100 Days Into Trump's Second Term: What's Changed With Tariffs, Immigration and More

There have never been 100 days like this.

President Trump was sworn in for a second term in January intent on transforming America and its place in the world. From his first hours in office, he has relentlessly driven domestic, economic and foreign policy in risky new directions; taken a chain saw to the federal work force; challenged the authority of the courts; and sought to purge liberal influence from government, education and culture.

The result has been a chaotic blur of new initiatives; judicial, political and economic backlash; and neck-snapping reversals. It has tested the nation’s ability to process disruption — and of American democracy’s resilience in the face of a president whose views of his power have prompted warnings of creeping authoritarianism.

The consuming conflicts of one day regularly give way to wholly new ones with stunning rapidity: pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, stripping out-of-favor officials and former advisers of security details, proposing to turn Gaza into a resort town and Canada into a 51st state, blaming a plane crash on diversity initiatives, presiding over a contentious cabinet meeting with Elon Musk, installing his personal lawyers to run the Justice Department, firing inspectors general, closing down U.S.A.I.D., igniting a global trade war, berating Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office, deporting migrants without due process and edging toward a constitutional crisis by defying judges on multiple occasions.

If the 100-day mark is an opportunity to pause to reflect on what this presidency has meant so far — and what it could mean in its remaining 1,361 days — it offers one clear lesson. In this second time around, Mr. Trump is intent on using every hour to pursue an agenda shaped by a shifting mix of grievance, short-term political calculation, long-held belief and the experience of his first term.

Here’s a deeper look at how Mr. Trump has already made his mark.

— Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman

“I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States,” President Trump said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in their now-famous altercation before cameras in the Oval Office in late February. “But you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out” with the Russians.

And lose, he went on to suggest.

It is hard to encapsulate the revolution in America’s approach to the world in these past 100 days in any one episode. But with that public humiliation of Mr. Zelensky, once regarded as Churchill in a T-shirt, Mr. Trump sent a clear signal about what was to come: the end of an era that began 80 years ago when the United States helped design a world of rules, international agreements and norms to constrain the powerful from seizing territory and to empower the weak without resorting to war.

So the real message of that argument was that international law was out and power — raw, preferably nuclear-backed — is back in. In Mr. Trump’s view, the world is divided into two kinds of countries: those that “have the cards” and those that don’t. With nothing to put on the table, Mr. Trump was arguing, Mr. Zelensky would have to take whatever terms being given to end the war.

That reflects Mr. Trump’s long-held view of how the world works. Unconstrained by establishment advisers, he seems determined to deal largely with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China. In this spheres-of-influence world, international law is fine until inconvenient, borders are up for negotiation, and the vague soft power gains of providing aid to the world’s neediest are unnecessary.

The other message of the encounter between the American and Ukrainian leaders was that Mr. Trump wanted to switch sides and normalize relations with Moscow. At a minimum doing so would open up business opportunities. Some around him argue it could interrupt Russia’s burgeoning partnership with China.

No one knows how this grand experiment in raw geopolitical power politics will play out. Most European leaders say they are horrified; Asian allies are more circumspect, but fear empowering Mr. Xi to test the theory by squeezing Taiwan.

Tellingly, on his first trip abroad in his new term, for Pope Francis’ funeral, Mr. Trump held one detailed conversation, with Mr. Zelensky. He shook the hands of a few European leaders, but passed on the chance to talk about tariffs, or the future of alliances. Instead, he headed straight for his airplane to return to the America he says comes first.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University, was on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends when she was surrounded by federal agents, some of their faces obscured by black masks.

Supporters say her offense appears to have been that she was the co-author of an opinion essay in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’s support for Israel. She was swept up by the government as part of what the Trump administration has described as a campaign against antisemitic activists on campus.

President Trump rode to re-election on promises to crack down on immigration, and he has taken extraordinary measures to do so. He has targeted student visa holders and legal permanent residents who took part in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. He has jettisoned due process and sent undocumented immigrants to a megaprison for terrorists in El Salvador, including at least one by mistake.

The administration has placed migrants’ names in Social Security’s “death master file” to cut off their access to bank accounts and other financial services. He has pressured countries to retrieve their citizens, sent people to third countries far from their homes and invoked a wartime law to remove migrants without due process.

He has fulfilled a signature campaign promise, essentially sealing the southern border with Mexico even as he welcomes white South Africans as refugees.

U.S. border officials also are using more aggressive tactics, which the administration calls “enhanced vetting,” at ports of entry to the United States, prompting concerns even among American allies about travel to the United States.

But for all of the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s campaign, his efforts continue to fall short of the mass deportations he vowed to carry out. Overall, the number of flights and their destinations look largely similar to those under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Even Elon Musk seemed a little surprised to be there.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Mr. Musk said with his trademark staccato laugh. The press pool walked into the Oval Office and saw the world’s richest man and his young son X over President Trump’s right shoulder. “Come here often?”

Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were about two weeks into a presidential partnership that had turned into a bureaucratic bull rush. Mr. Musk had turned federal agencies inside out, but he had offered no public explanation of his grand strategy. Inside the Oval, with X on his shoulders, Mr. Musk said again and again that it was all about rooting out fraud. And, in his telling, there was plenty of it.

U.S.A.I.D.? Fraudsters. The Social Security Administration? Fraudsters. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Fraudsters.

Those are just three of the agencies where Mr. Musk and his team of almost 100 aides have run roughshod, getting into seemingly daily fights (and lawsuits) against the federal bureaucracy. He has narrated it all in real time on social media. Mr. Musk has sought to cut the number of people drawing a government paycheck by hundreds of thousands, and to give the president more authority than Congress would like to unilaterally reduce federal payments.

Over 250,000 people have had their jobs cut, planned to be cut or have taken a buyout, according to a New York Times tally.

But while Mr. Musk’s group took drastic actions like shutting down America’s foreign assistance agency, the effort is not expected to come close to fulfilling Mr. Musk’s promise of cutting a trillion dollars of waste out of the federal budget.

Mr. Musk has also angered several top Trump officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio during an explosive cabinet meeting in March, and gotten into a power struggle with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over the I.R.S.

For all the drama, Mr. Musk’s relationship with the president has proved durable. Mr. Trump has for the most part been fine having Mr. Musk around, and clearly Mr. Musk likes being there. It is a transactional relationship for two deeply transactional leaders. Mr. Musk has said he will leave Washington next month, but few think he will be out of the picture.

Perhaps the most salient example of President Trump’s penchant for revenge came on April 9, when he directed the Justice Department to try to pin a crime on a specific person: Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official from his first administration.

Mr. Krebs had enraged the president by contradicting baseless claims that Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election because electronic voting machines were compromised. But there was no evidence to believe Mr. Krebs had broken any laws.

That did not stop Mr. Trump, whose message was clear: Opposing him publicly means risking punishment at the hands of the federal government.

Since returning to the presidency, Mr. Trump has brazenly used his official powers to carry out a retribution campaign against his perceived enemies. His subordinates have fired career prosecutors at the Justice Department who played a role in investigating Mr. Trump or his supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The president terminated taxpayer-financed security protection for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who led the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, and others who went on to criticize Mr. Trump, including John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.

The president has threatened his perceived opponents with state sanctions. He has urged the Federal Communications Commission to remove the licenses of broadcast networks that have covered him in ways he does not like.

Mr. Trump is bullying universities, demanding ideological changes to hiring and academic policies and freezing huge research grants.

He has signed executive orders singling out law firms that employed or represented people he considers opponents. He has signed presidential orders that target former officials he dislikes for “reviews” by the federal government, in search of any evidence that could be used to prosecute them.

Some of Mr. Trump’s targets have capitulated, but others are fighting him in court. Yet even if he ultimately loses, his legal bills are being paid by taxpayers.

And Mr. Trump’s weaponization of law enforcement power for revenge may be the most aggressive move of all. Mr. Krebs has since resigned from his job and said he must focus full time on defending himself.

On April 2, President Trump walked out in front of a crowd of officials, reporters and workers in hard hats assembled in the White House Rose Garden and unveiled his plans for remaking the global trading system. The president hoisted up a poster with the tariffs he planned to charge on imports from foreign countries and said the day would be remembered as “Liberation Day.”

“We are finally putting America first,” Mr. Trump said.

The announcement ended up triggering panic among foreign officials and investors, and tipped the United States into a full-blown trade war with one of its biggest trading partners, China.

While Mr. Trump is often cast as a product of the 1980s or the 1950s, he has lately taken to pining for the period after 1890, when tariffs were the primary expression of economic policy. In February, he added a 10 percent tariff to Chinese exports, saying that Beijing needed to halt exports of fentanyl and the chemicals that make it. Beijing retaliated, putting its own tariffs on U.S. products and introducing other measures to hurt U.S. companies.

The same situation played out in March, when Mr. Trump added another 10 percent tariff on Chinese exports, and China answered with more restrictions of its own.

But it was after Mr. Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April that tensions really surged. China was the only country to immediately retaliate, and Mr. Trump singled them out for punishment. Just hours after his own tariffs went into effect, Mr. Trump decided to pause them for 90 days for other countries, but he announced drastically higher rates for Chinese imports, writing on social media that the country “PLAYED IT WRONG.”

Products from China — the second-largest source of goods for the United States — now face a minimum tariff of 145 percent, and in some cases the levies are much higher. U.S. exports now face a 125 percent tariff going into China. For entrepreneurs and farmers that rely on trade between the countries, particularly small businesses, that has been crippling. Some companies have stopped trade altogether, and bookings for the ships that carry freight from China to the United States have plummeted.

U.S. officials have toyed with the idea for years of “decoupling” from China for national security reasons. With little warning, the countries have suddenly dived into that scenario.

Trump officials, including Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, have described the situation as “unsustainable.” But the United States and China have not held substantive talks, and it is not clear how the governments will resolve the rift. So for now, the standoff continues.

In a Fox News interview with President Trump in early March, Maria Bartiromo pointed out that there were “rising worries” about an economic slowdown.

“Are you expecting a recession this year?” she asked.

“I hate to predict things like that,” Mr. Trump replied. “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.”

News coverage of the interview focused on Mr. Trump’s refusal to rule out a recession. But his answer was arguably less remarkable than the fact that Ms. Bartiromo felt the need to ask the question at all.

When Mr. Trump took office, he inherited an economy that was the envy of the world. Yet within weeks, consumer confidence was plummeting, businesses were pausing planned expansions and investors were questioning the safety of U.S. government debt. Forecasters debated which was more likely: a mere recession, or “stagflation,” in which growth stalls while inflation rises.

Those fears are the result, most directly, of Mr. Trump’s ever-shifting trade policies, which threaten to drive up consumer prices, disrupt global supply chains and inspire retaliatory tariffs from U.S. trading partners.

But the disruptions are not limited to trade. Mr. Trump’s threats to fire Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, have roiled financial markets. His immigration policies have led some employers to complain that they are struggling to find workers. The administration’s cost-cutting efforts, led by Elon Musk, have resulted in tens of thousands of layoffs and resignations among government workers and put billions of dollars in federal funding in limbo.

Perhaps more than any specific decisions by the administration, business leaders say that the near-constant shifts in policy — tariffs that are imposed and then suspended, workers who are fired and then reinstated — have made it almost impossible to plan ahead. Economists say that uncertainty alone could be enough to cause a recession if businesses respond by pulling back on hiring and investment, as surveys show many have already begun to do.

Still, the evidence of a downturn has so far shown up mostly in surveys and anecdotes, not in measures of actual economic activity. Job growth has been solid. Layoffs remain low. Consumer spending faltered at the start of the year but has since rebounded. That suggests that while the risk of a recession has risen, one is not yet inevitable.

Walk into the Oval Office these days and there is an unfamiliar visage on the wall, just above the gold-enhanced mantel: James K. Polk. For those with only vague memories of high school American history, his appearance is no accident. It was Polk, the 11th president, who seized Texas and much of the Southwest and pushed America’s borders to the Pacific.

He was, in short, the hero of manifest destiny, a phrase President Trump revived for his inaugural address. When visitors come to the White House now, Mr. Trump, not known for his intense study of his 19th-century predecessors, notes that Polk “got a lot of land.”

Which helps explain Mr. Trump’s fascination with acquiring Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal and turning Canada into the 51st state.

It started in earnest 13 days before his inauguration, when Mr. Trump, at his Mar-a-Lago club, was asked whether he would rule out using “military or economic coercion” to get the lands he covets. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said, insisting that economic or national security imperatives were so vital that “you might have to do something.”

Ever since, he has repeated the threat again and again, unconcerned that his words were fueling resistance movements from Denmark — which protects Greenland — to Canada, where the Liberal Party has been revived because it is standing up to Mr. Trump.

He is hardly the first to be interested. Secretary of State William Seward sought Greenland after he bought Alaska in the 1860s. Harry Truman wanted it in the opening days of the Cold War. But only Mr. Trump has talked about actually taking it by force. And that, of course, is unnecessary. The United States once had dozens of bases on Greenland, but it shrunk them down to one. An existing treaty allows Mr. Trump to greatly expand the American presence.

The United States could do the same in Panama, and already an American hedge fund has struck a deal to buy out some Chinese facilities. Canada, on the other hand, has no interest in becoming the 51st state, a phrase Mr. Trump has used so often it has become distinctly unfunny to the Canadians.

It was the first national tragedy of President Trump’s second term: An American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River in late January, killing 67 people. After a moment of silence and condolences for the families whose loved ones were still being pulled from the water, Mr. Trump saw fit to cast blame.

Citing no evidence, Mr. Trump said diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered standards for air traffic controllers.

It was a crescendo moment in Mr. Trump’s campaign to eradicate programs and practices aimed at reversing the effects of systemic inequities from the federal government, and virtually every sector of American life.

In his remarks, Mr. Trump equated diversity with incompetence, and effectively aligned himself with people who use diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., as a proxy for race, a dog whistle for white grievance, and a catchall for societal ills.

The programs were created to serve as guardrails for civil rights enforcement, and to help remedy inequities faced by groups that have historically been discriminated against, such as minorities, women and people with disabilities.

But Mr. Trump left no doubt about his intent when, during his remarks, he also blamed what he characterized as Obama-era policies for the hiring of ill-equipped air traffic controllers. “They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white,’” he said. “We want the people that are competent.”

The declaration reflected Mr. Trump’s instinct to frame major events through his political lens, and use tragedies to further his ideological goals.

On his first day back in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that required the elimination of all D.E.I. programs, personnel and practices, in an effort to deliver on his promise to usher in a society that is “colorblind and merit-based.” The order unleashed an avalanche of activity throughout the federal government that has sought to reframe the country’s history of racism and discrimination by denying that it existed.

Just a few weeks into his second term, President Trump stunned the arts world by making himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

He fired board members who had been appointed by Democrats, breaking with precedent at the institution, which had prided itself on bipartisanship since its founding. And the president — who boycotted the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term after several of the stars it featured criticized him — told his new board of loyalists that he would like to see “slightly more conservative” figures celebrated.

While Mr. Trump complained that the center’s programming had become too “wokey,” his new team has been vague about its plans besides promising “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.” But his takeover incited a backlash, prompting several prominent acts, including the popular musical “Hamilton,” to cancel upcoming engagements at the center.

It was a shocking turn of events, given that U.S. presidents rarely pay much attention to arts or culture, let alone seek to play such an active role in them. But it underscores the lengths to which Mr. Trump has gone as he aggressively moves to bend some of Washington’s biggest cultural institutions to his will, while seeking to impose his views of American history, diversity and gender on federally funded entities.

Mr. Trump also took aim at the Smithsonian Institution — which includes 21 museums, libraries and the National Zoo — accusing it of promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Having tried eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term only to be blocked by Congress, where the programs enjoy bipartisan support, Mr. Trump is targeting both in other ways this time around.

The humanities endowment canceled most of its grants and made plans to redirect some resources toward Mr. Trump’s priorities, including his proposed patriotic sculpture garden called the National Garden of American Heroes.

And the arts endowment announced that it would require organizations seeking grants to promise not to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “gender ideology.” Those requirements are being challenged in court amid questions about what kinds of cuts the Trump administration might seek at the arts endowment.

In President Trump’s White House, the substance is the show.

One of the defining characteristics of the second Trump administration is how so many of its top officials behave like influencers.

There is a constant cascade of content meant for social media consumption. The images, videos and stunts served up to the public are meant to provoke, to hype, to bend reality. And yet, in their way, they are oftentimes some of the truest and most defining expressions of the administration and its approach to policy and governing.

Elon Musk waving around a chain saw was more than an instantly viral moment. It so clearly communicated how he saw his role in Washington — more so than any interview or soft-pedaling explanation he or the president would offer about what the Department of Government Efficiency was up to. It is a defining image of the first 100 days.

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, using men in a Salvadoran prison as props for her social media content said so much about what was to come as the administration began its campaign of sending migrants there without due process.

Attorney General Pam Bondi giving binders of what she called the “Epstein files” to right-wing influencers was a stunt so hollow it actually backfired — it turned out there wasn’t much in there, and the influencers revolted. But it also seemed to communicate something about the administration and where its priorities lie, and how it feels the need to please some of the basest parts of its base.

In the span of a month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted 16 videos and still photos of himself working out with troops around the globe. That the posing and posturing for the public continued even as the Pentagon descended into turmoil over his rocky leadership seemed to say something, too.

Mr. Trump has often sought to create his own versions of reality, taking steps to constrain independent news coverage while amplifying the voices of influencers and openly supportive outlets he has invited into his orbit. And how his cabinet members behave is completely in keeping with that approach.