Trump’s (second) “first 100 days”

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards, Tuesday, April 29, marked the first 100 days of Trump's second term, and what an eventful 100 days it has been.

DONALD TRUMP: The golden age of America begins right now.

SPEAKER: DOGE task force sweeps through the federal bureaucracy.

DONALD TRUMP: My fellow Americans, this is liberation day waiting for a long time.

SPEAKER: Today, Wall Street experienced the worst day since Twenty Twenty.

SPEAKER: The stock market briefly stalled Thursday before closing higher for the third day in a row.

SPEAKER: I mean, chaos is exactly the way to describe it.

SPEAKER: Last week, President Trump used the alien enemies act to deport more than 200 Venezuelan migrants.

SPEAKER: Sent hundreds of people to the notorious mega prison in El Salvador known as CECOT.

SPEAKER: A federal judge is planning to start a contempt investigation for willful disregard of his order to halt deportation flights.

SPEAKER: Vice President Vance has suggested that judges do not have the authority over Trump's executive power. Now, could this signal the start of a constitutional crisis?

DAN RICHARDS: Obviously, there is more than we could possibly cover in one podcast episode. But to help us start to make sense of it all, I spoke with Wendy Schiller. Wendy is the director of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at the Watson Institute, and the interim director of the Watson Institute.

We focused on over a few key policy areas, how Trump's approach to governing has changed since his first term, and how the country, so far, seems to be reacting to those changes? We also discussed what Wendy thinks has been missing from mainstream coverage of this moment in US politics, as well as the evolving relationship between our national politics and institutions of higher education, including our very own Brown University.

It was a wide ranging discussion that made me see these first 100 days in a new light, and hopefully, it might do the same for you. Here is our conversation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Wendy Schiller, thank you so much for coming back on the Trending Globally.

WENDY SCHILLER: My pleasure to be here.

DAN RICHARDS: By the time listeners hear this, it will be at least Trump's 100th day in office in this second term. And maybe let's just take a step back first and ask, why is the 100 day marker an important or interesting milestone in a presidency?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, the 100 day marker really becomes a big deal, for lack of a better phrase, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because there were such dire economic circumstances. There was poverty. There was food shortages. There was agricultural drought. There were tariffs. There were many, many, many millions of people without jobs.

So how would you get America back on its feet and how quickly could you act? And so that begins not only the 100-day metric for presidents, but it also marks, and we're coming up on the 100 years of this, a much more expanded role for the federal government in each of our daily lives.

DAN RICHARDS: There are too many things that have happened in the last 100 days for us to possibly cover in one podcast. I wonder maybe we could start, I'm just curious of what has surprised you most in these 100 days. What has been different than you expected, either specific policies or Trump's outlook or approach in general? What's really surprised you?

WENDY SCHILLER: The surprise I think about what is the second Trump term, interrupted by four years of President Biden, was that the Trump campaign was strategic. It was well run. It was well organized. It didn't seem to suffer from a lot of the mishaps that I think we're seeing now.

And it's surprising, given all the time that the Trump folks had to prepare, why they weren't more surgical about the way that they went about trying to reduce the size of the federal government, and rather than firing lots of people at the Social Security Administration, which millions and millions of Americans rely on, that seems like counterproductive.

If you're trying to say, I'm going to make American government work better for you, and you have this huge swath of active people, 72% of people over the age of 65 vote, they're very pay attention. They're very tuned in. And all of a sudden, you're sort of chopping at that.

And so it just looked less polished and less organized than I expected it to be, given that he had already been president and had some time in the last four years to think about how he would go about this. And so that is surprising. And I think a lot of people felt that there would be a different administration. It wouldn't be as constrained because Donald Trump, at the moment, constitutionally, cannot run for president again.

So that sort of electoral incentive that might keep you in check, and the tie to his own party in the Congress, sort of the fate of the Congress and how that reflects on the president, that would maybe keep him in check. But I don't think he cares about that. Right now, he can't run for re-election.

And so what we're seeing in real time, in the 21st century, is what a completely unconstrained presidency looks like with a very large federal government.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, speaking of unconstrained, there's maybe no better example of that then Trump's economic policies in these first 100 days. He has announced tariff increases on dozens of countries, including on China, Canada, and Mexico our three biggest trading partners.

And Trump has backpedaled on some of these tariffs. He has paused others. He has created exemptions for certain industries. It's, again, this sort of like not surgical approach to this sort of complex piece of economic policy.

So why were these tariffs such a priority of Trump's this term? And why hasn't he been more responsive to the negative effect these policies have had on the stock market and businesses, Places that he has traditionally sort of paid attention to when deciding what he's going to do?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, Dan, I wish we had a whole several podcasts to talk about the ways that political parties have used trade policy. And that I think we need to understand that to understand what's going on now. So when you go all the way back to when we had an economy that needed protection, which isn't really until the late Eighteen Hundreds, early Nineteen Hundreds, Republicans were protectionist, New England manufacturers really rule the roost and very protectionist.

Lots of import taxes on items that were made elsewhere, but that we made ourselves in the United States to protect our supremacy in these industries and protect jobs. And that's the way that Republicans sold it. These actually protect jobs. Never mind that it makes things more expensive for you to purchase them.

And Herbert Hoover took that to the ultimate when he signed Smoot-Hawley in the Nineteen Thirties, early Nineteen Thirties. And he was a Republican president. Flash forward many years, 60 years later, you start in the Nineteen Sixties, and all of a sudden it occurs to people, particularly in the South of the United States, where they produce a lot of things that they want to export, and the farmers in the country produce a lot of things to export, that multi-country arrangements would work better.

And we go all the way to NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement and GATT, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Nineteen Ninety-Four and '95. But that critical juncture is when the United States really starts to open up trade.

And over the 30 years, we've seen, and of course, in Two Thousand, with permanent normal trade relations with China, meaning that we treated China like any other trading partner, and we gave it preferential status, that it just was too tempting for businesses not to go to China and make things. And we do find ourselves, 30 years later, in an economy where so many of the things that we used to make are now made in China.

Trump is not wrong about everything. But the mistake is not being surgical. So instead of warning the American people and saying, look, it's going to take about two years for this to kick in. So I'm going to be surgical about this. Only some things from China, and not others, he went all out. Of course, then, the tech companies, particularly Apple, really literally freaked out because Apple chooses not to make its products in the United States of America. It chooses to make them in China. And basically, he backed off.

And then there are some components of cars now. Some homemade cars, he'll keep the tariffs on. But components of cars that we need in America for Ford, and everybody else to make cars here, he eased up on those tariffs. So he understands he doesn't want to be responsible for a recession. But again, he's not running for re-election.

DAN RICHARDS: It's so interesting to me the realms where he seems to be listening and responding to push back versus where he seems to be ignoring it, which brings me to another topic we need to talk about, which is the Trump administration's policies around immigration, because this is an area where Trump has historically had very high approval ratings.

But even here, recently, you've seen his approval ratings slip in recent polls, especially in light of his extrajudicial deportations of immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, including that of Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who the administration has, itself, admitted was sent there in error.

And this has really captured attention in a way that I think maybe the Trump team was not prepared for. So how has the public responded to Trump's immigration policies so far? And what does it tell you about sort of how they might evolve?

WENDY SCHILLER: The poll numbers on immigration are important to sort out. The poll numbers on immigration are that the majority of Americans support the president's attempts to repatriate people who are here without any legal status. So typically, we refer to people as undocumented if they don't have legal status.

He came into office with support on that, so that people still say even though we're uncomfortable, possibly with these raids, but on the other hand, that if you came here without documentation, that it's appropriate for the federal government to say you have to go home and come back with using legal means.

The general polls on immigration have the president sliding, and the reason is what people don't like, is that the United States says to you, you are on a pathway to citizenship, you have a green card. We will make you a citizen. That's swooping in and arresting somebody, and then sending them to some jail in Louisiana or sending them to a prison in El Salvador, is making Americans very uncomfortable very quickly.

And I think the Trump administration is surprised by that. People are now, the average person trying to think about this, actually says to themselves, well, we wanted more border security on the southern border, but we don't want you to take somebody who the United States says legally can be here and simply surround them one afternoon and whisk them away without due process, without a court of law, hold them, and then possibly even put them on a plane and send them back to wherever they are, or even not even their home country.

And those visuals, those images, those stories, those have really hit a chord. And that is a surprise to everybody, that voters are more sophisticated than people give them credit for, in the sense that they recognize there are dimensions to immigration policy. And that is the way that American politics can always surprise you.

DAN RICHARDS: It's like I feel like people have been saying lately, the right problems and the wrong solutions, that whether we're talking about tariffs or immigration, there's a kernel of something people approve of in what Trump's doing, but we're seeing in all these examples, some sort of overreach that is turning more people off.

WENDY SCHILLER: And there are so many important ripple effects for areas of the country that vote Republican, that voted for Trump. So when you think about aid to universities, for example, and we're at an elite university, Brown University, the Trump administration, sort of in every corner, is sort of trying to deplete resources that universities depend on for their research, but also for international students to come and study.

And state schools across the country have a fairly decent percentage of international students just as much as any elite school does, sometimes even more. And those students are lifeblood of the economies of those institutions. So Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, all of those major state schools rely and depend on bringing international students to their communities, for their local economies, and even possibly to stay open businesses and build their local economies.

You're cutting that off because you're scaring international students who say, I don't want to be told in September or November that I have to go and I have 10 days to leave. So we're seeing a melt on people willing to come here. And that, I think, is also adding a dimension to the Trump policy that I think voters who live in those communities thought, no, no, no, we didn't vote for that. That's not necessarily what we wanted at all.

DAN RICHARDS: Speaking of pushback, the Trump administration has faced, both regarding its immigration policy and in other realms, I wanted to ask you about the courts and the role they've been playing in these 100 days more broadly. So in the last two months, multiple judges have ruled against Trump on various aspects of his immigration policies.

In April, the Supreme Court issued a ruling to block the Trump administration from deporting more people out of the country without due process. They've also upheld lower court rulings that the US needs to facilitate the return of Kilmer Abrego Garcia.

Now, Trump's team seems to claim that they are cooperating with the courts, but it's a gray zone, to say the least. And opponents of Trump are saying that his team is delaying and maybe even violating these rulings. So how do you think about that type of confrontation that we're seeing right now between the executive branch and the courts, either in immigration issues, specifically, or more broadly?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, I'd like to break that question up in two parts. One is on the concern of returning this individual from El Salvador, it undermines the Trump persona to say, we can't get him back. We've asked, we've tried, or we're not going to try, one or the other. But then it's oh, we asked, we can't get him back.

But that doesn't jive with any of the other kind of impressions Trump wants to give as president, and being the most powerful man in the world, really the leader of the free world. And so when he's trying to sort of make peace in Ukraine and say, Putin, you have to listen to me, why should Putin listen to him if he can't even get one person back from a jail in El Salvador?

So this is the problem, this case, it affects lots of other things that Trump wants to do. And it's become so internationally well-known that it's become an Achilles heel for the president in establishing himself on the world stage. And how do you backtrack and get yourself out of that? And I think that's what they're trying to work on now in terms of saving face in this regard.

The second thing, the clash with the court, again, people talk about polarization. I think the single to me, even more than Congress, the single arena, where party ideology or ideology itself, liberal or conservative, has completely consumed one of our branches of government, and that is the courts.

Ever since Robert Bork, in Nineteen Eighty-Seven, when the Democrats torpedoed that nomination based on Bork's beliefs on reproductive rights, essentially, and affirmative action, ever since then. It's not the Republicans did it, the Democrats sort of did it first, we have seen not just Supreme Court nominations, but appeals court, district court, it's all completely ideologically polarized now.

And where that's gotten the courts is the problem of being too aligned with one party or the other, and one president or the other. It is more difficult now for the federal courts to stake out a territory that is truly neutral.

And we've seen now in rulings that have not gone President Trump's way, we've seen Trump appointed judges join with Obama or even Clinton judges and say, no, we're ruling against you. And I think there is a general sense, we had Justice Breyer here several weeks ago at Brown, a general sense that the judiciary has to reclaim its independence. It has to try. And the way they do that is in their decision making.

They can rule in Trump's favor, but they have to really have the law on their side. And then when they rule against Trump, they have to be more united. And we're seeing different alleles court circuits coming together in some cases. So I think that's where the courts really have to step up and say, this is law and we want to treat this like law.

The Supreme Court will have a day of reckoning. They gave this man unfettered immunity as president of the United States. But unfettered immunity, personally, is not the same thing as using the law in a way that is unconstitutional or not the way Congress intended.

The courts still have the opportunity and that sort of arena to say this does not accord with what Congress wanted or it doesn't fit with the Constitution. And the Supreme Court will have to make a lot of those decisions in the remainder of this term, which ends in June, and then to get on the docket for the term that begins in October.

DAN RICHARDS: Are you worried that we could see some sort of escalation of Trump really more openly defying the courts during his time in office?

WENDY SCHILLER: President Eisenhower used to say the courts need the president and the federal government to enforce their decisions. And we saw Brown v Board being decided, a combination of cases in Nineteen Fifty-Four and Nineteen Fifty-Five. And really, it only came to a head in Nineteen Fifty-Seven. And Eisenhower had to send the military to Little Rock, Arkansas, to implement a Supreme Court decision.

And still, even after that, I think many of us would argue that education today is still quite segregated for lots of reasons. So implementation takes a long time. I do think that you also need for Donald Trump to defy the federal courts. You also need the cooperation of state governments, of state police forces, state national guards. Does he federalize all the national guards, governors?

In order to really implement something that the court says he can't do on the ground level across the country, he'd need the cooperation of all those governments and all of those legislators and all those politicians. And they, by the way, can all run for re-election, with some exceptions with state term limits for state legislatures. So that's going to be very difficult for him to do.

But purely, federal or international decision making, I think, in the court says, no, you can't do it, I don't know who then stops President Trump from doing that. But on a domestic level, it's very difficult to do that because of our federal system.

DAN RICHARDS: Trump has also attacked and challenged institutions across our sort of civil society law firms and media companies, and of course, also universities, largely by using the federal government as a sort of financial threat against universities for behaving in a way he doesn't approve of, including at Brown, where he has planned to freeze over potentially $500 million of funding.

We're sitting at Brown University right now, an institution that has been at the center of some of this activity. How are you thinking about the roles of institutions like universities in the Trump administration or sort of in American society right now for navigating Trump's power?

WENDY SCHILLER: Donald Trump himself went to the University of Pennsylvania. He's a product of an Ivy League education. I think we look at universities, and over time, just like a lot of other things in American life, starting in the Nineteen Forties, but really in the Nineteen Fifties, particularly with the National Defense Education Act of Nineteen Fifty-Eight, under Eisenhower, money started to flow to universities, and they became dependent on that.

But the country benefited in terms of all of our education for our technology, for our medicine, for all the advancements. And there was a symbiotic relationship. But you can argue that maybe institutions of higher education or universities like Brown became a little too dependent on federal financing and polarization or ideological slant has also seeped into funding.

So the Biden administration wanted to encourage diversity, DEI, research on marginalized communities, including LGBTQ+ and trans. And so they said, OK, we're going to give you money to do this, or we're going to now attach a requirement to a grant that says, we need a component of this to look at these underserved groups.

That's ideology, that's politics, that's what the president can do. But just as Biden did that, President Trump can say, no, we don't want you to do that. We're going to take it away. Universities can't pivot that quickly. These grants are multi-year. People are hired. Research takes time. That's the structural problem, is that when universities commit, they commit for the longer haul, which usually surpasses the lifetime of a term of presidency, which is four years. So that's one pretty big problem.

The second is 60% of America doesn't go to college. We have not funded vocational education nearly as well. We don't do worker training very well. There are a lot of people who graduate from high school and don't have a path. And Biden announced forgiveness of student loans, I think, at least four times, possibly more.

And after a while, the 60% who never went to college or doesn't go to college or their children aren't going to college says, what are we doing with that? I have to pay off my car loan and my mortgage and every other obligation I have. Why should somebody who goes to college, which I didn't do, get to not pay off their loan?

The selling of that message was atrocious by the Democrats, and I think it really solidified resentment towards federal dollars going to support colleges, or students who are going to college when the majority of Americans don't take that path.

DAN RICHARDS: But would you agree with the assessment some have had that this isn't just Trump making a decision on how much to invest in universities. There's an element of what people have described as a weaponization of this money to try and get universities to behave in a way that aligns with Trump's values more so than past presidents have? Or do you think that's not really a fair thing?

WENDY SCHILLER: I actually don't subscribe to the idea that Biden's requirements in the NIH, NSF favor and proposals to do certain things saying, we need to pay attention in this, and why don't you have this component in your work. That's interference.

So you think about this and you think, OK, well, your beliefs may accord with that line of research or that concern. That's politicization, and Trump is taking it in a different direction. So to say that it's weaponized under Trump, because Trump is taking away funding for these things, but it wasn't weaponized under Biden. It was politicized under Biden, as in other presidencies, and it's politicized under Trump. And that's one thing.

The second is when you are saying, I'm forgiving your loan, but the visual is of students marching, chanting, camping out, then America says, wait a minute, I thought we were forgiving your loans because you went to college and studied. And education is the main goal of university life, why we subsidize education, why there's indirect costs for education, but we are not seeing that in the last nine months. We didn't see that, particularly on the campuses of the richest universities.

That is a stark thing to try to reconcile. Is Trump taking advantage of that to undermine education, free speech, free thought? Yes, he's doing all those things at the same time. But again, not everything he does is completely made out of thin air. And he has a sense of what people are resentful about.

And universities have now, our president at Brown, Christina Paxson has been doing this quite, I think, bravely and repeatedly, defending the principle of free speech and freedom to learn and freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly that universities do fundamentally defend the common freedoms in the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights. And that's why we need them. And that's an argument that I think we have to wait and see if that resonates with the general American public.

DAN RICHARDS: So would you say that the Trump administration has been challenging freedom of speech on college campuses more than previous presidents?

the Democratic Convention in: 1968

I think there have been lots of presidents, particularly, and J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI for, I think, 50 years, certainly surveyed, spied. There were lots of limitations on free speech, so I don't think it's unique to Donald Trump. And again, what people have to think about is, do the vast majority of college students believe that their free speech is now curtailed? I don't know the answer to that.

DAN RICHARDS: We've talked about some of what has surprised you in the Trump term so far, and just some of the aspects that have captured the country's imagination and attention the most. Are there any elements to what we have seen in the last 100 days that you think aren't getting enough attention, things you wish people had focused on, more that maybe they haven't been?

WENDY SCHILLER: I think that understanding that you can't just dismiss the entire Trump administration and just say, well, they're not doing their job or they're all this or they're all that, that's not going to be effective. Targeting and saying to yourself, OK, I care about this, and this is going wrong, and really grasping at what is on the ground going wrong in your community, that's what I'd like to see more of, I think, for people who oppose the president.

And for people who support the president, then, please defend more of the things that he's doing, that to a lot of Americans, even every day, seem increasing Americans, not defensible. And together, I think, those voices could find common ground, and particularly on the economy.

The economy that Trump inherited was very strong and very healthy by the end of the Biden presidency. Not healthy enough to save Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, but certainly healthier than it is now. And so understanding what is true and what is not, what is actually happening and not happening, can prevent us from going into an economic panic, but also a sort of a democracy panic.

Figure out what's actually being curtailed, what's actually being constrained, and fight for what you think is most important, and to remember that most people in America think the economy is the most important thing, trying to get their kids to school safely, keep their jobs, take care of their family members or elder care, these are the vast majority of Americans.

And so if people like the Democrats or people who oppose Donald Trump go too far away from those themes, I think they'll lose audience, and they'll lose an opportunity to make their case.

DAN RICHARDS: So do you think that the concerns that Trump is leading us into some sort of anti-democratic, authoritarian phase of the United States government is overblown? Or how should we be thinking about the real challenges he's posed versus a "democracy panic," quote, unquote?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, the Trump campaign, in terms of demonizing people who come here who are undocumented, for example, but now even demonizing people who we allow to stay in the United States, they have parolee status, meaning not your typical parole, but meaning you're fleeing your home country and you can stay here for some period of time, whether you're Haitian or El Salvadoran or Venezuelan.

Again, it's the word of the United States. You can come, you'll be safe, and you can stay. And then we'll sort of let when you have to go. And I think Americans understand the full faith and credit of the United States of America and the word of America. And I think that's where Democrats, or people who are worried about democracy in general say, what do we stand for as a country?

We are unique. We are different from all the other countries, and we are the font of democracy in the last couple of years. But what do we stand for? And that's where you can be persuasive with people who might have voted for Donald Trump or didn't vote for Kamala Harris, or are independent thinking, thinking it's not about Donald Trump, individually. It's about do we care that the kinds of values that we've always believed in aren't being exhibited or carried out by the Trump administration, and people can be snatched off the street with no due process and put on a plane and sent away.

Or you cut funding for women's health, specifically women's health or Black women's health on purpose. Because you say, well, we're not going to worry about that anymore. These are your neighbors. These are your community. These are the people we all live together as. And I think when you're targeting particular communities, whether it's immigration status, It's gender, it's self-identified gender, it's socially constructed race or ethnicity, that, I think, in the 21st century, is un-American.

And that's where people who say, well, the sky is falling, our democracy is collapsing, need to really stop generalizing and start saying, if they're going after them, they will come after you. And we aren't a country that wants to live that way. That, I think, resonates with almost anybody.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and that brings us back to sort of where we started, which is the public's reaction to these 100 days and how that could affect Trump's presidency going forward. And we've touched on some of the polls, but the polling on average of Trump's performance, 100 days in, has seen shrinking approval, even on traditionally strong policy areas for the president, like the economy and sort of, as we discussed, with some caveats, like immigration.

Overall, he has the lowest approval rating 100 days in of any recent president. And I guess this just makes me wonder, looking ahead, if these trends continue, which of course, they could not, nothing is for certain. But if they were to continue, do you think we could start to see a different, more moderate, perhaps more cooperative Trump in the next 100 or 200 days? And I guess more generally too, just what are you keeping a close eye on in US politics right now?

WENDY SCHILLER: I had a professor in graduate school who said, sort of evaluating people to hire, let's say, or something of that nature. And that person said, people do what they can do. And they typically show you the best of what they can do.

So if Trump doesn't get a handle on the problems in his cabinet, I do think Secretary Hegseth is presenting a problem at the moment to him, if he doesn't get a handle on showing some gains with our European trading partners, our East Asian trading partners, China, by the end of the summer, if he can't get it together by then, I'm not sure when he would change course.

I think the time is to do it now. I think the damage and perception will be done by September, and then you're only a year away from Twenty Twenty-Six. So the question for most people watching this is not so much when will Trump pivot, we're thinking about that if it's going to happen at all, it's when will Republicans were up for reelection in Twenty Twenty-Six decide that he is a liability?

Will they be so captured by Donald Trump that they will go down with the ship in Twenty Twenty-Six, as they did in Twenty Eighteen? I think Democrats picked up 41 seats. Are they willing to stay with him for the longer haul now, given that he cannot run for reelection again, or will you start to see, particularly watching the Senate, some real defections from some of the things he wants to do and using that as leverage? That's what I'm watching over the next three to five months.

DAN RICHARDS: Wow. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for, as always, helping us put the focus where it could be most productive and helpful for us to understand what's going on in the world. We really appreciate it.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, thank you for having me as a guest on Trending Globally. I always enjoy it.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, with production assistance from Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. If you like this show, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you haven't subscribed to Trending Globally on any of those apps, please do that too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word, trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.