Trump's First 100 Days Of Project 2025 Proved His Critics Right
Trump’s first 100 days have been defined by chaos, incompetence, and authoritarian overreach. Trump is recklessly pursuing a radical agenda and turning the country and the world against him.
Thank you for reading! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value in-depth analysis through a pro-democracy lens, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.
100 days ago, Donald Trump stood in the United States Capitol—the same building where his supporters once assaulted police officers in a violent attempt to unlawfully overturn his 2020 election loss. Surrounded by supporters and billionaires who once condemned him, Trump took the presidential oath of office, swearing to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His hand was not placed on the Bible.
Since Inauguration Day, President Trump has frenetically worked to undermine that very Constitution, while federal courts across the country have tried to preserve, protect, and defend American democracy from him.
It turns out that those who were deemed “alarmists” for warning about Trump’s autocratic ambitions were actually realists.
Now, with his approval rating at the lowest of any president at this point in their term in seven decades, it’s clear that the majority of Americans believe Trump has dangerously overreached, as predicted.
President Trump’s first 100 days have been defined by chaos, incompetence, and authoritarian overreach. Trump and his team of loyalists have moved with reckless abandon in their effort to gut the federal bureaucracy, eliminate pockets of independence in the executive branch, unilaterally dismantle agencies, reshape the global order by undermining economic and diplomatic alliances, target civil liberties, and consolidate power in the presidency.
Within hours of being sworn in, President Trump signed a flurry of executive orders, over two-thirds of which were directly aligned with Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation-led policy and personnel operation that laid out exactly how the next Republican president should reshape the federal government into a tool of the far right. The agenda included replacing civil servants with trained Trump loyalists, gutting agencies, consolidating power in the White House, and executing a far-right agenda that targets civil liberties.
President Ronald Reagan implemented over 60% of the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations outlined in its first “Mandate for Leadership” in 1981, which was far less extreme than its 2025 recommendations. President Trump looks on pace to match or exceed that, according to the Project 2025 tracker, which claims Trump has already pursued over 40% of Project 2025’s goals.
There’s a reason former Project 2025 Director Paul Dans said Trump's execution of their blueprint is "way beyond my wildest dreams.”
President Trump has reinstated Schedule F to strip civil service protections from federal workers, attempted mass purges of federal workers, moved to unilaterally dismantle agencies like the Education Department, pursued extreme immigration crackdowns, rolled back Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, withdrew from global multilateral agreements, signed anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders, and implemented environmental regulation rollbacks. All of this is straight out of Project 2025’s playbook.
After lying about his ties to Project 2025, which was organized with the help of dozens of former Trump officials, Trump hired at least 11 Project 2025 authors, contributors, and advisory board members for top jobs. Most notably, Russell Vought as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought is a self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on executive power and was in charge of crafting Project 2025’s first 180-day plan.
While Elon Musk has been getting most of the attention, Vought is the real mastermind behind Trump’s remaking of the federal bureaucracy. Vought has long been a proponent of the right-wing unitary executive theory, the stripping of civil service protections from federal workers, the gutting of agencies, the illegal use of impoundment to unilaterally freeze federal funds, and the elimination of independence from agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
All of that is currently being pursued, and none of this is surprising.
When I first came across Project 2025’s 922-page policy playbook in 2023, I began relentlessly covering it in my newsletter, publishing over 40 analysis pieces on Project 2025 and making several MSNBC appearances before the 2024 election. I tried to warn the public of what was to come, and so did many other researchers and journalists. And of course, the country received dire warnings from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Unfortunately, far too many Americans didn’t heed these warnings. Now, we’re seeing Project 2025’s vision come to life, although more incompetently than many may have imagined.
This is a President Trump without guardrails. There is no John Kelly as Chief of Staff to rein him in. No Mark Esper at Defense to tell him no. No Steve Mnuchin at Treasury to restrict his tariff impulses. No Don McGahn as Legal Counsel to advise him against illegal moves. There are only loyalists jockeying for position.
When the central incentive structure within an administration is to flatter the egomaniacal president instead of looking out for the best interests of America, what you get is Trump’s first 100 days—Destructive policy and gaslighting justifications for them.
Abraham Lincoln had a team of rivals. Donald Trump has a team of sycophants.
Far from the meritocracy the Trump administration preached amid their attacks on DEI, we see an administration rife with unqualified stooges. The constant backtracking of policies, shifting explanations for their mistakes, incompetent exposure of classified material, firehose of disinformation, and overall chaos are a direct result of Trump’s prioritization of loyalty above all else.
Personnel is policy. If you hire incompetent people, you will get incompetent policy implementation.
While President Trump pursues his agenda with ferocious speed, it’s important to acknowledge that he’s failing in more ways than he’s succeeding.
There have been over 120 court rulings at least temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s actions, according to The New York Times' tracking tool. This avalanche of court losses does not indicate a partisan judiciary out to get President Trump, as his allies claim. To the contrary, this mountain of injunctions reflects the immune system of democracy rejecting Trump’s expansive view of executive power.
President Trump’s attacks on civil liberties have alarmed federal judges across the country. Trump’s cruel deportations of immigrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the Salvadoran mega prison, revocations of visas from students with differing political opinions, threats to the funding of universities and schools Trump feels hold ideologies he opposes, and orders for his own DOJ to investigate former administration officials who criticized him has reminded Americans just how dangerous an unchecked Trump is to our fundamental freedoms.
Where the Republican-led legislative branch has failed to be a coequal check on Trump, the judiciary has stepped up. But how far the courts will go in the face of Trump’s active defiance of multiple court orders remains to be seen.
The legal backlash is just the beginning of America’s rejection of Trump’s authoritarianism.
The Elon Musk-led effort to take a chainsaw to the administrative state culminated in countless mistakes as the careless cuts backfired, resulting in political backlash in town halls and off-year elections across the country.
Compounding this political backlash is President Trump’s nonsensical tariff policy, which is amplifying attention on his other failings. The Trump administration has yet to articulate a coherent long-term end goal for its indecisive approach to trade. Trump’s blanket tariffs sent global markets into turmoil. Even if he rolls back all these measures, the long-term damage is done.
By violating trade deals he negotiated and antagonizing America’s allies, Trump is eroding America’s global standing. It will take years, perhaps decades, to rebuild the trust Trump has destroyed in three months.
President Trump could’ve walked into office and coasted on President Biden’s economy, which was objectively the envy of the world. Instead, Trump has made his mood an economic indicator. How can allies, trading partners, or business leaders make long-term investment decisions when the president could wake up any day and decide to unilaterally tank global markets?
While Trump’s unstable approach to the economy rattles allies, his foreign policy is jeopardizing 75 years of the post-World War II order. As we’ve seen in the President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s disgraceful treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, it’s been clear that the core of Trump’s foreign policy is a shift away from democratic allies and toward authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At home, Americans are feeling the volatility of Trump’s mind in their 401(k)s. As a result, the economy, Trump’s biggest perceived strength, has become one of his biggest polling weaknesses.
There has been a real legal, political, and moral backlash to Trump’s second term that has reawakened an opposition his allies declared premature victory over. Trump is misreading his mandate and turning the country against him in the process.
Trump’s declining approval numbers indicate that the American people are beginning to reckon with an unmistakable truth. Trump is exactly who his critics warned he is: An unhinged, unprincipled man who desperately wants absolute power, but has absolutely no discipline.
There is no longer any question about who Trump is or how far he’s willing to push democracy to the brink in pursuit of his self-centered goals. The only question that remains is how forcefully America’s institutions, courts, lawmakers, media, and voters will push back—and whether that will be enough to meet the moment.
Very well summarized, Ahmed. I like the idea that we can all be the immune system fighting this deadly virus.