CNN
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Ever since the government-changing administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a president’s first 100 days in office have been viewed as a sprint to see how much they can get done in the honeymoon period after Inauguration Day.
At the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has embraced an effort to dismantle the administrative state that Roosevelt helped create more than 90 years ago.
Working with Elon Musk to shrink government as significantly and as quickly as possible, Trump has moved to cut international and scientific research funding and fired federal workers.
His rat-a-tat executive orders and his flood-the-zone approach to major policy proposals have overwhelmed Americans’ attention spans. His mass deportations are affecting American neighborhoods; his tariffs could remake world trade. He’s exercising executive power in a way unimagined by the framers of the Constitution and directly challenging portions of the Constitution itself. He has found time for multiple trips to his private Florida club in Mar-a-Lago, but he’s also found his approval ratings slipping.
Here’s a look at Trump’s first 100 days by some of the biggest numbers:
No president other than Roosevelt signed more executive orders than Trump in a single year.
These orders, along with executive actions, include consequential changes like rescinding equal opportunity requirements in federal government hiring that date back 50 years; directing the US military to help more at the US border; unwinding Biden administration efforts to combat climate change; and directing Musk and his ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency” to shrink the federal government.
Others, such as declaring English the national language and trying to ban trans girls from girls’ sports teams, seem to speak directly to his supporters and their politics. His endorsement of high-flow showers may simply be popular, if ultimately wasteful.
With some variation, the number of federal workers directly employed by the government has remained relatively steady at around 2 million for decades. Trump and Musk wasted no time trying to trim things down. Probationary workers who had not been on the job very long have been fired at many agencies. Others have been targeted by “reductions in force” and early retirement efforts. It’s not clear how many workers Trump ultimately wants to remove.
An effort during the Clinton administration in the 1990s shrank the federal workforce by more than 400,000 positions over the course of seven years, but at the same time, the number of contractors has grown. CNN has tracked how many federal workers have been let go or targeted for firings during Trump’s second term so far.
There’s no doubt border encounters are down since Trump took office, although they were also dropping at the end of the Biden administration. Trump spent hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy elements of the US military to the border, and his deportation efforts have likely caused many potential migrants to rethink their plans. Trump also effectively shut the border to asylum seekers.
Trump bucked 400 years of history in trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. When the Associated Press still referred to the Gulf by both names, Trump’s White House sought to bar the wire agency from many events. A lawsuit is ongoing.
Presidents are under a lot of pressure, so far be it from anyone to begrudge Trump’s numerous trips to his private club in Florida, where he frequently plays golf on the weekends.
There is some dissonance between his insistence that federal workers must do all of their work from a federal office building and his frequent work from Mar-a-Lago. That said, a president’s work is never done, and infrastructure is in place to allow Trump to work from all his homes.
Trump has built an entire strategy around challenging the US Constitution in court. He wants to reinterpret the 14th Amendment, end birthright citizenship and refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. How and when those larger issues make it to the Supreme Court on the merits is anyone’s guess. But already the court has weighed in on whether several of Trump’s actions can take effect in the short term.
Justices partially sided with Trump in one case dealing with his plan to use an 18th-century law to deport migrants as if they were part of an invading force, but broke with him temporarily when that issue returned a second time.
They also handed him defeats on his effort to freeze billions in USAID funding and on the firing of a government watchdog. But Trump has won, so far, on his ability to fire probationary workers and cancel education grants while those underlying cases continue. It’s hard to say who won in the court’s decision that Trump must facilitate the return of a mistakenly deported Maryland man, but not necessarily “effectuate” that return.
Trump has had great success confirming Cabinet secretaries. Only one position, US ambassador to the United Nations, remains unfilled. That position is sometimes not even included in the Cabinet. Trump pulled the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik, one of his most loyal followers on Capitol Hill, because Republicans have only a thin majority in the House of Representatives, and they were nervous about replacing her with a special election.
While Trump’s Cabinet is mostly full, thousands of lower positions remain unfilled. Plus, Trump hopes to reclassify much of the bureaucracy that is not currently appointed by each president to make them easier to fire and replace with people who support him.
While there was a “Trump bump” after the election, stock markets and major indexes fell dramatically after Trump’s herky-jerky rollout of his tariff plan. Tariffs were imposed on imports from close US partners like Canada and Mexico. A 10% across-the-board tariff was imposed on almost all imports. But punitive reciprocal tariffs — which Trump threatened due to his contention that the US, despite the size of its economy, has been cheated by other countries — have been delayed.
Investors don’t like tariffs and they don’t like uncertainty. Trillions of dollars in market capitalization have been lost.
For now, the US maintains a 10% universal tariff on virtually every good imported to America, with higher rates for some things. Additional tariffs are coming, according to the White House. Trump says the pain tariffs cause for consumers will be worth it to create new manufacturing jobs in the US and to combat a market flooded with Chinese goods. Economists, however, doubt supply chains built on worldwide trade will be able to adapt to a more nationalist approach. Trump has promised to negotiate scores of individual trade deals.
Another complication of tariffs is that while Trump promised to lower the price of goods after inflation hurt Biden’s presidency, tariffs — which he also promised during the campaign — will do the opposite, and will likely raise prices.
Musk’s involvement in Trump’s administration and his leadership of the government-shrinking Department of Government Efficiency have hurt Tesla’s business. The electric vehicle company was founded to respond to the threat of climate change. Now, Musk has morphed into the top election benefactor for Trump, who has said climate change is a hoax and who wants to prioritize carbon-emitting fossil fuel production.
As Tesla’s share price shrank, Trump stepped in to endorse the cars and promised to buy one in a show at the White House in March.
Trump’s most notable foreign policy episode was his confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, broadcast live on TV when the two leaders met in the Oval Office.
Zelensky has since worked to maintain US support for Ukraine, although Trump has long admired Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has not visited the White House. Most world leaders adopt a strategy of flattery in the White House, so Zelensky’s heated pushback during an Oval Office visit with Trump and Vice President JD Vance came as a surprise.
Every president gets the opportunity to redecorate the Oval Office, but Trump, long a fan of all things golden, has brought something new for his second term. There are now multiple gold-framed portraits lining the walls, gold filigree on the fireplace, gold vases on the mantle. It’s a lot of gold.
CNN’s David Goldman, Samantha Waldenberg, Riane Lumer and John Fritze contributed to this report.
Photo credits: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images, Alex Wroblewski/AFP/Getty Images, Kevin Lamarque/Reuters, Tesla, Inc.
