Tuesday 29 April 2025 marks 100 days in office for Donald Trump’s second presidential administration. Thomas Gift writes that most presidents use this early part of a term to focus on one signature policy initiative. By contrast, through executive actions, Trump has pushed an an aggressive, wide-ranging agenda – without passing any major new legislation through Congress. This scattershot approach makes it harder for Democrats to counter his rapid-fire policy agenda.
Donald Trump has upended the conventional wisdom about what the start of a presidential term is supposed to look like. Before this White House, conventional wisdom held that US presidents could realistically enact one major policy initiative during their tenure. Success required a laser-like focus, with armies of West Wing staff, members of Congress, policymakers, party operatives, media allies, and other surrogates being called upon to make that change happen.
Take recent presidents: For George W. Bush, the signature policy accomplishment was the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act in education. For Barack Obama, it was the 2009 Affordable Care Act in health care. For Trump’s first term, it was the 2017 tax cuts. For Joe Biden, it was the 2021 American Rescue Plan in response to COVID-19.
Doing everything at once
For Trump 2.0, however, this conventional wisdom has been turned on its head. At a backbreaking velocity, Trump has “flooded the zone with sh*t,” to use his former chief strategist Steve Bannon’s words, in a way that no other US president ever has. Rather than tackle a single policy challenge, Trump has sought to do everything at once, all at the same time – provoking love from his supporters, and hate from his opponents.
Consider that, in just his first 100 in office, Trump or his team floated or took some executive action on the following radical ideas:
- ending birthright citizenship
- undertaking the largest migrant deportation in history
- shuttering the US Agency for International Development
- annexing Canada as the fifty-first state
- renaming the Gulf of Mexico
- proposing that Gaza becomes the “riviera of the Middle East”
- taking back the Panama Canal
- seizing Greenland, creating a Bitcoin strategic reserve and;
- imposing tariffs on global allies and adversaries at levels not seen in 80 years.
That’s not all. Trump took the following concrete actions in the same period:
- pardoned more than 1,500 January 6th rioters
- sanctioned the International Criminal Court
- gave the go-ahead for military strikes against ISIS in Somalia
- took the US out of several United Nations institutions
- waged war against Harvard
- barred transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports
- intervened in a spat between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf and;
- granted his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) unprecedented access to sensitive data of millions of Americans within the Treasury Department.
“President Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House – April 25, 2025” by The White House is United States government work
What Trump has not done
Conspicuously absent, however, is what Trump has not done. Despite a unified Republican majority in Congress, Trump has not passed any new, major piece of legislation on Capitol Hill. While there’s still plenty of appetite among Republican lawmakers for a marquee bill – including making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent – for now most GOP allies are satisfied that Trump is delivering on many (if certainly not all) of his 2024 campaign pledges.
While all presidents take executive actions, the pace and scale of Trump’s agenda to begin his second term is unrivaled. Trump has generated not just chaos, but a specific kind of chaos. He’s disoriented his opposition by making it impossible for Democrats to mount a coordinated response. Any attempt to direct energy toward combating Trump in one area leads to problems elsewhere. Underlying this strategy isn’t just an overarching ideological objective. Instead, Trump’s aim is to take maximum control over the levers of government.
Trump’s policymaking speed makes the real stories hard to see
The idea of “flooding the zone” isn’t entirely new. Yet in the past when applied to Trump, it has been about making it more difficult to distill fact from fiction, rendering it impossible for some voters to decipher real stories. Think Trump’s “Big Lie” alleging that he won the 2020 election or his oft used “fake news” moniker. Trump 2.0, however, isn’t just about distorting the narrative. It’s about actually moving on policies, particularly those outlined in Project 2025. In short, Trump 2.0 isn’t just “flooding the zone with sh*t.” It’s about doing it with clear reforms in mind.
That mentality has led to gaping divisions in how the American electorate views Trump. While Trump’s approval numbers are still high with Republicans and the MAGA base, overall they are the worst of any president 100 days into his term in eight decades. Republican Congress members haven’t challenged him yet, but if those numbers plummet more, some may abandon their leader in the heat of competitive midterm elections in 2026.
Agree or disagree with it, Trump’s 2.0 strategy has been advertised in plain sight. In his first term, Trump flooded the zone with false narratives. In his second term, he’s flooding the zone with both a tactical precision and a guiding policy blueprint behind it. Just as importantly, he’s doing it with a cabinet that’s loath to challenge him. Trump recently declared, “The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys…And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
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- Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.
