Shock and Awe: Trump’s First Hundred Days
Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov
Only a few days in, and already we can see the broad shape of what Trump’s Second Term will bring. There was advance talk of a blitz of 200 executive orders on the first day, but in the event we got 46 in the first two days and counting – still far more than Joe Biden’s 17 on the first day, which was itself a previous record. We are certainly witnessing a running start, a version of the “Shock and Awe” that figures close to Trump had promised would mark the start of an Administration bent upon radically reshaping America’s political economy.
Gone are the deer-in-the-headlights impressions given by the Trump team in the early days of 2017, when they still seemed a little shell-shocked that they had won – and when they lost precious time to lack of preparedness, their nominees struggled to get confirmed, and there was a degree of chaos and disorganization. This time they are determined not to make the same mistakes, and they have properly hit the ground running.
The First Hundred Days
The concept of the First Hundred Days comes to us from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a phrase floated in one of his famous fireside chats, and FDR in office was able to blitz his opponents with one of the most rapid and audacious legislative reform packages in history. One does not have to be a New Deal Democrat to recognize that FDR’s First Hundred Days remains a model for how a radical reforming government can effectively roll out its programme, encompassing legislation across huge swathes of the U.S. economy, including:
Agricultural relief (the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and the Farm Credit Act);
Industrial regeneration (the National Industrial Recovery Act);
Transport (the Emergency Railroad Transportation Act);
Energy (creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority);
Banking and monetary reform (the Glass-Steagall Banking Act and abandonment of the gold standard).
Moreover, all this took place at the lowest point of the Great Depression, with a quarter of the workforce (upwards of 15 million people) unemployed, and the American banking system on the brink of collapse. And yet it still managed to lay the foundations for the New Deal.
Trump’s Executive Actions
We see that Trump is intent on his own version of a First Hundred Days blitz, although relying much more on executive orders than legislative action. The preparations were well-laid with the infamous Project 2025 playbook – put together by over a hundred of the leading organizations on the political right, led by the Heritage Foundation, containing a detailed program for transforming the entire federal government, agency by agency – from which Trump distanced himself on the campaign trail but seems now to be following pretty closely, if not to the letter.
Among the extensive executive actions Trump has taken already are an array of measures aimed at reshaping the federal government and the purpose and reach of the American state and in whose interests it operates and regulates:
Withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement, and a mandate to federal agencies to unwind climate considerations and policies in an across-the board anti-climate action push.
Declaration of a national energy emergency - “Drill, baby, drill,” as Trump said in his inauguration speech – a big push to further expand fossil fuel extraction, including in the Arctic and for liquid natural gas. Suspension of offshore wind leasing.
A cluster of actions around border security and immigration:
Declaration of a national emergency at the southern border;
Mass deportation of undocumented workers, beginning immediately;
Pardons and commutations for 1,600 of the January 6 insurrectionists (in which Trump opted for the most sweeping option, sending a clear signal to white nationalist militias that the Trump Administration has their back).
Overturn of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, and suspension of all federal government DEI positions with pay pending further action
Overturning birthright citizenship, prompting 22 U.S. states to sue to overturn this order as unconstitutional, with a federal judge suspending the order as “blatantly unconstitutional”;
A more constitutionally careful version of Trump’s previous travel ban;
War on the drug cartels, who are designated as foreign terrorist organizations;
Action on biological sex and the declaration that there are only two genders;
Establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (Musk will apparently have an office of 20 in the White House);
A 90-day pause in all U.S. foreign aid (except to Israel, Jordan and Egypt, under U.S. treaty obligations);
Death penalty actions, including securing elements needed for lethal injections;
America First trade policy (but tariff action not yet clear);
Assertion of presidential control over the federal workforce, including agency heads and who is considered a political appointee, and revocation of flexible work from home arrangements and a federal hiring freeze;
Delivering emergency price relief and tackling the cost-of-living crisis (though with no real detail on how this is to be achieved);
Revocation of a long list of Biden’s executive orders and actions;
The usual organizing of staffing appointments and nominations
As of this writing new orders were being issued to declassify documents on the JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations and to designate Yemen’s Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, while in public Trump was pushing for a negotiated peace with Russia in Ukraine and a massive federal investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrencies.
New Politics on the Right
This is a sweeping agenda, and there are many questions we could ask about the likelihood of overall success given what we’ve seen through Republican and Democratic presidents alike since the 1970s – especially on large-order shifts like the efforts to reduce the size of government as a share of GDP, something that has been promised again and again since the Reagan Administration but that conservatives have signally failed to achieve. There is also a lot of culture war red meat for Trump’s political base but not a lot of detail on economic relief for the mass of ordinary Americans struggling with the cost of living and to get by in an unequal economy favoring the billionaires with whom Trump is surrounding himself in government.
Deep contradictions are likely to emerge within Trump’s political coalition on protectionist trade policies and on the economic implications of restrictive immigration measures for U.S. agriculture, big technology, and the service sector. The issue is less whether Trump will successfully pull all of this off where others have failed before – he clearly won’t, running into the usual deadlock and inertia and stalemate that has characterized so much of America’s political economy for decades – but rather the massive disruption and pain that will be caused in the process and how much collateral damage and deterioration and decay will result.
At the same time, it is important that Trump’s opponents recognize that this is not just another typical Republican governmental program but instead a radical effort to reshape and repurpose the administrative state. Frankly, it shows a level of seriousness and engagement with the scale and scope of national and global challenges that far outmatches anything that has been developed on the progressive left – at least in terms of a unifying program capable of drawing many political actors together, as Project 2025 has seemingly managed across much of the right.
It is also evident that there has been a substantial recomposition of thinking and political positioning on the right. For example, if you look at the classical commitments of the neoliberal right, since their foundation at Mont Pelerin – issues of free trade, globalization, the internationalization of capital markets, the removal of nation state sovereignty over economic policy conditions, and so on, all of which was central to their post-war project – the danger is that we are still operating with a outdated version of the right in the form of Chicago School economics when this is now a movement that has shifted radically from many of those neoliberal commitments.
Digging into some of the plans about where the right is headed next, there’s a high degree of crossover or continuity of concern with parts of the left on aspects of the crisis, it just takes a different formulation (and often a diametrically-opposed solution). There is probably not yet solid agreement on this across the right, but the center of gravity has shifted against free trade and globalization, seeing this as unfair competition, market manipulation, et cetera, from the Chinese. There is rhetoric (not yet policy!) about the perils of the decline of U.S. manufacturing and of ongoing deindustrialization and of jobs being offshored overseas. Whether there is actually any substantive policy content to that new right-wing politics remains to be seen, but it does allow for a clear popular appeal.
A Clear-Eyed Response
It would be dangerous to be operating still with a cartoonish view of the right. What they are gearing up for in the face of the crisis is a rearticulation of a radical program to intervene in what has been a systemically-blocked system in Washington, to actually get some outcomes this time around. While we can place bets one way or the other using the historical evidence about the likelihood of their success in implementing their program and obtaining the outcomes they claim to be seeking, there are a whole lot of things that flow from that that we need to be concerned about, in terms of what they are attempting to do, and who is going to get hit by that.
Finally, there is going to be an extraordinary opening for a response to all this. So far there is little evidence of a widespread counter-mobilization, just a lot of resignation and recrimination at the total uselessness of official Democratic Party responses. The real action, when it comes, will likely be more at the community level.
In the face of what is being rolled out, the immediate challenge is not to be shocked and awed into confusion and debilitating paralysis by Trump’s deliberate “Shock and Awe” but instead to formulate a counter-response that is commensurate with the scale of the challenges and capable of reaching the vast majority of ordinary Americans for whom the system hasn’t been working – and whom it will continue to fail. So far that is not evident, beyond a few scattered conversations. It had better emerge soon.
Joe Guinan is President of The Democracy Collaborative. He is writing in a personal capacity.