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This week marks one hundred days of President Trump's second term. He'll celebrate the milestone on Tuesday at a rally in Michigan.
Trump loves milestones. He loves anything that sort of has a top billing type of effect to it.
Josh Wingrove covers the White House for Bloomberg. The co authored a piece this week looking back on the president's first one hundred days, and he says that the mood at the White House is jubilant.
They think that they're killing it. I think right now they're happy with the flurry of executive orders. And I think it's important to understand that this administration of this landscape is like deferring to the President's avowed love of tariffs. And I think a lot of people try to figure out how to explain what's going on with this administration, and like a lot of it just spoils down to Donald Trump loves tariffs.
On April second, which the President calls Liberation Day, a pronounced a list of reciprocal tariffs tariffs on dozens of countries, including on some of the US's closest trading partners. He's paused those tariff hikes temporarily, but their scale and scope has become a, if not the signature policy of his first one hundred days. He's also upbended the United States's approach to foreign policy, and he's given billionaire Elon Musk
carte blanche to restructure the federal government. And he's cracked down on universities and law firms. The way the President has made a lot of these changes is through a flurry of executive orders.
Trump has done more than one hundred orders. Some of them are significant, you know, like dismantling the Department of Education or really dramatically trying to expand the president's powers and immigration.
Some are really minor, like rolling back a Biden era restriction on how much water can flow through showerheads.
He one hundred percent signed an executive order on water pressure. He signed on one of the days that the tariff news was blowing up. And this has been a bugaboo of his free years.
From minor to major, Trump has rolled out his executive orders with astonishing speed. Josh says that strategy has vulnerabilities and has left Trump's orders open to legal challenges, but he also says that speed has been one of the administration's most effective tools. It's created the effect of flooding the zone and allowed Trump to push the limits of his power.
We are seeing this plan put into place by Trump allies over months and years, the dramatically reshape the country, the government, the presidency, or try to, you know, with the stroke of his sharpie signature.
I'm David Gera and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show taking stock of the first one hundred days of President Trump's second term and his efforts to reshape the American presidency, Bloomberg's Josh Winrove says, one thing is certain. The first one hundred days of President Trump's second term have looked very different from his first term.
It is almost night and day different from the first term to the second term in terms of how they hit the ground running. And for instance, no one really knew who was in charge. Now there's like a clear delineation of authority. There's much less infighting, there's much less sort of public sniping and leaking and that sort of thing. And of course they know the mechanics of government much
better than they did. He was a group of outsiders in so many cases in twenty twenty five, it's staffed by people who not only in many cases worked with the president of his first term, but have spent months over the past few years preparing for when they get another kick at the can.
Josh says planning for Trump's second term actually started soon after his first one ended, with some aids from his first term, creating initiatives like Project twenty twenty five to lay the groundwork for the policies the administration is now rolling out.
And so they were able to hit the ground running in a very quick way, completely at odds with the first term, where they were sort of, you know, building the plane in mid air. Now again, a lot of questions I think remain for them. Can all these executive orders be codified? Will Republicans and Congress get together and
pass the bill? And of course Trump pledged quick wins on things like foreign affairs, a deal in Ukraine to and the fighting there and in Russia's invasion, Those have of course proven elusive so far.
I want to talk about some of the administration's top priorities during the first few months of this term, and let's start with the economy. Start with trade. How much has this rollout of these tariffs, of this trade policy gone according to plan.
They have clearly adapted. They would say that that's part and parcel of the process here, you know. But for instance, some of the early tariff announcements were on China, Canada and Mexico. And on the Chinese tariffs they kept them, but the Canada ones were delayed, enacted, clawed back, and still to this day remained in effect separate from the tariff regime that surprised everyone you know on April second and sent markets into a tailspin. So there has definitely
been adjustment. They've of course exempted some things like smartphones from some of their tariffs, but only because they plan on hit England with entirely separate tariff and by the way, one that is probably more legally sound and permanent and on stronger legal footing and could stand the test of
time more easily. So yes, it has been chaotic. What's also a fact is that he has said repeatedly that he believes in tariffs, and it seems clear that some tariff, and a big one is going to stay in place one way or another. He told Time this month Time magazine that if in a year tariff's of twenty thirty or even fifty percent remain in place, he will consider that a quote total victory.
What do you take away from the way he's reacted to feedback and pushback from some of his supporters. I think of the investor Bill Ackman. I think of the feedback that he's gotten in the markets when shortly after what he called Liberation Day, we saw red light flashing in the bond market. Is he reacting and what does that tell you just about his willingness to change or adjust.
He's essentially shrugged it off. We should know. Elon Musk has been sending anti tariff messages as well, and has seemed to have fallen from the sort of top tier of President Trump's orbit just a little bit over the course of this. Trump believes that tariffs are an end, not just a means to an end, and that is at odds with even some of his hawkage sort of tariff friendly staff, like for instance, Secretary Besson, too are
reporting is said. Secretary Besson favors using tariffs more as a tool to extract concessions, including reductions and other tariff levels, reductions of non tariff barriers, investments like hey, Volkswagen, build another plant in America rather than just having them for the sake of having them. By the way, David, as you know, there's a contradiction in so much of what Trump is doing. Right, He's talked about tariffs both as
an on shoring thing and as a revenue tool. Those things are of course in conflict with one another to a certain extent, and so I think Trump is not, you know, beefing with the bill Ackmans of the world, or the Ken Griffins of the world, or the Elons of the world per se, who have signaled, to varying extent,
some sort of unease with what is going on. And he is at least acknowledging the market reaction, talking about the yippie reaction that led to that April ninth, you know, clawback where he brought about five dozen countries from numbers above ten down to ten and then ratcheted up China. But on balance, the market seemed to react positively to that. So he's sort of shape shifting in real time and responding to it and not really getting into flame wars. But like he still is an avowed believer in.
Tariffs, sticking with the economy. Let's talk about taxes, and you brought this up just a moment ago. The way that he looks at tariffs is as a means by which he could pay for extending tax cuts. What is the administration's current plan for doing that.
The tariff and tax policy is moving as quickly as it could reasonably move. I mean, they are hoping for significant progress on that in the next few months. And what they will do is not only extend the expiring tax cuts, which by the way, need action. Right barring them doing something, they go away. These go the way taxes go up as opposed to them just trying to enact a proactive tax cut. But they do also want to enact proactive tax cuts on top of that, including
his no tax on tips pledge. They've flirted with doing a higher tax rate on millionaires or the Trump has sort of sent mixed messages about that, seems to be more or less distancing himself from it, at least politically, so they're looking at ways to do this there. Republicans in Congress are also looking at tools to kind of game the math a little bit and make the tax cut extension not count as a CBO score. Even though of course it would count in terms of revenue, So
all these things are in the mix. Trump sort of vision is that tax cuts else with tariffs, in particular tax cuts for domestic manufacturing potentially will drive a rebound, and that spending cuts led by Elon Musk and his DOGE efforts and additional revenues tariff revenues will either shrink the deficit or help facilitate those tax cuts.
On that point, and this was a dramatic start to this term, the work of Elon Musk and his small team kind of going through various agencies and bureaus and making cuts and laying off workers. Is there any evidence to suggest that that's made any kind of a difference in terms of what the government spending. Has it been a cost saver? Broadly speaking, it's.
Been a cost saver, But the indications are that it's much more modest than was initially pledged. Certainly compared to mister Musk's initial projection of two trillion in the annual savings on a federal budget of about seven trillion, I mean, it's going to come in way, way, way, way way below that. I mean they're talking about something like one hundred and fifty billion memory serves right now, so they're
going to save money but much less. And what we've seen a lot of reversals on is some of the staffing cuts save made. You know, they fire people and then have to bring them back, either because a court tells them to or because they realize that people were doing a job that they didn't want to do without. But it has produced some savings and it's brought with it a bit of a political impact, including potentially a
political price. But Trump has so far has sort of been almost gleeful to be associated with it because he wants to be seen to be breaking down the status quo.
Coming up an update on another policy priority for the White House, immigration and how that's part of a bigger fight over the limits of a president's power playing out in courtrooms across the country. A hallmark of the first one hundred days of President Trump's second term has been
his effort to broadly reshape immigration policy. Over the last few months, he's repealed temporary protected status for Venezuelans, sent additional troops to the US Mexico border, and use the seventeen ninety eight Alien Enemy Act to speed up the deportation process. So I asked Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove how the implementation of these policies has gone so far.
Trump consistently says that he thinks the election was substantially about the border, and so they wanted to come out swinging on border things. Along the border. He's had success in dramatically reducing border crossings. The numbers speak for themselves.
There's a lot of reasons for that. The tension and the potential constitutional crisis has come on their efforts within the country to sort of grab people and remove them, which is an imperfect process and of course has led to in at least a couple of cases, people being sent away to an El Salvadori in prison that a court has ordered the government to quote facilitate the return of, as well as some admitted errors of the government in its own deportations. Now, the politics of this are messy.
Democrats do seem split on this issue, but the ones leaning into it, of course are saying that due process matters whether you're a documented citizen or not, and so to be able to sort of disappear anyone to an El Salvadori in prison overnight raises of course, all kinds of questions where you're headed. Though there's potentially a standoff
with the Supreme Court. Trump has said he will listen to this Supreme Court, although in previous rulings, sort of eye of the beholder on whether you believe that the administration is hewing to the exact language of the Court's order. They of course argue that they are. But the immigration fight is proving more unpopular as time goes on. The low hanging fruit for Trump of closing the border, cracking
down on gangs and criminals, all that is popular. What is less popular is sort of extra judicial dead of knight grabbing of people, documented people and sending them away.
Josh, the courts are the crucible in which the president is fighting this fight over the limits of executive power. I'm curious, as you watch all of these many fights unfolding and courts across the country, what are the conflicts that you're paying the closest attention to that will tell you what the limits of that power, in fact are.
It's probably the immigration cases. But I think the administration does view this as a fight over executive power, and in their mind they are arguing that it is their power to reshape the bureaucracy and the agencies and the departments that is being stymied either by the bureaucracy or by court orders on behalf of the bureaucracy. Of course, if they find themselves as they have, in sort of open conflict with a court order, that gets into a pretty cut and dry clash of the executive and judicial
branches pretty quickly. But right now Trump is definitely, by definition testing and trying to remake what he and conservatives believe has been this sort of mandate creep of the bureaucracy that has made it impossible for presidents to get anything done expeditiously.
Then, of course there's President Trump's approach to foreign policy. In addition to his America First trade policies, he scrapped USAID ending programs critical to promoting America's soft power overseas and changed how the US interacts with its allies on
the world stage. Talking about how much the United States's role in the world has changed over the first hundred days of President Trump's second term, and I think there's probably no clearer example than how it has regarded and dealt with in Ala and Europe, with Ukraine, how much is that emblematic of the way the US now sees its traditional allies what we've seen in terms of how that relationship is deteriorated.
President Trump is just very transactional on these things, and with you, he is surprised at G seven counterparts by coming in and saying, Russia is in a strong position. You know, We've got to end this war. Otherwise Russia's going to run rough shot all over Ukraine. The view of the virtually the rest of the G seven was that Putin was kind of on the ropes and that if you kept giving weapons to Ukraine that things might turn.
But it is true that appetite for this conflict to continue is waning in many corners of the world, and so we'll see where it goes. But Trump is pulling back on what are traditional alliances, or at least alignments of American either military power or foreign policy, or interest
abroad or soft power abroad. But the question is is, of course, is there a price for this, right like shutting down elements of the State Department will create lanes invariably in corners of the world for Russia and China to expand its influence. Shutting down USAID will curtail the ability of the US to demonstrate soft power around the world, and waging these teriff fights will of course upset not only other governments and countries that have traditionally been US allies,
but the people in them. Trump wants to sell more US goods abroad. It is a fair question whether Europeans, Canadians, Japanese Australians are going to want to buy US goods when they feel their country is being batted around on the teriff fight. So you know, he has, I think a clear approach here. The response, I think is very unclear. And we don't know where the tariff stuff is going to settle. We don't know where the sort of boycott effective consumers abroad is going to settle. We don't know
where the economy is going to settle. We don't know what Vladimir Putin will do with this deal that's been hanging on the table for weeks ish.
One hundred days an arbitrary metric milestone. You've been talking to President Trump's allies and aids. How do they see it and what do they say about it? As a jumping off point for the next hundred days and two hundred days and the rest of his term.
There is a reason why, whether it's one hundred or two hundred or fifty or whatever people tend to measure the early days of administration. It's because you lose steam and you try to do things, You try to get things through the Congress before the midterms, when, of course, historically, although not necessarily always, the governing party loses at least
the House. And so Trump is raising the clock and that is why he's rushing things in one hundred days, and that's why they teed up over one hundred executive orders to roll out in those one hundred days. Going forward, in the next hundred days, I think we're going to focus a ton on trade. They're trying to get something done with China, and they have a series of other national security slash foreign policy discussions with Iran of course in Ukraine that they're trying to get some sort of
resolution on. And so I think he's going to try to pivot his attention to that, and he will continue to face pressure about what all these tariffs are going to do to the American economy and the American markets and the American bond market, what have you, and he'll no doubt be under pressure to adjust as things go.
But the dream of the administration is that they land a reconciliation bill, they get the tax cuts they wanted, the tariff stuff, settles in a place that markets can live with, and that they notch a bunch of wins on foreign policy. That is their dream. But of course there are warning signs flashing on literally all of those.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode is produced by David Fox and Julia Press, with support from Rachel Lewis Krisky. It was edited by Tracy Sanielson, Justin Sink, and Josh Wingrove. It was fact checked by Adriana Tapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sagia. Special thanks to Bloomberg's White House team. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our deputy executive producer is Julia Weaver. Our executive producer
is Nicole Beemster Boor. Sage Bauman is Blomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.