On Tuesday, the second Trump presidency officially reached the 100-day mark.It’s been a hundred days of transformation, tariffs, retribution, firings and deportation the likes of which America has never seen before.The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage sit down to assess President Trump’s record.Guest:Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times.Charlie Savage, who covers national security and legal policy for The New York Times.Background reading: 100 days into President Trump’s second term: What has changed?Mr. Trump’s 100-day report card.Eight charts that sum up Mr. Trump’s first 100 days.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Eric Lee/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the 100-day mark in a presidency?
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Tuesday, the second Trump presidency officially reached the 100-day mark. 100 days of transformation, tariffs, retribution, firings, and deportations, the likes of which America has never before seen. Today, I asked three of my colleagues, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Charlie Savage, to assess that record.
It's Wednesday, April 30th. Maggie, Jonathan, Charlie, welcome back. It's been a while.
Thanks, Michael, for having us.
Great to be back.
Chapter 2: Why do presidents use the first 100 days to measure success?
Yeah. That's what you've got, Charlie? Yep. Charlie, welcome back. Thanks for having us back. We're talking to you all on Tuesday, which is, although there's been a little bit of dispute on our team, the 100th day of the Trump second term. And I want to start with a very basic question of why it is we talk so much about the first 100 days.
It's a totally artificial metric, as anyone in the Trump administration will tell you, even as they are touting it and looking at it because they know other people are. It is how presidents for a while now have measured the success of their agenda. How much have they accomplished in that period of time? And it's a way to compare apples to apples to what previous presidents have done.
I don't want to be like the Australian talking about American history here, but obviously... But here you are. Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, the benchmark is FDR's first 100 days where he pushed, I think it was 15 major bills through Congress and created a legacy that we still live with.
So ever since then, presidents have used this, as Maggie said, artificial construct to measure their self-worth at an early point in the administration.
Mm-hmm. Charlie? Well, picking up on this and also the historical origins of it, there is one thing that isn't apples to apples here, which is the term first hundred days is coined by Roosevelt, but he wasn't actually referring to, as I understand it, his first hundred days. he had called Congress back into session after he was inaugurated for a special session to pass all these New Deal bills.
And he was referring to the first 100 days of that Congress. Fascinating. And the accomplishments were 15 hugely important, that created the huge pillars of getting the country back on its feet in the middle of the Great Depression through Congress. And it's remarkable that even with Republican control of both chambers of Congress here, Trump's first 100 days of his presidency
presidency, has resulted in zero major bills.
So that was all prelude to me explaining why we are bringing this august trio back, I think for the third time on the show, which is that you were the group that that prepared us for the second Trump term in theory, before it actually became a reality, by doing a tremendous amount of reporting about what his plan was for 2.0.
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Chapter 3: Has the Trump administration followed a master plan in its second term?
And so now that Trump's agenda has been rolled out, we want to assess this administration on a few metrics. And let me just spell out a couple of those. Firstly, you had told us that much more than in the first term, the second Trump term would be more thought through. If there was going to be a master plan, it was going to be the second term.
So has this administration stuck to that plan, or have things veered off into something more haphazard? Secondly, have the administration's approaches, whether they've been planned well or not, succeeded or failed? Finally, what does this administration, based on your reporting, make of the public reaction to what it's done?
So far, as our colleague Nate Cohn told us a couple days ago, most Americans think this White House has gone too far, and they think things have been disorganized. three-part framework in mind, where do you think we should start?
I mean, there's a million places you could start, but if you just look at the series of reporting that we laid out, the first big element that we talked about was expansion of power and destruction of or elimination of any pocket of independence within the executive branch. I would put a big tick next to that one, maybe even a double tick. He's clearly done that
firing checks on his power, getting rid of inspectors general and other elements within the executive branch. Another element, obviously, that we reported on in depth was immigration. I think we can talk about that later, but it's, I would say, a very mixed scorecard. Well, let's talk about it now. They've effectively started to do what they plan to do.
It just, in at least one half of their program, isn't going so well. So the first half, sealing the border, tick, record low border crossings. They've absolutely achieved that in a very short space of time. If you talk to people internally, they're almost, I'm not going to say frustrated by their success, but it almost came too quickly, too easily.
And, you know, so now they're sort of, well, we need to send the troops down there. And it's like, okay, but no one's really coming across. But the second part of the immigration agenda that has been far less successful is interior deportations, removing people from the country. And in that sense, the numbers are nothing like what they said they would be so far.
They promised the biggest deportation operation in American history, deporting millions of people every year. They're nowhere near on track to do that. And of course, very widely reported, they are jettisoning due process and sending people to prison for terrorists in El Salvador. At least one person sent there by mistake. They're running into a battle with the courts.
So that side of the immigration agenda is very messy.
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Chapter 4: What progress has been made on immigration policies in Trump's second term?
And which they promised.
Correct.
I think the problem they're encountering is that the normal process for deporting someone who's here illegally involves due process. It just takes a long time and they don't have enough personnel to do this. So Trump is still deporting more or less the same number of people, actually slightly less, I think, than Biden was. And they are frustrated by that.
And a lot of the stuff that they've been doing, expanding Guantanamo as a place to send migrants or now this prison in El Salvador, makes no sense on its face. It's expensive. It's getting them flack in the courts. It's not resonating with the public.
But in particular, they want the headlines about cruelty because they're hoping that huge numbers of people will simply go home on their own steam and then they can take credit for that.
You know, you're talking about an administration where Stephen Miller, who was the architect of Trump's immigration proposals, is, as many administration officials will tell you, living his best life. He's very happy. He is enacting the policies that he wanted to see for a very long time. They are at risk of making mistakes and have made some mistakes that will come back to haunt them.
One is Abrego Garcia, Tel Salvador. The other is some deportations of children who were sick last week. One had cancer. Very advanced cancer and was deported without medicine. And so those were the kind of headlines that actually were a problem for Donald Trump in Term 1, specifically family separation policies. That was a huge debacle for the administration.
Right. And I wonder, are we approaching with... some of these deportations, especially of children, something akin to the moment in term one That feels like child separation, something that is beyond the pale for many people in the public. And as I recall it, Trump eventually signs an executive order saying, oh, right, I'm going to ban those child separations. Those are not right.
He sort of acted like it was something out of his control and he wanted to end it.
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Chapter 5: Why is the Trump administration pursuing controversial deportation tactics?
This is making me think about the other portrayed villains by this administration, and those would be elite universities, big law firms, and some individual enemies of the president who he has pursued with extraordinary alacrity in this second term. And I wonder, given how central that has become
To 2.0 Trump, how much that is according to plan or how much it has started to veer into something that is just a kind of a personal project of the president and not according to the original plan. And again, I want to cite the polling that suggests that a majority of Americans are not comfortable with his pursuit of his enemies.
It's a little bit of both, Michael. So there were a series of promises that Trump made on the campaign trail that dovetailed with where the Republican Party and conservatives are generally, which is, you know, anti-DEI, anti-quote unquote woke, and anti-elite universities. So that is part of the plan. The retribution on law firms, I think, has been a more recent development.
And that has just been something that has evolved pretty rapidly because they saw they had success. Then it moved into targeted named individual retribution. presidential memos from the Oval Office. One was Miles Taylor, who was a DHS official, and Trump won.
And one was Chris Krebs, who was a cybersecurity official who said that the election voting machines had not been rigged, that it was a safe election. Which is true. Yes, it was true, and that was his sin. His sin was stating the truth.
And Trump ordered up investigations by his administration into these two after, you know, insisting repeatedly, always with a bit of a wink, during the 2024 campaign that... Success would be his retribution after AIDS nudged him to stop talking about who he was going to get back at. Right, and success has not been... Success has not been his only retribution. Retribution has been his retribution.
Actual retribution has been his retribution and is clearly a part that he is enjoying.
Charlie, would you describe this campaign of retribution, which, as Maggie just said, ranges from institutional to personal, as a success? And I guess... If it is, what's the criteria for describing it as a success? Or if it's a failure, what's the criteria for describing it as a failure? Because it has definitely become a pillar of the second term.
I guess I hesitate to pin the word success to something that dark. He has indeed, you know, messed with the lives of the people that he has targeted.
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Chapter 6: How successful has the Trump administration's campaign of retribution been?
Peter Navarro thinks that Trump's plan of initiating a global trade war was well thought through and that it would create the stipulated goal of a golden age of reshored heavy industry American manufacturing.
Well, so I want to raise something to the three of you, because one of the great, important, lasting lessons of our conversations during the campaign was that the president was going to surround himself with yes people who were not going to challenge him or get in his way. What you're describing is a series of advisors trying to stop him and get in his way and say... No mas.
And these are people who were ideologically aligned with him and primed to support this agenda. But they said it went too far.
That's fascinating. It was never really a clear agenda. Certainly, if you look at the remarks from Scott Bess and Howard Lautner in the lead up to Election Day, they suggested that this was more just going to be to get better deals. This obviously is not what they were talking about. And now, as Jonathan said, there is no clear off ramp and there is no clear end in sight.
And that is entirely of one man's doing, and that is the president.
Charlie, it has to be a failure if your goal was to put up high-tariff walls around the world in order to bring back domestic manufacturing, and you're literally tearing those walls down or puncturing holes and walking through them back and forth. That cannot be anything other than a failure.
You know, Michael, the discussion around the tariffs, I think, has been a little confused because there were multiple layers of tariffs that Trump imposed. And the thing that he put a 90-day pause on was this extra tariffs that he calls reciprocal, which are not reciprocal, but that's the label he attached to them, so we keep using it, for a country-by-country basis that now aren't happening.
But there is still... Now, a massive new import tax on almost everything coming into the country, 10%, that he did not unwind. Right. And he has basically made trade with China impossible by enormous import taxes. Right, 145%. And so shelves are going to start to go bare in Walmarts and Targets around the country pretty soon.
And the global trade war sort of picking a fight with everyone simultaneously, while it doesn't have this extra kicker for now, is nevertheless raging.
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Chapter 7: What impact has Trump's retribution campaign had on institutions and politics?
But he offered something that Just he clearly couldn't deliver on and is not going to anytime soon. If you talk to his aides, they will say that peace deals is going to be the focus of the next hundred days. But it was certainly not much in the first. So foreign policy has not been an overwhelming success so far.
Can we talk about Putin for a minute? Because that seems to be a case where the president may have misunderstood or miscalculated his leverage. And I'm thinking about a quote he just gave to our colleagues over at The Atlantic magazine. He said what he relishes so much about these first hundred days of term two is that I run the country and I run the world.
But when it comes to someone like Vladimir Putin, He offered Putin almost everything Putin could have ever wanted in a peace deal with Ukraine. And Putin is still not giving Trump an inch, which has required Trump to then take to social media and say, Vladimir, stop brutally attacking civilians in Ukraine to no avail.
And so is that just a case of the president not understanding the superpower dynamics?
I think it's the president realizing that he is getting played by Putin as he sort of acknowledged in a post that he did over the weekend on Truth Social. Vladimir's stop was, I think, his effort at looking like he is saying something publicly, but it didn't end up looking particularly strong since Vladimir did not stop.
I think a couple of things have happened. One is Trump thought he had more leverage than he actually does over Putin and Xi Jinping. I know from talking to people who've talked to Trump about this, that particularly with Xi Jinping, Trump had this idea that China would... basically fold, and that him and Xi Jinping would then get in the room together. On the tariff front.
Yeah, on the tariff front, and China has made clear that that's not going to happen. On Russia, when he came into office and in the transition, he had this notion that what he would say privately is that Putin is in real trouble, his economy is in real trouble, with additional sanctions or other financial measures, we can bring him to the table. again, looks like a miscalculation.
Putin has built an economy based on wartime. You know, Russia is one of the most sanctioned countries on earth. And when you have leaders like Putin and Xi Jinping, who are dictators, who are not as responsive to public opinion or any of the institutional pressures that a president leading a liberal democracy would be,
there's a lot of pain that they can endure and put their populations through in order to achieve something that they portray as a great outcome. So I think in those two cases, it's a misunderstanding of leverage. More broadly, I think it's fascinating what's happening with foreign policy right now, because really what's happening in Europe...
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