Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss
Trump's 100-day presidential progress report
Well, that escalated quickly.
When Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office in January, it was obvious that he was coming back with a much more aggressive governing style. During his first term, there was a sense that the president spent the majority of his time watching Fox News and rage-tweeting. Three years into his presidency, almost 200 key positions in Trump’s White House were still vacant, more than 25% of the administration’s top jobs.
This time, Trump came in with a new-but-familiar familiar approach, his go-to campaign and public relations strategy. Known in Trump-world as “flooding the zone,” it entails overwhelming your foes with the sheer magnitude of your activity.
It’s the military’s shock-and-awe tactic applied to politics. Trump’s adversaries can’t respond to everything that he says and does, which often renders their protests ineffective, as they flail about trying to decide where to target their criticisms and counterattacks. By the time that they’ve replied to his latest actions and statements, he’s spammed them with a new round of provocations.
Apart from hardcore partisans, the reaction of average Americans to Trump’s early second-term moves can best be described as “guarded curiosity.” Many were still leery of Trump’s wild and unpredictable swings and also of the influence that he was ceding to Bro-in-Chief Elon Musk. But, in the first weeks of the second Trump administration, there was at least a sense that things were happening. It might have been creative destruction—or just indiscriminate destruction—but at least actions were being taken.
The country’s sense of intrigue about what the administration was doing was reflected in opinion surveys. The percentage of Americans who told pollsters that the U.S. was on the right track shot up when Trump returned to office. According to Real Clear Politics (RCP), on Jan. 19, President Biden’s last day in office, the aggregate of right track-wrong track polls—arguably, the most important index of public opinion in politics—was at 27.9% right track and 61.5% wrong track, a 33.6% gap. By March 20, one month after Trump’s inauguration, the right track numbers had risen to 43.1%, while the wrong track figures had fallen to 50.6%, shrinking the deficit between them to 7.5%.
To state the obvious, these still weren’t great or even good numbers, as the majority of Americans were still saying that the nation was on the wrong course. But, the margin between the responses was the smallest it had been since the two-month mark of Biden’s presidency, when it fell to 6%, as Americans were impressed with Biden’s initial response to the pandemic, after Trump was seen as having mishandled it.
For additional perspective, RCP’s measure of right track-wrong track has never been above water in the last 16 years; the closest was June 2009, a few months into President Obama’s first term, when a cumulative 46.3% thought America was heading in the right direction, compared to 46.5% who disagreed. Also, Gallup, one of the pollsters that RCP factors into its figures, regularly asks registered voters whether they are “satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time,” (another way to phrase the right track-wrong track question). The last time Gallup found that satisfied respondents exceeded dissatisfied ones was in January 2004, when 55% were satisfied, which was less than a month after U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein.
At the start of his term, Trump’s personal approval ratings also reflected Americans’ cautious interest in his agenda. His first week in office, Trump signed 36 executive orders (for reference, Biden averaged 41 executive orders per year for his entire term). The flurry of activity was enough to push Trump’s ratings into positive territory, temporarily earning him the approval of 50.5% of Americans, according to the RCP average, with 44.3% disapproving.
By historical standards, a 6.2% net positive rating is a very middling figure for a president. But, for Trump, who spent his entire first term with negative approvals, it was easily his highwater mark.
It didn’t last long, though, as Americans quickly soured on his demolition-driven approach to governance, carried out by his personal wrecking ball, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), along with his authoritarian style and constant culture war campaign. After that first week, his approvals began to drop, and his disapprovals began to rise. He crossed from positive to negative territory on March 13, registering 47.8% approval and 48.5% disapproval, and he’s been progressively declining ever since. Currently, he has the approval of 45.4% of Americans, while 52.1% disapprove, a 6.7% net negative rating and an overall loss of almost 13% in support in his first 100 days.
Naturally, Trump’s plummeting approval rating has impacted the national right track-wrong track numbers. Three months after he took office, right track has dropped to 40.7%, while wrong track has climbed back to 51.3%. That’s a fall of almost 4% since a month ago, when right track-wrong track hit its peak under Trump.
Americans certainly don’t seem to think Trump’s tariff schemes are the proper course for the country, as almost two-thirds oppose the policy. So far, he has also failed to deliver on his campaign promises to rapidly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
But, more fundamentally, the message Americans appear to be communicating to Trump is that he has overstepped his mandate. Even, on immigration, Trump’s strongest issue, Americans believe he has gone too far, with only 46% approving his deportation roundups (which is still 10% more than approve of his economic and trade policies) Meanwhile, 53% disapprove of his overall handling of immigration.
Americans re-elected Trump because they had fond memories of the pre-Covid economy during his first administration and because Democrats had gone too far left on issues like criminal justice reform and gender identity. They did not return him to power so that he could dismantle the government or seek to rule without accountability.
But, from an anti-partisan standpoint, the biggest disappointment in Trump’s first 100 days is not the way in which he has abused his power, but the ways in which hasn’t used it. After being part of not one, but three, of the most divisive campaigns in American history, two of which ended with him in office, Trump could have taken an approach to governance that would at least try to close our civic ruptures, instead of ripping open the wounds wider than ever.
Because Trump—and try not to spit out your beverage when you read this, because it’s actually true—was uniquely positioned to be a potential healing force. First, because his Republican roots are shallow, he was ideally situated to make deals with Democrats and forge compromises on numerous, thorny issues.
Second, and more potent, he had survived the worst near-miss assassination attempt since Ronald Reagan in 1981. As polarizing of a figure as Trump had been up to that point in his life, the attack gave him carte blanche to reinvent himself.
He could have emerged from the experience as a unifying figure, prepared to be a president for all Americans. Even the most hardcore Republicans would have had to follow the lead of their standard bearer, who would have turned into a transcendent, national symbol. If he had embraced this opening for change, he could have become a transformational figure who made America one nation again.
Instead, when he resurfaced, he was the same old Trump.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
THE WHO — “WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN” (1971)
Portions of this post have been inspired by my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
Follow me on X at @JeffGebeau or on Facebook