A Historic Start to Trump’s Return to the White House
The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been like no other presidency in recent memory. Unlike the managers of American decline who have occupied the Oval Office over the past few decades, Trump has made clear he doesn’t want America to continue down the path of irrelevance and decay. His mission is instead to revitalize the nation so that its citizens, per the Constitution’s Preamble, can work to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
With a blizzard of executive orders, key cabinet selections, and outside-the-box thinking with the creation of DOGE, among a number of other actions, the Trump administration is continuing to usher in our age of realignment that Trump initiated with his shock victory in the 2016 election.
At the most basic level, Trump represents a return to the practice of politics itself: restoring American sovereignty and our tradition of self-rule rather than being crushed under the wheels of the denizens of the Swamp. He represents a return to republicanism against the tyranny of the unaccountable administrative state and its minions ensconced in the bureaucracies. The administration is seeking to deliver actionable results based on the enlightened will of the governed rather than listening to the whispers of the Grima Wormtongues who populate the ruling class.
In the past three months, Trump’s second administration has been racking up a string of successes. Crossings at the southern border have plummeted to levels unseen in decades. Deportations, while not where the president wants to see them, have continued apace. And he’s working to help finally end the war in Ukraine.
The president has signed 143 executive orders, which range from eliminating the use of disparate impact liability in the federal government to closing down the Department of Education, a long-time goal of conservatives that’s finally coming to fruition. DEI is being defenestrated while meritocracy, rightly understood, is being lauded again. And the administration is working on taking away the taxpayer subsidies that Ivy League universities have gobbled up as they teach students to despise the country they call home.
Though some with a more libertarian bent are wondering why an active, energetic use of executive power should be celebrated, any chance of returning to a government that’s not a mercurial colossus will necessarily require actions that may make us uncomfortable. A return to normalcy will take something like a revolution. And even then, a government of a nation the size of the United States will necessarily be big—which is why the object is ultimately not “small government” but one that actually secures the good of those it was established to serve. After all, the same “strict constructionist” Thomas Jefferson who sparred with Alexander Hamilton over the limits of the powers of government also approved the Louisiana Purchase.
On the economy, Trump continues to attempt a courageous and bold move to rebalance the global order, making sure that the advantages the U.S. has handed over to China under the guise of “free trade” are removed. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that 177,000 jobs were added in April, and “[m]ore than half a million private-sector jobs have been added since January.” Though not a significant drop so far, mortgage rates have nevertheless gone down. And though former Trump administration official Jeffery H. Anderson has rightly argued that we need much more than DOGE to truly get a handle on our looming debt problem, Trump, at the very leas,t is making an effort to cut waste and redundant programs.
Trump’s victories have been so apparent that even the mainstream media has had to begrudgingly admit to some of the administration’s successes. PBS noted that “inflation last month saw its lowest increase in nearly four years.” Meanwhile, CBS News reported that just in the past three months, the U.S. has received $2 trillion in commitments from private companies—and around $5 trillion from foreign countries—since Trump was sworn into office in January.
Like Trump’s first term, deregulation is in. Oil-and-gas producers and liquefied natural gas exporters have already benefitted from the administration’s moves to cut red tape, which will ultimately help the American people by lowering energy prices and keeping up with rising energy use across the U.S. Travis Fisher, who worked in the first Trump administration and is now at the libertarian Cato Institute, calls the administration’s moves on this front a “new high water mark in terms of the deregulatory agenda,” adding that Trump is “moving more boldly than Ronald Reagan.”
This points to a truth that is perhaps difficult for some nostalgic Republicans to accept: the Trump Revolution is real in a way the Reagan Revolution never was. As Daniel McCarthy recently argued, “Ronald Reagan was elected to do much of what Trump is now doing.” Though there’s no need to denigrate the successes Reagan had in office, it’s clear that the misnamed Reagan Revolution was far more hagiography from movement conservatives than a true turning point in American politics. Putting a mythology in place of lasting accomplishments, Reagan’s admirers constructed a world inside their own heads that was largely disconnected from the everyday realities most Americans face.
And what about the presidents who followed in Reagan’s wake? Both Bushes were institutionalists—with W.’s folksy evangelicalism a cover for neoconservatism on steroids. Bill Clinton, like JFK before him, was far less than the wunderkind his 1992 presidential campaign suggested, and kept the global order intact rather than challenging it in any fundamental way. The same goes for Barack Obama, whose seemingly exotic background masked an utterly conventional and cringe-worthy form of liberalism that only further cemented our modern regime. In light of decades of disappointment, it is no wonder that the American people chose Trump multiple times as their tribune.
The media has used words like “destabilizing” and “chaotic” to describe Trump’s first 100 days. But this is not at all surprising since they’re measuring Trump’s policies by the political order he was elected to overturn. Most reporters and op-ed writers are still largely working on behalf of a political class that’s not a partisan of the American nation or its people. They don’t care about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, or what the great monuments in America commemorate. Instead, they want to ensure that their sinecures, positions, and access to those who champion the causes of their own class—the ruling class—are preserved.
The media remains obsessed with the president’s polls, but, like the currently floundering Democratic Party, they still don’t seem to care all that much about what the polls say about them. The Democrats currently have an approval rate hovering somewhere in the high 20s. Chuck Schumer was recently asked by an intrepid reporter why his own approval rate stands at 17% after Schumer criticized Trump’s poll numbers. And in the American mind, the media is as underwater as the Democrats. In Gallup’s latest poll, more Americans (36%) have zero trust in the media than Americans (31%) who have a great deal or fair amount of trust.
This points to one of the most important aspects of Trump’s first 100 days in office: the psychic blow that his winning the 2024 election and being back in office has dealt to the Left. Trump winning not only the Electoral College vote but also the popular vote has left them shaken. Whether by strategy or simply a lack of will, they seem to be unable to marshal any true on-the-ground resistance.
Trump has triumphed over wave after wave of attacks to get back into office. He was in the political wilderness, as his businesses were being targeted and the Left was attempting to put him in jail and disbar his lawyers. But Trump has persevered. And the Left now seem to be in a wilderness of their own making, without any champions on the horizon to help them break the strong grip Trump now has on American politics.
Though much more will need to be done on every front, Trump’s first 100 days in office are a historic start to what looks to be a historic presidency. Compared to the sclerotic and doddering nature of the Biden administration, Trump clearly has the energy and stamina to make good on his campaign promises. The political winds are with him. Meanwhile, his political enemies only have epithets, illogical arguments, and memories of the once vaunted Obama coalition that has long since cracked up. And they also have to worry about something else: President JD Vance taking up the reins of MAGA in 2028 and beyond.
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