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Any discussion of the opening days of Donald Trump’s presidency must start at the key date — last Nov. 5, when he rose from the political dead to seize his second term in the White House.
His comeback victory was decisive as he swept all seven battleground states on the way to piling up 312 electoral votes, winning the popular vote and leading the GOP to control of Congress.
But first he had to survive two assassination attempts, with one in Pennsylvania a miraculous near miss, and overcome an onslaught of Democratic prosecutions and civil suits designed to defeat and imprison him.
All those cases, the first ever brought against a former president, were necessary, Americans were assured by Dems and their media mouthpieces, to protect democracy.
The Big Lie — that the weaponization of the courts was anything other than a partisan power play — seems like ages ago.
But recognizing the dogged determination Trump needed to survive the persecution and come out on top is key to understanding his conduct since he took the oath on Jan. 20.
He believes God spared him to save America, and so his sense of mission is infused with urgency. He savors revenge — who wouldn’t? — but ultimately came to get big things done.
He’s in a hurry and sometimes, as with tariffs, to a fault.
Record of achievement
Still, the avalanche of orders, actions and proposals reveals his biggest and most important accomplishment — Trump is continually expanding the outer limits of what a president can hope to achieve.
His comfort with the power and prestige of the office allows him to unmask conventional wisdom as a paper tiger.
Tell him that something can’t be done, and he takes that as a challenge. That is his defining difference.
His book “The Art of the Deal” was a memoir about his days as a brash real estate developer, but his political autobiography should be called “The Art of the Impossible.”
Exhibit A is that he managed to do the very thing both political parties and the supposed media experts insisted couldn’t be done.
Trump closed the southern border. Correction: He sealed it.
Recall that former President Joe Biden said last year he had done all he could to reduce illegal immigration even as Homeland Security was reporting nearly 3 million illegal crossers. To do more, Biden claimed, would require new legislation.
As Trump told me in a phone interview Monday, “You didn’t need new legislation, all you needed was a strong f–king president.”
The facts bear him out: In March, the numbers of illegal border crossers encountered declined by 95% over March of last year.
“We had to seal the border,” he said. “If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have a country. People were coming here from all over the world, literally from everywhere. It had to stop.”
‘Rogue judges’
His related promise — to carry out mass deportations, starting with criminal migrants, has encountered resistance from leftist activists, some of whom wear judicial robes.
“Rogue judges,” he called them Monday, while expressing confidence that “I believe it’s going to work out at the appeals levels.”
Despite the resistance, border czar Tom Homan said Monday that 139,000 criminal illegals have been deported. It’s an impressive down payment.
The president also has the courage to take on the explosion of antisemitism at America’s top colleges and universities, and is trying to drain the ideological swamps that provide more indoctrination than education.
His weapon is money — the university system feeds on billions of federal dollars for research and other uses, and he aims to withhold it if they don’t shape up. He started with Columbia University, and has targeted as many as 60 schools, including Harvard and Penn.
Again, the comparison with Biden is instructive. The addled former president said next to nothing and did even less during the Jew-hatred explosion after Israel responded to Hamas’ Oct. 7 butchery with an invasion of Gaza.
Trump vowed to act, and has.
Another promise made, promise kept involves recruiting Elon Musk and his DOGE Musketeers to cut waste and fraud from the federal budget. With outlays of nearly $7 trillion, $2 trillion of which is borrowed, pay dirt is everywhere.
The only shock is that Dems and the media object, as if the world as we know it will end if America spends a single penny less.
It’s a case that demonstrates Trump’s genius for exposing the idiocy of his opponents.
Other areas where he has broken sharply with the past involve the dreaded culture wars. It’s been a leftist playground — until now.
He issued an executive order that ended the government DEI programs that often morphed into racial discrimination and is putting pressure on colleges and corporations to do the same.
Another executive order requires federal agencies to recognize two sexes and stop promoting “gender ideology” of the sort that allows biological men to participate in women’s sports. States that resist will lose federal funds.
Can’t be intimidated
Even among most Republicans, these topics were regarded as political “no go zones” because activists would raise holy hell. Trump wasn’t intimidated, and the resulting outrage was far more muted than predicted.
Similarly, his order dismantling the Department of Education has been on the GOP wish list since Jimmy Carter created it.
Most of these and other changes were delivered soon after Trump took office, making the first 70 days or so a record of action that rivals FDR’s fast start, which set the standard by which all subsequent presidents have been measured.
But then came April 2. Trump called it “Liberation Day” to signify the start of America being freed from what he views as extremely unfair trade practices involving countries around the world.
The effort has not run its course, so the president may yet succeed in making new agreements that spark investments and millions of manufacturing jobs at home while opening more foreign markets to American products and services.
In the meantime, “Liberation Day” has come to mean the start of something quite different from what he intended.
His actions almost single-handedly changed the view of his administration among many Americans, who started giving him poor marks on the economy just months after it was a huge advantage in the election.
So much so that a full assessment of his first 100 days is best done by dividing them into two distinct ones.
There is the wildly successful pre-tariff period, and the rocky, dispiriting post-tariff period.
Stock markets offer a measure of the difference. Wall Street was on a joyride, with the major indexes here and in much of the world reaching new highs in February, only to plunge in April.
Forecasters suddenly warned that a long standoff would crush global trade, leading to both a recession and inflation, a double whammy that could destroy Trump’s presidency.
As millions of Americans saw their savings and retirement funds shrink, the president’s poll numbers dropped. Reports of White House infighting and corporate leaders pleading with the president to change course added to the feeling of peril.
Clawing back losses
Although markets stabilized and clawed back much of their losses after the president began making carve-outs for certain industries and he and aides spoke optimistically about quick deals, no deal has materialized, creating a lingering feeling of uncertainty.
Yet the president remains confident in the strategy. He said Monday “there can’t be big inflation with the price of oil staying low” and that “the tariffs are going to work out very well.”
He added his common claim that the money being collected at ports of entry will be used to help fund tax cuts and pay down some of the nation’s debt.
His can-do optimism is infectious, but as someone once said, “Hope makes a great breakfast but a poor dinner.”
The sooner he settles the major trade deals and on favorable terms, the sooner he can reap a windfall of political and economic gains.
Two other foreign policy problems also fall into the incomplete category: Russia’s war in Ukraine and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Candidate Trump promised to settle both quickly, but his envoy, Steve Witkoff, has wavered on the terms, which indicates that the president has not settled on a bottom line for either.
That’s not surprising, given the complexity, but the deadlock is a reminder of why Harry Truman famously kept a sign on his Oval Office desk that said, “The buck stops here.”
Godspeed, Mr. President.
America and the world need you to succeed.