Final week, President Donald Trump sat for an interview with Time journal to replicate on the primary 100 days of his second time period within the White Home. Trump, as he tends to do when discussing himself, let the superlatives fly. “I really feel that we’ve had a really profitable presidency in 100 days,” he mentioned. “We’ve had folks writing it was the perfect first month, and finest second month, and actually the perfect third month.” Though the fourth month has not but concluded, I’m assured I can guess how he’ll characterize it when the time comes.
Regular folks don’t concur together with his self-assessment, to place it gently. Trump’s approval score on the 100-day mark is the lowest of any newly elected president relationship again to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who took workplace earlier than the widespread availability of coloration tv. Greater than half of voters say the nation is headed “within the fallacious path,” which is mostly not the type of first impression that politicians aspire to make. Assist for his commerce warfare is hovering within the mid-30s, and that was earlier than retailers started passing along the prices of tariffs to their baffled prospects, who have been abruptly getting hit with “import charges” that usually value greater than the objects of their carts. (Simply in time for the cabinets in big-box shops to start emptying out!)
Even Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, historically a supply of energy together with his Republican base, is underwater lately: 53% of voters, together with 61% of independents, disapprove of his dealing with of the difficulty, and virtually half consider his deportations of undocumented folks have “gone too far.” His penchant in current weeks for illegally deporting U.S. residents, too, together with a toddler receiving most cancers therapy, is unlikely to reverse this pattern anytime quickly.
For some other president, numbers like these can be disastrous, and would immediate frantic hand-wringing concerning the continued viability of their coverage agenda, to say nothing of their health to serve for 45 extra months. However thus far, the defining function of Trump’s second time period has been his utter disinterest in what the polls, standard opinion, his advisers, fellow Republicans, and even the courts say about him. He appears to understand his efficiency solely by way of the distorted lens of a right-wing media ecosystem that amplifies voices that flatter him and filters out these that don’t. The result’s probably the most unabashedly venal presidency in current reminiscence—the start of a four-year victory lap throughout which Trump intends to benefit from the perks of the workplace to the fullest extent, regardless of the penalties for everyone else.
Nobody would mistake Trump as embodying the spirit of humble, selfless public service throughout his first time period. However he has been much more cavalier about utilizing the presidency to counterpoint himself this time round, and his hands-off strategy to cryptocurrency specifically (on the marketing campaign path, he promised to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet”) has been nice for enterprise. World Liberty Monetary, a Trump family-controlled crypto enterprise, has accomplished a brisk commerce for the reason that inauguration, pulling in more than half a billion dollars in gross sales in current months. He has dangled the promise of dinner on the White Home to juice curiosity within the $2.7 billion marketplace for his eponymous memecoin, most of which is managed by members of his inside circle. And he stays the only largest shareholder within the Trump Media & Expertise Group, the share worth of which jumped earlier this month after the corporate introduced plans to broaden into—you guessed it—crypto-adjacent monetary companies merchandise within the close to future.
Not all of Trump’s revenue streams are fairly so subtle; you possibly can nonetheless purchase an ostensibly hand-signed Trump Bible for $1,000, a worth that does not include shipping. However his powers as president to control markets and concurrently dictate the federal government’s regulatory agenda (or lack thereof) makes this supply of his wealth particularly helpful. Bloomberg estimates the mixed paper features of Trump’s crypto initiatives at near $1 billion, which is a reasonably good return on an asset class that he was deriding as a “rip-off” as just lately as 2021.
In earlier many years, a president splitting his time between earning profits, taking part in golf, and persecuting his political adversaries would examine his unpopularity within the newspaper day-after-day, and listen to about it on the information each evening. Again in 2017, when Trump routinely introduced U.S. authorities coverage whereas tweeting from the bathroom, he was no less than conscious of which points of his agenda certified as “controversial” with the general public, as a result of he may see real-time suggestions from Democratic lawmakers and irate Krassenstein brothers alike.
In 2025, nevertheless, there are not any remaining establishments able to checking Trump’s apathy towards the plights of the folks round him. The more and more insular nature of conservative media—Trump posts totally on Reality Social, a platform constructed round his political motion, and sometimes on X, a cesspool of conspiracy theories curated by his wealthiest supporter—makes it uncommon for him to even encounter significant criticism, not to mention digest and reply to it. In the meantime, his administration is reshaping the White Home press corps, elevating sympathetic reporters whose thought of a tough query is asking Trump whether or not Democratic politicians are merely fallacious, or additionally treasonous. In his thoughts, legacy media retailers exist principally to sue for billions of dollars anytime they’ve the temerity to report tales he doesn’t like.
The upshot of all that is that Trump successfully spends 24 hours a day in an data bubble of his personal creation, surrounded by individuals who solely inform him how nice he’s and what a terrific job he’s doing. He views skeptics of all sorts, from immigrants asserting their constitutional rights to company executives begging him to not sink the economic system, as voices he can safely ignore, if not enemies whom he has an electoral mandate to humiliate and defeat. These first-term hour-by-hour sparring matches with opponents are far much less widespread now, partly as a result of Trump has the luxurious of not realizing or caring what the haters are saying about him anymore.
Maybe probably the most unsettling lesson of Trump’s first 100 days is that to the extent that he’s keen to second-guess himself on something, it is just when his monetary pursuits are at stake. His resolution in April to delay the deliberate implementation of most “reciprocal” tariffs is maybe probably the most important concession he’s made on his marketing campaign promise to “tariff the hell” out of insufficiently cooperative buying and selling companions. However he did so not as a result of the reciprocal tariffs would represent a self-inflicted monetary catastrophe that would cost working families a mean of $2,100 per 12 months, based on the Yale Price range Lab, however as a result of information of the tariffs triggered a sell-off within the bond market, which he described as “getting just a little yippy.” In a exceptional coincidence, the worth of Trump’s investments in bonds may very well be near half a billion {dollars}, according to The New York Occasions. The potential implosion of 1’s personal portfolio has a humorous approach of placing issues in perspective.
In his Time interview, Trump downplayed his issues about volatility within the bond market, his earlier admissions on the contrary however, and mentioned that he didn’t pause the tariffs “for that motive.” He then pivoted again to calling Joe Biden “probably the most incompetent president in historical past,” which is identical fundamental comms technique my 4-year-old makes use of after I ask if her little brother is crying as a result of she took his stuffed giraffe, and he or she responds by hiding it behind her again and asking me to learn her a guide.
It’s after all good that Trump, no less than for the time being, backed off a proposal that prompted JPMorgan to boost its projected odds of a world recession from 40% to 60%. However although Trump’s monetary pursuits on this case occurred to align with these of everybody trying nervously at their retirement accounts, what’s finest for regular folks will not often be finest for an aged tv character obsessive about holding down a spot on the fringes of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Each resolution Trump makes throughout his remaining time in workplace will likely be about doing what’s finest for himself and his pals, as a result of his solely curiosity in public service is and has all the time been about how a lot he can revenue from it.
