A turbulent 100 days (January 20-April 29, 2025) have passed since the beginning of Donald Trump's second term in the White House, during which the Republican began to reshape US domestic policy, international relations and global trade on a large scale. In just over three months, Trump has cracked down on illegal immigration, slashed government spending, imposed tariffs on both adversaries and allies to reduce his country's trade imbalance, and pursued active diplomacy to end Russia's more than three-year-old war with Ukraine.
FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
Cutting illegal immigration was Trump's campaign anthem and the issue on which he has the most support. He is following through on his plan by implementing some of the toughest immigration policies in the country's history, even though the promised mass deportations have yet to materialize, according to the Associated Press.
This issue, perhaps more than any other, carried him to victory in the 2024 election. During his campaign, Trump promised to end the "invasion of the southern border." And in the first 100 days of his second term, he has reduced the number of border crossings to a fraction of what they were just months ago, writes the conservative-friendly Daily Wire, founded by American political commentator Ben Shapiro.
After taking office, Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border, ordering the Secretary of Defense to deploy troops to the border and resume construction of a border wall. By early March, about 9,000 active-duty soldiers were already guarding the southern border. One of Trump's most significant policy changes was the reinstatement of the "Remain in Mexico" policy, which requires migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum applications are processed. This is a departure from the Biden administration's "catch-and-release" policy, which allowed asylum seekers to enter the United States and live and work in the country while their applications were being processed, the Daily Wire added.
In his first 100 days in office, Trump has taken drastic steps to revoke the legal immigration status of hundreds of thousands of people, expanding the pool of people potentially subject to deportation while trying to increase the number of deportations to historic levels. The Republican has taken action to end humanitarian programs for legal entry into the country started by his Democratic predecessor, and the visas of thousands of students who participated in anti-Israel protests, and has made it easier to deport foreigners with criminal charges.
A representative of the US Department of Homeland Security said that 145,000 immigration violators were arrested in the first three months of Trump's term - compared with 113,000 in the entire 2024 fiscal year. Deportations have decreased in the first three months of Trump's term - from 195,000 last year to 130,000 this year, according to department statistics. This is due to the higher number of border apprehensions under Biden, in which migrants were returned more quickly without a de facto deportation procedure, Reuters points out.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants and sent hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in violation of a court order, the AP notes.
The number of people trying to cross into the United States illegally from Mexico fell sharply in the last year of President Joe Biden's term - from 249,740 people in December 2023 to 47,324 people in December 2024. Under Trump, the number has fallen even more dramatically, to just 8,346 in February and 7,181 in March, official data show.
The administration has promised to end automatic citizenship for people born in the United States and has proposed "gold cards" that would allow foreigners to buy American citizenship for $5 million.
A poll by the AP and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) found that 46% of U.S. adults approve of Trump's handling of immigration, while about half say he has "gone too far" when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally.
GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
When President Trump returned to the White House in January, he promised to "restore competence and effectiveness" of the federal government, creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DOGE thus went from an internet meme to a government department given carte blanche to take drastic measures in the name of combating alleged waste, fraud and abuse, according to the US National Public Radio (NPR).
The small team of software engineers and others associated with billionaire Elon Musk quickly spread throughout federal agencies, where they encouraged the layoffs of tens of thousands of federal employees, dissolved agencies, cut spending on foreign food aid, medical research, basic office supplies and hacked into numerous sensitive data systems.
Musk's vision of DOGE, which would chainsaw government spending, ran into numerous problems. The initial $2 trillion savings target was reduced to $1 trillion, and recently lowered again to $150 billion - less than a tenth of Musk's original promise. Even that number may prove difficult to achieve. Many of DOGE's initiatives have been canceled or delayed because they were blocked in court or met with public discontent, NPR adds. END OF DIVERSITY AND EQUITY (DEI) PROGRAMS Trump has ordered the federal government to end its "diversity, equity and inclusion" (DEI) programs and investigate private companies and academic institutions believed to be involved in such "illegal" initiatives, the BBC notes. Trump's executive order has accelerated the actions of leading global companies such as "Meta" (Meta) and "Goldman Sachs" to reduce or eliminate these programs.
First introduced in the 1960s as part of the civil rights movement, early forms of DEI were an attempt to expand opportunities for black Americans. They later expanded to include other racial groups, women, and LGBTQ people.
The campaign was intensified and embraced by much of corporate America following the "Black Lives Matter" protests. in 2020, following the death of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis.
But according to its critics, DEI puts politics and race above the talent and personal qualities of individuals, creates division and is no longer needed in modern America, the BBC adds.
ECONOMY AND TARIFFS
Accusing its trading partners of having "robbered" the United States for decades, Trump launched a large-scale tariff policy that shook financial markets, weakened the dollar and prompted warnings of a slowdown in global economic output and an increased risk of recession, Reuters notes.
Trump has managed to change the economy through the levers of executive power, largely bypassing the Republican-controlled Congress. He has imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars, including on America's two biggest trading partners, Mexico and Canada, as well as the EU, and then delayed most of them. Chinese goods were taxed at a total of 145 percent, the Associated Press notes.
The trade sanctions have increased tensions with the European Union and prompted Japan and South Korea to rush to negotiate.
The president claims that his tariffs will create jobs in local factories, cover the cost of a tax cut plan that could cost more than $5 trillion over 10 years, pay down $36 trillion in national debt, and serve as leverage to renegotiate trade on terms favorable to the United States. But his tariffs could reduce the disposable income of the average household by $4,900, the "Budget Lab" warned. at Yale University.
During his campaign, Trump promised that the American economy would flourish under his leadership. He promised that prices would fall on his first day in office - similar to his demand to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office.
This happened for some products, such as gasoline. The prices of airline tickets and hotel rooms also fell, as did overall inflation. At the same time, average prices of goods were 2.8% higher in March from a year earlier, the smallest increase in almost four years, the AP points out.
FOREIGN POLICY
During his campaign, Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. But the conflict is still ongoing, and the president has had to admit that he is not in a position to arrange a quick end to it.
Washington is working unilaterally on a solution, but without the support of traditional US allies and with compromises that appear to favor the Russians over the Ukrainians. Even during his first phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump appeared to make serious concessions to Russian arguments, even though it was Russia that invaded Ukraine, Deutsche Welle reported.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was criticized by Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance during a visit to the White House in late February for being "ungrateful." As a result of the spat, military aid to Ukraine was suspended, although it was later restored.
President Trump recently criticized Ukraine for insisting that Crimea remain part of Ukrainian territory rather than simply handing the peninsula over to its enemy in order to facilitate a quick peace. In Ukraine, locals affected by the ongoing war were shocked by the sudden change in the position of their most important supporter, the German media added.
America's Western partners are also concerned about what Trump believes. He has questioned America's participation in the NATO military alliance. He has even said that the United States might refuse to defend NATO countries that he believes are not spending enough on their own defense if Russia attacks them. He eventually took back his words, but it has become abundantly clear to European countries that they can no longer rely on the United States in the way they used to, Deutsche Welle also reports.
Trump has insisted that the United States "get" Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish island. He has angered Canada by saying that it has no reason to exist and should become the 51st state of the United States. He has threatened to "take back" The Panama Canal, which was ceded to Panama in 1999. And he offered Washington the chance to take over the war-torn Gaza Strip and turn the Palestinian enclave into a Riviera-style resort.
Trump began his second term with a bid to end the war between Israel and the Hamas group. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate mogul turned diplomat, teamed up with Biden's Middle East adviser, Brett McGurk, to get the warring parties to agree to a temporary ceasefire that went into effect the day before Trump took office.
On the eve of his return to office, Trump took full credit for what he called an "epic" agreement that would lead to "lasting peace." in the Middle East, the AP reports.
The temporary ceasefire led to the release of 33 hostages held in Gaza and the release of about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. But the truce did not hold, and fighting resumed in March, with the two sides unable to reach an agreement on the return of the remaining 59 hostages, more than half of whom Israeli officials say are dead.
ORDERS
President Donald Trump made history in his first 100 days in office, breaking former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's record for the most executive orders issued in the same period, Fox News reported.
To date, Trump has signed more than 135 executive orders in the first 100 days of his second term - more than the 33 executive orders he signed in the first 100 days of his first term, and more than the 99 executive orders Roosevelt signed during the same period.
According to experts, the many executive orders indicate a shift in power away from the legislature and also show that Trump has a clear a set of priorities he wants to accomplish during this term.
Trump's approach signals that power is being shifted away from Congress and that the executive branch is gaining more and more lawmaking authority - a trend that is likely to continue under future administrations, James Bruegel, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who focuses on regulatory reform, told Fox News.