Surrounded by loyalists, Donald Trump knows the old rules no longer apply to him. He’s taking full advantage, implementing ideas he has held for decades.
One hundred days into his second term, the world revolves around Donald Trump. In Europe, nations scramble to bulk up on arms in hopes of defending Ukraine, or perhaps themselves. In Asia, manufacturers strategize where to move production lines, without knowing the rules of the game. In Latin America, the tired, poor, huddled masses stay home, sensing that things are different now in the land of liberty. Those inside the United States feel it, too, with uncertainty seeping into the most powerful institutions—Wall Street banks, Capitol Hill offices, federal agency headquarters, private university campuses.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, seems happier than ever, back on his throne. “He is more relaxed,” says Andrew Weiss, who worked inside the Trump Organization from 1981 to 2017, “and he’s got more loyal people.” Almost all of them are eager to sing his praises. “In his first 100 days, President Trump has delivered on hundreds of promises and already accomplished his two most important campaign goals—the border is secure, and inflation is ending,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says in a statement, exaggerating the president’s progress on inflation.
The truth is no one should be surprised by the swift start. Trump’s priorities have been clear since the 1980s and 1990s, when the real estate developer spoke up on a few issues that mattered to him. Take international trade. “It’s not free trade,” Trump scoffed in 1988. “If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about it.” He struck a similar tone on defense spending. “I’d make our allies pay their fair share,” he said. Hinting at his thoughts on immigration, he told one associate the United States would not become a majority-minority nation. “It’ll never happen,” Trump said. “We’re not going to become South Africa.”
With Trump back in the White House, the issues that have long been on his agenda are now on the nation’s agenda. “These are fundamental things that he believes and has believed for three to four decades,” says Gordon Sondland, who served as ambassador to the European Union during Trump’s first term and marvels at the “shock-and-awe” start to his second term. It might all be bewildering if Trump had not been so consistent for so long. Decode the president’s base instincts, and his first 100 days become more understandable, his remaining 1,362 more predictable.
The first thing any president does is pick his people, and Trump has always been attracted to fellow tycoons. “He loves associating with rich guys,” says Alan Marcus, a communications consultant who worked with Trump in the 1990s. “He thinks rich means good. Rich means, ‘Well, he’s rich, so he’s right.’” During his first administration, Trump tried to bring on Carl Icahn, naming him a special advisor, then implying that he did not need to divest his assets. Icahn’s firm ended up hearing from the Department of Justice.
This term, Trump took a different approach, naming Elon Musk, his biggest donor and the world’s richest man, as a special government employee, a designation given to short-term employees that generally allows them to retain their assets. Musk is one of an unprecedented 10 billionaires in the administration, not all of whom hold jobs for which they seem best-suited. While the Tesla cofounder has seemed omnipresent at times, it’s helpful to remember how the president first pitched his role, as the person responsible for slashing government spending.
Those who have known Trump for decades question how much the president really cares about paying back trillions in past bills. “I know how he views debt—he has the money, why the [heck] am I going to pay it off,” says Nicholas Ribis, who once served as the chief executive of Trump’s bankruptcy-prone casino empire. “I don’t think he’s as concerned about the deficit as other people seem to be.”
Instead, the Department of Government Efficiency seems perfectly primed to take on the bureaucracy. Trump, who has long chafed at independent voices, used his first Friday in office to purge a lineup of inspectors general, the watchdogs whose job it was to root out waste, fraud and abuse long before Musk showed up. Trump also slashed USAID, which doled out money to help poor countries around the world. The future of the Department of Education remains unclear, but Linda McMahon, the wife of WWE billionaire Vince McMahon, has described her work as its “final mission.”
His own house upended, Trump turned to the global stage, hosting Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House in February. “You’re either going to make a deal, or we’re out,” Trump said, as cameras captured the disintegration of a wartime alliance on television. “You don’t have the cards.”
The deal, in this case, was apparently an agreement to partner on rare-earth minerals in exchange for military support. Trump had proposed another kind of trade with Zelenskyy in his first term, for the release of military aid if the Ukrainian president announced an investigation into Joe Biden’s family. That move led to Trump’s first impeachment, which he defeated. Today, an emboldened Trump offers a quid-pro-quo—rare earths for military assistance—with the world watching, and hardly anyone reacts.
“Classic Trump wanting to again set the agenda,” says Sondland, the former ambassador to the European Union. Sondland first met Trump in 1988 at the Republican National Convention, bumping into him while waiting for an elevator. Sondland introduced himself, and Trump paid little attention—until they ran into each other again at the hotel bar that night, this time when Sondland was seated with the governor of New Hampshire. “He sat down and couldn’t have been nicer to me because I was with someone important,” recalls Sondland.
That’s how Trump views the world—there are people who matter and people who don’t. “It’s very transactional,” Sondland explains. “When it comes to other nation states, the first priority is always ‘Are they a nuclear power?’” Why bail out a non-nuclear country like Ukraine if it risks provoking a nuclear threat such as Russia? “That always takes priority,” Sondland adds. “It’s why there are kid gloves with North Korea. It’s why he would really like to do something with Iran before they get that capability, and so on.”
In March, Trump launched a global trade war. Again, lessons from his first term proved critical. Trump was initially unclear exactly how much authority he had to implement tariffs, given that Congress had long played role in trade negotiations, according to former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. The administration cited national-security concerns to impose the duties, leading to litigation and, ultimately, a White House victory.
That freed Trump to almost single-handedly general a far-ranging trade war in his second term, putting global markets on a see-saw. To implement the new tariffs the president relied on his salesmanship, labeling the duties “reciprocal,” even though they do not appear to match the tariffs that other countries put on the United States and instead reflect the trade deficit between countries. “The particular formula,” says Ross, “strikes me as not really measuring what they seem to think it would measure.”
Never one for nuance, Trump plows ahead, moving markets by trillions. Such is life in Trump’s new world, where something new pops up every day at the White House. “The best salesman in the world,” concludes Ribis, the casino executive. The true test for Trump, however, is what comes next. Can a man who forged his political career on grievance, convinced that everyone is ripping off the United States, shift to implementing solutions? The stock market, at least, shows some skepticism. “The reason markets are so edgy right now is that it’s not clear, ‘Is there an end game?’” says Ross. “And if there is, what is the end game? What is the world going to look like?”
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