American presidents enter office with a finite amount of power, and it only diminishes over time. This is the nature of democracy—politicians win elections to build political capital, and they spend it governing. In an election campaign, politicians can promise the world, and voters and even elected party members get caught up in the rush. But then comes the actual sausage-making, which sparks conflict over competing visions, followed by horse-trading, and ultimately, in the best case, a form of compromised legislation no one loves. That’s politics.
That first six months or a year is when a president has the most power they ever have. This year, the GOP had the grandest plan of all—using the election of Donald Trump to dismantle American democracy. Project 2025was the blueprint, and despite Trump’s efforts to distance himself from that plan during the election, it quickly became the administration’s guiding document. Trump has always hated democracy and its attendant limits to power, so he was happy to lead the charge into the illiberal democracy it outlined.
Trump’s reelection, moreover, enervated the resistance, giving him a free hand to maneuver. The Democratic Party was completely disorganized and flat on its back, more often offering gestures of conciliation than opposition. Trump had lined up Congress, the Supreme Court, and religious and business leaders to work in coordination. Everything was in place, and if he moved quickly enough, he could use the period to install framework that would permanently ensconce the GOP in control, ala Victor Orbán or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
And yet, after 100 days, he’s blowing his golden opportunity.
An Excellent Strategy
One can see the contours of a successful strategy hiding underneath the chaos. Trump stocked his cabinet with lackeys who would undermine disfavored departments until he and Congress had a chance to dismantle them. He had already done an exceptional job bending corporate power to his will, and he might have used tariffs selectively to reward supplicants and foreign powers he favored, while punishing holdouts and foreign powers he wanted to bring to heel.
He and the GOP had a theory about tearing down the parts of the federal government they didn’t like while using others to actively advance their agenda. It would extend presidential power, but with the courts backing Trump, seemed eminently doable. And so they got started.
Attacking science and education is one of the first chapters in the autocrat’s playbook, and so it wasn’t surprising to see Trump’s moves there. Independent sources of information are innately problematic for an autocrat; even if they’re not actively opposing the government, teachers and professors aren’t part of the misinformation apparatus. Taking control of K-12 and higher ed is a great way to erode independent thought and opposition—and turn them into organs of propaganda. Science is not as straightforward, but can be a problem if it remains fully independent—that’s especially true of social science and economics. The government needs to take control of those areas that can harm it, while bolstering the tools of control. Weapons and tech are indispensable, so autocrats love those.
The federal government is an extremely potent instrument for those who want to wield it corruptly. Trump might have created a classic patronage/spoils system to reward red and purple states while crippling blue states, and he did make some gestures in that direction. His anti-DEI approach revealed a pathway here. Blue states would try to protect their underrepresented populations, giving Trump an opportunity to target them by withholding dollars and even cracking down with force. Blue states offer many such filters for Trump to target: sanctuary laws, abortion, environmental laws. It’s likely that he will eventually use them as tools them to crush opposition in concentrated regions of Democratic power.
He effectively targeted enemies and the media. This created a chilling effect, and in those hundred days we saw big law firms and media orgs pre-obey. His attacks on individuals, meanwhile, limited the number of dissenters who would risk an attack by the DOJ. Pulling security details from individuals was a warning to current and future employees.
Renaming Denali and the Gulf of Mexico and similar efforts were smart politics. They demoralized his opposition with little cost. Targeting trans people, as cruel and disgusting as it has been, is classic and effective authoritarian politics. (A dutiful media played along, spending their time hounding Dems on the issue, too—another advantage for the autocrat in punching down.) Bringing the military under his power by firing generals is also classic authoritarianism, and he quickly weeded out the potential troublemakers.
A lot of the stuff in Project 2025 is merely borderline illegal and buttressed by a vast corpus of dubious legal theory Trump judges were ready to deploy in defense of it. Using his honeymoon period, Trump and the GOP might have jammed a lot through without much resistance. Carefully-planned initiatives would have been ready-made to just pass judicial muster. For much of those hundred days, it appeared like he had broad support—certainly the most he’s ever enjoyed. Almost no one was willing to stand up to him. For the first time in Trump’s, elite power was scared and compliant. Had he followed the plan, Trump was in an excellent position to seize control of the government before the opposition could organize to stop him.
Incompetence and Stupidity
Instead, Trump Trumped. While he did pursue much of the Project 2025 agenda, he couldn’t resist adding his own patented “flair.” His grandiosity wouldn’t allow him to play his coup safe—he had to escalate and antagonize. He is too dumb to understand those legal lines or the ways in which his excesses undermined his own cause. As always, for Trump’s enemies, the best ally is always Trump.
He allowed Elon to ravage the federal government in stupid, broadly objectionable, and clearly illegal ways. It was almost the opposite of a spoils system: Elon took visible delight in screwing Trump supporters in rural states as much as blue-state libs. With DOGE, he began to alienate a judiciary unwilling to let him not just flout the law, but do it in service of actions that benefited no one—certainly not conservative justices.
Trump’s immigration initiatives were proceeding successfully—even sending immigrants to Guantanamo was going to be okayed by courts—but he had to escalate. A president has a lot of legal authority over immigration, but Trump’s acts were so egregious and ham-handed that even the Supreme Court couldn’t go along with it. In sending plainclothes goons to scoop up legal immigrants and disappear them to foreign dungeons, he activated a backlash from judges and regular citizens—even those who were broadly supportive of his immigration goals. In the end, the actions of DOGE and Trump’s illegal arrests and deportations turned one of the White House’s most important assets, the federal judiciary, into a foe.
Trump was winning on education, but he had to demand Harvard give him complete control over hiring and curriculum, measures no university would or could allow. He’s doing fairly well on bringing the military under control, but his choice of the wildly incompetent Pete Hegseth endangers that. A huge goal of Project 2025 was gutting the federal workforce (the “deep state”), but DOGE’s bumbling efforts, which included firing air traffic controllers and nuclear technicians, made even Republicans balk.
And then there were the tariffs. I mean, what to say? Believe it or not, they were actually a part of Project 2025, too. A Trump obsession for decades, I suppose they have some narrow utility to the blossoming autocrat—but even there, they have to contain some kind of internal logic. Trump’s absurd on-again, off-again approach, his weird fixation on punishing key allies, and the massive rates he set weren’t economic policy, but the actions of some combination of a mob boss and internet troll. Escalation, shock, and trolling—it may build an audience on social media, but it’s a poor macroeconomic approach.
It’s Still Really Bad, But…
Anyone paying attention knew these four years would involve massive corruption and a turn away from democracy. When the Supreme Court gave Donald Trump immunity from criminal liability last year and the voters in turn gave him the presidency, the coming disaster became a fait accompli. The matter was done before it began. All the cruelty to marginalized citizens and immigrants, the tinpot dictatorish revenge against enemies, turning the ship of state into a massive confidence game, abandoning our allies, hiking tariffs, selecting incompetents and crooks to lead federal agencies—all of this was inevitable. With the stacked judiciary and compliant GOP Congress, there was no way to avoid it.
Add to that our buckling, 18th century beta-version constitution, nearly impossible to fix, which strengthens the hands of the minority and gums up the levers of government, and we were already in pretty bad shape. None of that was going to change, either. Even if Kamala Harris had won, we would have continued our slide to illiberalism. (It’s hard to imagine the Senate would have allowed her to seat a cabinet, and certainly no judges, and the courts were going to continue their habit of disallowing Democratic governance.) Our old, creaky democracy has been on its last legs for a while. Once we re-elected Trump—well, there was no scenario for a good outcome.
The best we could hope for is what we’re getting. It has only taken a hundred days for Trump to squander all his goodwill and wake up sensible Americans to his danger. (Yes, sensible Americans. Keep in mind that for a third of the voting public, maybe 20% of the population, what Trump and the GOP are doing is the right thing.) In order to salvage our democracy, we’re going to have to overhaul it. I don’t know if that means starting from scratch, or initiating large-scale reform, but been clear for years now that the basic structure of our government is broken, and that we have a party devoted to exploiting its faults for a functional coup.
Since overhaul is really our only chance to reverse things, and since a hundred days ago the chances of that were 0%, things seemed very hopeless. But today, a sizable and growing portion of the population sees these failures and also see the GOP’s goals for what they are. That still leaves us a long way from real change, but the chance is no longer 0%.
Trump’s actions will result in real wreckage we’re all going to have to endure. The economy is going to tank, public health is going to get bad, the poor and vulnerable will fall into poverty, and the GOP will prey on queer folk and people of color. But that’s only going to further alienate Trump and the GOP. Is the likelihood of change very high? No, but it’s higher than it was a hundred days ago, and that’s because Trump and the GOP are cruel, bigoted, incompetent, and dumb. And that is definitely not going to change.
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