consumed by political violence. It was also a rare opportunity for Trump to reinvent his political persona. In the moment, he had demonstrated his rare political skills by rising from the ground, exhorting the crowd to fight, and raising his fist to the sky in defiance. In the days after the attack, he spoke of being a changed man. Now he would have an opportunity to reintroduce himself to the nation as a chastened hero, someone whose near-death experience had added a modicum of wisdom and restraint to his unrivaled appetite for political battle.
For the first half hour of the speech, it looked as though he might just pull it off. Trump spoke in a measured tone. He mostly stuck to his script. He explicitly addressed his words to Americans of āevery race, religion, color and creed,ā emphasizing that he was running to be president of all, not half, of the country. āThe discord and division in our society must be healed,ā he exhorted his audience at the very beginning of the speech. āWe must heal it quickly.ā
Then Trump, visibly buoyed by the adoration of the crowd, slowly morphed back into the politician the country had known for the previous decade. He started to go off script. He delivered red meat to his base. He alluded to very-online gripes and conspiracy theories that likely eluded much of the audience watching at home. He kept going and going for an extra hour, talking about ācrazy Nancy Pelosi,ā saying that Americans were being āsqueezed out of the labor force and their jobs taken ā¦ by illegal aliens,ā and claiming that Democrats āused Covid to cheatā in the 2020 election.
A hundred days into Trumpās second term, it is becoming painfully clear that the arc of that speech was a premonition for the arc of his presidency. Just like that day, Trump has had a genuine opportunity to broaden his appeal by demonstrating that he is capable of reason and restraintāonly to be undone by his narcissism, his consuming anger at his opponents, and his congenital unwillingness to moderate.
Much more so than for his first term, Trumpās second victory in a presidential election gave him a robust mandate to govern. The outgoing president had grown deeply unpopular. There was widespread dissatisfaction with the political establishment and the functioning of some of societyās most influential institutions. Trump attracted many new voters, including from segments of the electorate on which Democrats had long counted for their supposedly inevitable victories. He carried every swing state. For the first time in his political career, opinion polls consistently found that more Americans approved than disapproved of him.
Trump could have built on this mandate to make big and potentially popular changes.1 He could have reduced Americaās military presence in faraway regions of the world. He could have pressured Americaās allies to do more to provide security on their own continents. He could have invested in American manufacturing. He could have cracked down on the southern border. He could have cut wasteful spending in the federal government. He could have pushed back against woke excesses in universities and corporations. And he could have prioritized the economic interests of the many aspirational, working-class Americans who supported him in hopes of ascending the social ladder.
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But like so many times in the past, Trump has turned out to be his own worst enemy. On every major issue, he has vastly overstepped the extent of his mandate. Gifted a political environment in which there was a genuine hunger for the kind of change he might incarnate, he insisted, time and again, on replacing one unpopular set of ideological commitments with another set of ideological commitments that turn out to be even more extreme and unpopular.
Trump didnāt (just) reduce Americaās tendency to play world policeman. He has signaled a willingness to let Russia and China do what they want in ātheirā respective spheres of influence; humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office; and repeatedly praised sworn enemies of the United States like Russiaās Vladimir Putin.
Trump didnāt (just) press NATO allies to spend more money on their militaries. He repeatedly threatened the sovereignty of longstanding allies; kept joking that Canada would soon turn into Americaās 51st state; and has repeatedly insisted, apparently in earnest, that Greenland must come under U.S. control.
Trump didnāt (just) try to strengthen American manufacturing or use tariffs as a tool to bring vital industries like defense or computing back to American shores. He effectively blew up the global trading system and risked a worldwide recession by imposing extremely onerous and haphazardly-conceived tariffs on virtually every single trading partner of the United States.
Trump didnāt (just) take energetic action to bring Americaās border with Mexico under control. He arbitrarily canceled the student visas of those who expressed disfavored opinions in college newspapers; deported multiple people in apparent defiance of court injunctions; and arrested a judge whom he accused of harboring an illegal alien.
Trump didnāt (just) focus on cutting genuine waste and dysfunction in the federal government. He indiscriminately shuttered whole agencies like USAID and Voice of America; enticed tens of thousands of federal employees to quit, likely pushing out talented civil servants while retaining those with few other career options; and then tried to hire many of them back once he realized that the government couldnāt function without them.
Trump didnāt (just) fight against genuine forms of ideological coercion in publicly-funded institutions. He has imposed the administrationās own ideological purity tests on institutions from the National Institutes of Health to the Kennedy Center; tried to subvert the academic freedom of colleges from Georgetown to Harvard; and seemingly decided that he would rather weaken and diminish rival power centers like Americaās leading research universities than fight to reform them.
Finally, Trump didnāt (just) try to turn Republicans into a party of the multiethnic working class. He supported a budget which would give massive tax cuts to billionaires and big corporations while vastly increasing the national debt.2
The first Trump administration was characterized by a strange mix of chaos and competence. The chaos was caused by the fact that Trump clearly did not have a team of trusted loyalistsāa state of affairs that led to distracting power struggles within the administration, rapid staff turnover, and a constant sense of unpredictability. The competence was in part a side effect of that dysfunction: precisely because Trump did not have his own team in the White House, a large number of decisions were taken and carried out by relatively traditional operatives with extensive bureaucratic experience. (Indeed, it has, over the course of the last weeks, repeatedly struck me that we owe a collective apology to the much-derided āadults in the roomā who helped to ensure that America and the world did not go totally off the rails during Trumpās first term in office.)
The second Trump administration, conversely, seems to be characterized by a strange mix of efficacy and incompetence. Trump has succeeded in assembling a vastly larger team of genuine loyalists, and the speed with which he has been moving is genuinely impressive. His ability to impose his will on the American government by turning speculative policy ideas into concrete initiatives is astonishing. But precisely because this government is more efficacious, it also risks doing greater damage: this time around, ideological obsessions like Trumpās disdain for NATO or his mistrust for international trade are having a vastly bigger impact on the world.
The extent to which Trump has, across the board, overstepped his mandate gives his opponents a clear opportunity. They need to point to the ways in which he has placed himself far outside the political mainstream. They need to make clear how big a price in prosperity and security ordinary Americans will pay for his missteps. And they need to turn themselves into a commonsense alternative to his ideological excesses. The trick for the opposition is to be resolute and energetic in resisting Trumpāwithout letting his provocations bait them into becoming increasingly extreme.
But Trumpās strategic blunder in vastly overstepping his genuine mandate may also tempt his opponents to commit two strategic blunders of their own.
The first is to be overly confident that the real-world consequences of Trumpās policies are going to decimate his popularity. This is certainly a possibility, and there is some evidence that this process is already underway. Most notably, the economic chaos caused by āLiberation Dayā led to a quick decline in approval ratings for Trump; the share of Americans who approve of Trump is now down to 44 percent, while the share of Americans who disapprove of him has climbed to 53 percent, putting him in more negative territory than he had been 100 days into his first term.
But I worry that some Democrats are too sanguine about the inevitability of a further slide in popularity, in part because they may now overstate the likelihood that economic armageddon is just around the corner. It is notable, for example, that stock markets have recuperated much of their tariff-induced losses over the course of the past weeks; if the faction of the administration which opposes steep tariffs ultimately prevails, and Trump makes permanent his 90-day pause on the most extreme trade barriers, the economy might just recover from the needless shock he has induced. His approval ratings could then gradually begin to climb again. If the opposition rests its strategy on the expectation of impending disaster, it doesnāt just risk looking unpatriotic; it may once again underestimate his political strength.
The second strategic blunder which Trumpās opponents might be tempted to commit is that they let the extent to which Trump is overstepping his mandate blind them to the fact that there really was a genuine mandate in the first place. In the last months, leading Democrats have increasingly signaled that they are not willing to rethink the partyās stances on some of the issues that made them toxically unpopularāand help to explain why, according to one recent NBC poll, only 27% of Americans take a positive view of the party. Ken Martin, the newly elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee, insisted that āwe have the right message.ā Tim Walz, Kamala Harrisā running mate, insisted that the reason for their defeat lay in their unwillingness to double down on wokeness and DEI.
There was no public clamor for deporting gay makeup artists who get caught up in a dragnet of supposed gang members to prisons in El Salvador; but there really was a mandate to stop the surge of immigrants coming across the southern border during the Biden administration. There was no public clamor for renaming the Gulf of Mexico or throwing trans people out of the military; but there really was anger over progressives removing Thomas Jeffersonās name from public schools and silencing legitimate debate about topics like the participation of athletes who have undergone male puberty in womenās sporting competitions. There was little desire to burn to the ground institutions like Harvard or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; but there really was a widespread sense that these institutions are overly ideological, beholden to the narrow self-interest of their stakeholders, and that a major shake-up of the country was needed to stop elites from running roughshod over the views and interests of ordinary people.
Democrats are now in danger of forgetting all of that. The utter inability to read the national mood seems to be infectious, passing back and forth from Democrats to Republicans like an interminable flu.
Trump has been in office for 100 days. This means that barring an impeachment or a premature death, both of which are unlikely, he will be in office for another 1,360 days. Among the barrage of activity from the White House, it is easy to forget that the presidencyāand the job of responding to it, whether as a citizen or a writerāis a marathon rather than a sprint.
In a recent episode of The Good Fight, the great Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev suggested that Trumpās government has taken on a revolutionary characterāand that, as in every revolution, events quickly take on a logic of their own. At some point, he warned, you are no longer running the revolution; the revolution is running you.
If that is the right way to understand Trumpās first 100 days in office, then it is hard for anybodyāincluding the president himselfāto predict what the country will look like in a month or a year, let alone at the end of his term. The danger that recent attacks on the rule of law will escalate is obviously real. It would, for example, not take much for the White House to defy the Supreme Court in a more clear-cut and concerted way than it has done so far.
Since it is impossible to predict the events that may be about to consume the country, it is also impossible to give specific advice about how citizens devoted to maintaining the rule of law and the basic institutions of the American Republic should respond to them. But one thing is clear: anybody who wants to run a successful marathon must think carefully about pacing. There are dangers both in running ahead straight out of the gate and in falling too far behind. And even as the exhaustion mounts, itās imperative to keep a clear head.
That will, for the next 1,360 days, be the task of those who are deeply concerned about the rule-breaking radicalism of Trumpās administration. Resisting his perilous overreach of executive power will require calm and alacrity, passion and analytical rigor, principled resistance to the extremism of the MAGA movement and an ability to recognize the flaws of the establishment, a keen sense of the seriousness of the situation and a healthy ability to laugh at ourselves, the stamina to keep informed about what is going on in Washington and the ability simultaneously to get on with the project of living meaningful lives.
Some of these I would have agreed with; others I would have strongly disagreed with. But they would have been clearly in keeping with the promises he made on the campaign trail, and would have responded to genuine dissatisfactions amongst large segments of the American population.
The list could go on. And on.
Trump won by 1.5% of the popular vote. I do not consider that to be a "robust mandate".
"There was no public clamor for... throwing trans people out of the military." That's true. There was just an enormous amount of private clamor among servicemembers, which was studiously ignored by the media. Why actually gather data from actual warfighters when you can impose unworkable ideas from the top down?
The Trump administration's (early) revitalization of our military is one of the best and most important policy changes that could have been made. We take military effectiveness for granted here but we really shouldn't.