"A free fall not seen in modern history": 100 days of destruction

Donald Trump has now been president (again) for 100 days. Trump is not a humble man. It should be no surprise that he is trumpeting his “accomplishments” very loudly. As Trump sees them, his great “accomplishments” include being a great man of history who has left an indelible mark on the trajectory of the United States and the world.

Donald Trump, who was declared a de facto king or emperor by the right-wing extremist justices on the Supreme Court, has more power than any American president before him, and he is using it to advance his political and personal goals. Trump has been mostly successful in crushing, bending and smashing America’s democratic norms and institutions and the larger culture to fit his will.

Donald Trump, both directly and indirectly, is using his return to the presidency to further increase his already vast amounts of wealth and financial power. This is a conflict of interest and extreme moral hazard that has no precedent in modern American history. If politics is fundamentally the realm of affluence and influence, Donald Trump has both in extreme abundance.

In a series of interviews, speeches, and other communications marking his 100 day return, Trump has announced that he has not made any mistakes and “I run the country and the world.” Trump told his MAGA people at a celebratory rally in Michigan that, “We’re here tonight in the heartland of our nation to celebrate the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country….We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.” On Thursday, Trump delivered the commencement speech at the University of Alabama. He told the audience that, “They all hated me in my first term, and now they’re kissing my a**…. It’s amazing. It’s nicer this way.”

In an Oval Office meeting with his Cabinet and other senior advisors to commemorate his 100 days back in power, they took turns praising their Dear Leader. North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong Un would have been envious. Donald Trump was in his element; Trump recently told The Atlantic magazine that, "I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do….You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”

Donald Trump is receiving narcissistic fuel in abundance. It would be a first-order error in reasoning and inference to separate Trump’s style of personalist rule and autocracy from his personality and mind. They are entangled with one another in a synergistic relationship.

Trump’s views of his “accomplishments” are not shared by the American people. A series of public opinion polls have shown that across a range of major issues (the economy, immigration, democracy and the rule of law, safety and security, etc.) the American people view Trump’s first 100 days very negatively, if not as being an outright disaster. In total, Donald Trump’s polling numbers are the worst in 80 years for an American president at this early point in his tenure. For example, a new PBS News/NPR/Marist poll shows that a plurality of Americans give Donald Trump a failing grade, an “F,” for his first 100 days back in power. In a new poll from PRRI, a majority of Americans describe Trump as being a “dictator.” However, a new poll from Pew Research Center shows Donald that Trump is still loved by members of the (White) Christian right. Pew’s findings include how, “In addition to approving of Trump’s job, 57% of White evangelical Protestants say they trust what he says more than what previous presidents said while in office.”

These huge divides in American public opinion and politics will decide the future of American democracy and freedom.

In an attempt to gain a better perspective and insights on Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in power, what may happen next, and what has already been lost, I reached out to a range of leading experts. I also asked them the following question: If these first 100 days of Trump’s administration are indeed the good times as compared to what will come next, what do they want to prepare the American people for?

This is the third part of a three-part series.

Ryan Wiggins is Chief of Staff for the Lincoln Project where she previously served as the Communications Director. Before joining The Lincoln Project, Ryan ran Full Contact Strategies, a political media consulting firm specializing in political strategy, campaign communication, crisis communications, public affairs, issues management and media relations.

I am angry and upset over how Trump and his administration and MAGA are wrecking our economy, destroying the Western alliance, and removing America from its leadership position in the world. They are incompetent, vengeful and don’t give a damn about the country. The country is less safe and less strong now because of what they’ve done in the first 100 days.

And I’m not alone. The polls show that independents who helped Trump win the election are getting buyer’s remorse, as his poll numbers are dropping to lows that Trump has never seen before.

The chaos, confusion, and absolute incompetence are exactly what we thought we would see. Trump and his forces are whipsawing the markets and people’s 401ks, defying court orders, and on a revenge tour. They’ve been using Project 2025 as their playbook to hammer the government’s operations.

These are the good times, and things will only get much, much worse with Trump as president. Trump is going to step on the gas for revenge and retribution - especially if his poll numbers keep dropping. Trump won’t go quietly; he will burn it all down this time by defying court orders and imposing his terrible economic policies. Trump is starting to display the authoritarianism the Lincoln Project warned about — that’s only going to get worse. And Trump is already priming the public for a run in 2028, something that is blatantly unconstitutional.

Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller "The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future," as well as "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity."

By nature, I’m generally an optimistic person. I’m anything but alarmist. But, just 100 days in, it’s clear that Donald Trump presents a clear danger to the future of American democracy. As Trump is slowly but surely steering our country toward authoritarianism, the divides in the country can no longer be understood with the traditional labels of Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal. Given the clear Constitutional crisis in which we already find ourselves, if we are going to survive as a nation resembling anything like the principles outlined in our founding documents, the political battle lines are going to have to be mentally redrawn, in the short run, as MAGA authoritarianism versus democracy. That will take, on the most difficult end, a coalition standing up for democracy that includes a courageous minority of Republicans and Republican elected officials, along with majorities of independent voters and the engagement of approximately 40% of Americans who sat out the previous election.

PRRI’s new poll on Trump’s first 100 days, just released yesterday, shows that we may be seeing the beginning of such an awakening. Like a raft of other polls, PRRI finds Trump’s job approval at 40%, the lowest of any president not named Trump at the 100-day mark since World War II. Notably, Trump’s favorability has dropped 12 points among Latinos (from 39% to 27%), and a whopping 19 points among Latino Protestants (from 51% to 32%), two-thirds of whom voted for him in 2024.

This much is also crystal clear: White Christian groups — particularly white evangelical Protestants but also majorities of white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics — are the groups responsible for allowing Trump’s return to power and for continuing to lend him support and legitimacy. White Christian groups and the three in ten Americans who support Christian nationalism are the principal groups continuing to hold majority favorable views of Trump.

Even as someone who lives in D.C. and has tracking politics as part of my job description, I’ve been surprised at the pace of the destruction and the transparency of the grift and power grab by Trump and his administration. Particularly, I’ve been surprised at the way Trump has treated executive orders like kingly decrees for the digital age, declaring nonexistent emergencies to broaden his power, undermining the basic tenets of the rule of law like due process, and even attacking established constitutional principles like birthright citizenship. According to the American Presidency Project, he has issued 143 executive orders in 100 days. By comparison, Joe Biden only issued 162 executive orders during his entire term, and the last Republican president, George W. Bush, issued only 118 in his final term.

Most notably, the new PRRI survey shows an American public that may be waking up to the danger Trump represents to the nation’s founding principles. In PRRI’s recent poll, a majority (52%) of Americans — including 87% of Democrats, 56% of independents, and even 17% of Republicans — believe that Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy. Two-thirds (68%) of non-voters who expressed regret for their decision not to vote, and even a majority (55%) of the small number of Trump voters who now say they regret voting for Trump, also agree that Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited.

I wouldn’t say these are the good times. I’d say these are the liminal times, when it still may be possible to pull the United States back from the abyss. For those with eyes to see, the signs are already there. In her blistering dissent in the case involving the hundreds of Venezuelans Trump deported to the Salvadoran gulag, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor has already warned us that “the implication of the government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal.” My own book, "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," was one of 381 books recently banned by the government at the US Naval Academy for espousing “improper ideology."

Unless the public sends a strong message to Trump and this regime sooner than later, we need to prepare for scenes I never thought we’d see in my lifetime: militarized internment camps (which an alarming 62% of Republicans support), jailed journalists, politically-motivated disappearances and deportations of US citizens by ICE and the FBI, book burnings, and the other trappings of fascist regimes. If we allow Trump to celebrate such outrages to democracy alongside the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, there may be no turning back.

David Pepper is a lawyer, writer, political activist and former elected official. His new book is "Saving Democracy: A User's Manual for Every American."

While the daily barrage of extremist and authoritarian actions can feel overwhelming, I feel better than after the first 20 days, or 50 days.

2025 is the year where we are most vulnerable to the anti-democratic onslaught and the far right’s “flood the zone strategy.” The more those who value democracy can stop and/or delay now, the closer we get to an election cycle that gives us the opportunity to hold politicians accountable through campaigns, and then put a hard stop on the White House by regaining the House.

Every month of delay and every mistake Trump makes helps. And he keeps making them. For example, by overusing executive orders and acting beyond the law and his authority, he’s overreached in a way that will ultimately doom many of his actions. (And thus far, the federal judiciary is largely holding the line.) By appointing unqualified people, Trump has undermined confidence in his leadership.

This is happening as the protest movement is growing in size and scope. And polls reflect that Trump is rapidly losing the support of the American people, including on issues that traditionally favor Republicans, such as the economy and immigration. Those are major red flags for Republican politicians, especially those on the ballot in ’26.

I wrote an entire book predicting what would happen in 2025 based upon Trump’s promises and the details of Project 2025. Most of what I imagined is happening. It is not a surprise. They literally told us what they were going to do in great detail, planned it all last year, and are now doing much of it (although often sloppily, as I wrote above).

We are in the same fight for a fully representative democracy that has marked our entire nation's history. And that history tells us that the arc of the moral universe doesn’t magically bend towards justice — it bends in the direction of whoever is pushing it harder. But when the side fighting for democracy unites and keeps pushing, it has always prevailed.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters." His website is Enough Already.

The once-powerful United States of America is in a free fall not seen in modern history, and there is absolutely no reason to believe we will ever return to anything resembling respectability or gain back the trust we lost as a country when just enough of us played with fire and elected Trump as president for a second time. Now we watch as the political arsonists who voted for Trump get burned from playing with matches. They were told about the horrible things that would happen if Trump again ascended to the White House, but they chose to vote for him anyway. MAGA has illustrated there is no known pain or sacrifice to our civil liberties or pocketbooks that they won’t absorb just for the satisfaction of watching some poor kid of color go without something they don’t think he or she should have.

As for the “good times?” Our air, water, earned benefits, peace, public safety, civil rights, and human rights are all under immediate threat. Worse? This is only the beginning of what Trump and his administration and various agents and followers are going to unleash. Their carefully planned goal: to break the American people.

The insults, the attacks, the endless provocations, and the thrashing of our Constitution will continue daily. All this carefully planned evil will be aimed at exactly one thing: breaking us.

One of the big mistakes of Joe Biden’s presidency was this notion that everything was going to be OK, and that his idea of America matched the actual circumstances of America.

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If I had a dollar for every time Biden said this, I’d fold up shop and move to Tahiti: “We are the United States of America — there's nothing we can't do if we do it together. We just have to remember who we are.” That was pre-2016, magical thinking.

At some point, Trump will do something so heinous … so anti-America … so dangerous … that the people who truly love our country will be forced to participate in massive nationwide protests. That is in many ways the best case. The worst case is we just go quietly into the dark, gloomy night and become an authoritarian country, where we have zero rights or say in how we are governed. It’s coming, sure as I am typing this.

Donald Trump will do anything to stay in power. I mean that literally anything. If you don’t think that Trump will use all his power and that of the United States government against the American people to stay in power, you are naïve and foolish, and probably in some leadership position in the Democratic Party.

Investigative reporter Heidi Siegmund Cuda writes about U.S. politics and culture for Byline Times and Byline Supplement.

The American nightmare that I and many other reporters spent a decade warning everyone about came true. It did happen here. And I feel sad. As a mother, I wasn’t able to protect my children from this authoritarian nightmare.

I often wish I could wake up from this nightmare to a world where America is still aligned with its post-World War II allies and not a global threat to democratic nations, but denying reality isn’t helpful. At least Europe and Canada understand how dangerous America is and are offering safe harbor for many of our scientists and academics.

I predicted America would become like Russia in the ‘90s when the oligarchs ran the politicians, violent and lawless, and here we are. I do have hope that the regime will collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Even though I know the cruelty is the point, witnessing due process evaporate is still surreal. How many people wrongfully arrested and deported will it take before the mass protests begin? If this pace of events continues from the first 100 days of Trump’s second administration, nothing good will happen for a very long time in the United States.

M. Steven Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Fish has appeared on BBC, CNN and other major networks, and has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy, among others. His new book is “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.”

Of course, I’m hating the sight of democracy under attack, but now is no time to mourn and fret. I’m heartened by the prospect that the Democrats might finally realize that their old ways of operating have failed. November 2024 provided definitive proof that the Democrats have got to try to make public opinion rather than just reading polls and telling voters what we think they want to hear. We have to ridicule and humble Trump rather than calling on everyone to quake in their boots and be overcome by the vapors in the face of Trump’s attacks. We’ve got to project a star-spangled narrative that hammers at Trump’s treasonous betrayal of our leadership of the free world to turn our country into a pathetic junior partner in Vladimir Putin’s anti-American Autocracy International.

I’m neither shocked nor awed by Trump’s onslaught against democracy. It’s true that Trump has been swifter and more aggressive in his efforts to destroy it than any other autocrat in recent decades. But that could be his Achilles heel. Russia’s Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, India’s Narendra Modi, and other successful autocratizers took years to do what Trump has tried to do in a few months. They acted methodically, taking out their opponents and removing institutional barriers to their supremacy one at a time to let public and elite opinion adjust, all while carrying out deft media campaigns to convince the folks that what they were doing was in the national interest. This mode of operation is not as shocking, and that’s the point. These autocratizers consolidated their gains incrementally, thereby minimizing public outrage, dampening counter-mobilization, soothing and coopting key elites, and generally making everything they were doing feel normal.

Trump is doing just the opposite. He’s consolidating nothing as he strikes out in all directions at once. Consequently, he often backs down shortly after initiating an attack or a new policy. The courts — even the Supreme Court — are increasingly ruling against his most egregious actions. Liberal civil society is coming to life and popular demonstrations are breaking out on a scale we haven’t seen in America for decades.

Fellow right-wing populists around the world who looked to Trump for inspiration are suddenly treating him like kryptonite. At home Trump is setting records for the lowest personal approval ratings — as well as the lowest approval on policy matters — ever recorded for a president 100 days into his term. Is Trump’s onslaught shocking? Maybe. Awesome? Hardly. Incompetent? Definitely. Trump has dealt real blows to democracy, but there’s nothing he and his MAGA Republican party that places loyalty to Trump above loyalty to and love of country have done that we can’t undo. Whether we succeed depends on us.

There are some signs that some Democrats are finally getting the message that they need to fight back, hard, against Trump. This gives me some hope amid such darkness and peril. Unsurprisingly, the bolder figures are reaping the political benefits. For example, Bernie Sanders and AOC have been barnstorming the country together and pledging no surrender. They are drawing crowds of tens of thousands — even in small towns in deep red states and districts.

Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech in Congress was another great conflict-embracing move.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills is meeting every threat Trump makes to her state by telling Trump things like “see you in court,” and “I have spent the better part of my career listening to loud men talk tough to disguise their weakness.” Mills is even standing up for causes, like trans athletes, that most Mainers — and Democrats nationwide—don’t support. All the better for her: Like Gov. Andy Beshear imposing COVID masking mandates and marching in pride parades in Kentucky, Mills is earning a raft of positive national attention for her temerity and commitment to principle. Little known to many other Democratic officeholders, people want to be led, not petitioned. Boldness and leadership are what matter — one’s positions on “the issues” be damned.