At the entrance of the Oval Office, where the president and his visitors can see it every day, hangs the mug shot taken of a glowering Donald J. Trump after being arrested and charged with racketeering to overthrow an election.
A couple of hundred feet away, in the grand foyer of the White House state floor where the official portraits of past presidents in solemn poses are on display, hangs a painting of a defiant Mr. Trump, blood splattered on his face by would-be assassin’s bullet, angrily pumping his fist and shouting, “Fight! Fight!”
These icons of Mr. Trump’s journey back to power loom large as he completes the first 100 days of his second presidency. There is a reason he has placed these images in positions of prominence. They reflect the crucibles of a man who escaped existential threats of prison and death in his quest for vindication and vengeance. They fuel his self-authored narrative as a man of destiny, saved by God to save America.
In the opening chapter of this new term, Mr. Trump has acted like a man on a mission, moving with almost messianic fervor to transform America from top to bottom and exact retribution against enemies at the same time. He appears intent on demolishing the old order no matter the collateral damage, putting his personal imprint not just on government and foreign affairs but on almost every aspect of national life, including business, culture, sports, academia, the legal world and the media.
Through sheer force of will and brazen assertions of presidential power, Mr. Trump has done more to change the trajectory of the country in three months than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the notion of a first-100-days presidential yardstick. But where Roosevelt used his early weeks to build a new edifice, Mr. Trump has used his to tear it down. In effect, he is trying to repeal the liberal social compact and international system that Roosevelt constructed, “unwinding neoliberalism,” as one aide put it.
Nearly every day brings a fresh breach of what were once thought to be the rules, moves that have thrilled his insurgent supporters and petrified his nervous opponents. In his own telling, Mr. Trump is putting America on the path to the “golden age” that he promised in his inaugural address, while his adversaries fear that it is instead the path to a new dark age of autocracy, repression and upheaval.
These first 100 days have been far more ambitious than the first 100 days eight years ago when Mr. Trump came into office a governing novice who, by his own later account, did not know how to be president. That was before the re-election defeat, before the indictments and trials, before the shooters. Now the scar tissue is deep, the guardrails are gone and the sense of righteous mandate is palpable.
“He is very laser focused on what he wants to accomplish,” said Robert Jeffress, the Dallas evangelical pastor, who joined the president at an Easter dinner at the White House this month. The trials and tribulations of the past few years, including the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., took time to process, Mr. Jeffress added. “But I think he came to the conclusion — the right conclusion — that God has a purpose for him.”
He has cracked down on immigration, bringing crossings at the border to historic lows even as his agents have defied courts in deporting migrants who were in the country both illegally and legally. He has put pressure on law firms, universities, news outlets and sports leagues to change policies to suit his wishes. Adopting a new “manifest destiny,” he has coveted territory in Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and even war-torn Gaza.
He has gone after his critics much as he vowed to do, ordering Justice Department investigations of specific adversaries by name, stripping security details from former officials facing death threats, firing government officials who crossed him or even just went to the wedding of someone who had crossed him.
No issue appears too small for him to address if it piques his interest, including plastic straws, shower pressure and the lineup at the Kennedy Center. At the same time, he and his family have profited significantly off the presidency through business ventures, cryptocurrency and a promotional documentary about Melania Trump.
But some of the president’s most high-profile initiatives either have yet to bear fruit, early as it is, or have generated enormous tumult. Mr. Trump has failed so far to make peace in either Ukraine or Gaza despite having boasted about how easy it would be. He has failed to “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1.”
Instead, in an audacious bid to restructure the global economy, he sent markets plunging and wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth by declaring a trade war on allies and adversaries alike. While Roosevelt embarked on a 100-day flurry of action in an effort to end a Great Depression, economists warn that Mr. Trump’s 100-day flurry of action risks starting one. The famously impatient president counsels patience, promising that the resulting new trade deals will ultimately benefit the country. But either way, the international economic system will never be the same.
“This time he appears super-driven,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of Mr. Trump’s. “I’m not sure it’s because of the finality of a second term, that he has a G.O.P. Congress or perhaps his age, but he wants to get everything done yesterday.”
While even Mr. Trump was surprised that he won his first election eight years ago, this time he and his team had plenty of time after his 2020 re-election defeat to map out what they would do if they took back the reins of power, crafting blueprints like Project 2025.
“He had four years to think through what he wanted to do and what he didn’t want to do next time around,” Mr. Jeffress said. “Those four years gave him an opportunity to plan and look to the future and explain why he hit the ground running.”
Unlike Roosevelt and every president who followed, however, Mr. Trump has relied mainly on executive authority rather than trying to pass legislation through Congress. Roosevelt set the standard when he took office in 1933 in the teeth of the Great Depression, pushing through 15 landmark pieces of legislation in those epic 100 days.
Overall, Roosevelt signed 76 bills into law in that period, more than any of his successors, while Mr. Trump has signed just five, the lowest of any president since then. By contrast, Mr. Trump has signed a whopping 142 executive orders, more than three times the 42 that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed in his first 100 days in 2021.
The lack of major legislation is not because Mr. Trump failed but because he has not even bothered to try. Even though his own Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, the president has all but disregarded Capitol Hill so far, other than seeking a giant package of spending and tax cuts that is only just starting to make its way through the House and Senate. Executive orders feed his appetite for instant action, while enacting legislation can involve arduous and time-consuming negotiations.
But the price of instant action could be failure to bring about sustained change. Bills passed by Congress and signed by a president become the law of the land for years if not decades to come, while executive orders can simply be repealed by the next president.
“F.D.R.’s accomplishments were enduring,” said H.W. Brands, a Roosevelt biographer at the University of Texas at Austin. “The Supreme Court overturned some but they were revised and reinstated. Most are with us still. Trump’s accomplishments, so far, can be undone by mere strokes of the pens of his successors.”
At the same time, Mr. Trump has claimed authority to act that his predecessors never imagined they had, setting off an escalating battle with the courts, which as of Monday had ruled at least 123 times to at least temporarily pause actions by the new administration that might be illegal or unconstitutional.
Mr. Trump has issued increasingly menacing threats against judges who dare to block him, and in one case his F.B.I. agents even handcuffed and arrested a county judge accused of obstructing his immigration crackdown.
“These first hundred days have been historic, not because of how much of his agenda he has achieved, but because of how much damage he has done to democratic institutions and state capacity in his effort to wield an unprecedented amount of executive power,” said Nicole Hemmer, director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Roosevelt too expanded executive power, but in the early days at least he did so in tandem with Congress, which empowered him to respond to the crisis afflicting the country. In the process, he designed a domestic architecture that broadened the federal government’s role in society just as he would later fashion a new American-led international system that would last for generations.
“On the simplest level, I can’t think of any first hundred days in the modern era as consequential as Roosevelt’s and Trump’s for their sheer impact on the life of the nation,” said Marc Selverstone, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. In effect, he said, the two presidents “will serve as bookends to a defined era in constitutional governance.”
But after swinging to extremes, Mr. Selverstone said, the system has a way of adjusting. “If history provides any guide here, the rebalancing will come,” he said. “The question is how much pain we’ll have to endure until the constitutional order finds a more stable equilibrium that commands broad assent from the public.”
Mr. Trump makes no apologies for pushing the boundaries of his power or ignoring lawmakers as he seeks to enact his agenda. “Rather than passing the buck to Congress, which we know moves too slowly sometimes, the president is taking any and all executive action he can to deliver on the promises he made,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, while noting that he was still working with lawmakers to pass tax cuts and finance border security.
But Ms. Leavitt denied that Mr. Trump was crossing lines. “We wholeheartedly reject that the president is defying his constitutional authority or legal obligations,” she said in an interview. “Every executive order the president has signed has been legally and carefully crafted to ensure it’s well within his executive and constitutional authority.”
Ms. Leavitt said that in his frenetic 100 days so far, Mr. Trump has been motivated by the searing experiences of recent years. “The president has faced an incredible amount of adversity to return to the White House and surely we all think about that every day and remind ourselves of how much it took to get back here,” she said. “The president is in full-blown problem solver mode. He is a man on a mission to solve the country and the world’s problems, no matter how big or small.”
But while Mr. Trump claims a mandate from both God and voters, the voters, at least, are not so sure. He finishes his first 100 days with less public support than any president in the history of polling at this stage. Just 42 percent of voters approved of his performance in a survey by The New York Times and Siena College that found Americans using words like “chaotic” and “scary” to describe his tenure so far.
Mr. Trump has never been a popular president, even though he plays one on television. Although he won the Electoral College in 2016, he lost the popular vote. While he edged out Vice President Kamala Harris by 1.5 percentage points in 2024, he fell just short of 50 percent. He has never had the approval of a majority of voters in any Gallup poll in his first or second terms, unlike any president going back to Roosevelt.
The polls so far have not constrained him, nor have his advisers or allies. For all the talk of a more disciplined operation this time around, shouting matches in the West Wing speak to the rifts and rivalries that mark the second term. But this team includes more enablers and ideologues advancing Mr. Trump’s agenda, and fewer figures like, in his first term, the economic adviser Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, willing or able to tamp down his most radical instincts.
“What’s changed is all the people around him,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a onetime friend of Mr. Trump’s who served briefly as White House communications director during the first term and has since become a critic. “The stuff he’s doing right now were 2018 ideas, but he didn’t have the people around him to do it. He would have done everything he’s doing now seven years ago, but Gary Cohn said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ Mnuchin said, ‘I’m not doing that.’”
Mr. Trump makes a point of never admitting mistakes, seeing that as a sign of weakness, but the lesson he took from that first term was to shed those who might get in the way. He has a better sense now of how to wield power and a greater willingness to do so regardless of objections. He sees himself as a singular figure not just for the present day but in the stream of history.
And so the self-described man of destiny pushes forward without as much resistance, pushing to rid the country of millions of immigrants, pushing to eradicate “woke culture,” pushing to upend the global economy, pushing to punish those standing in his way, pushing to expand America’s borders and unravel its economic and security alliances. Pushing, pushing, pushing.
He looks up most days and sees that mug shot and maybe passes that painting with the blood on his face and he knows what could have been. By all accounts, for good or ill, he has changed the country in just 100 days. Under the Constitution, he has 1,361 more to go.
