Trump's next 100 days could be a lot harder for him

Next week marks 100 days of the second Trump term, and an interesting new milestone could be coming into view: the high-water mark of the 78-year-old leader's power. EPA

President Donald Trump's second term has seen an unprecedented blitzkrieg on America's governing norms, with his administration moving to overturn constitutional rights and protections, ignore the Supreme Court and cut tens of thousands of jobs from the federal government.

All of this and more happened in three months, delighting Mr Trump's supporters, who say he is doing exactly what they wanted him to, especially his clampdown on immigration.

Republican politicians have largely backed the President despite him grabbing at some of Congress's authorities over trade and spending. And the Democrats remain in disarray, incapable of offering a coherent alternative narrative, giving Mr Trump an air of untouchability.

Yet things can change quickly in politics. Next week marks 100 days of the second Trump term, and an interesting new milestone could be coming into view: the high-water mark of the 78-year-old leader's power.

Like a fighter in the ring stunning his opponent with one-two jabs, Mr Trump has left his naysayers and critics dazed and wobbly with an incessant stream of executive orders (139 and counting) and decrees.

But instead of pausing for breath and taking a step back to assess his next move, Mr Trump has kept on punching – and is starting to miss the mark.

The most obvious example is his tariffs policy. Trying to address some of the deleterious effects of globalisation on US and western workers is a worthy goal, but Mr Trump's approach has been disastrous.

Based on convictions he developed in the 1980s when Japan was America's top economic rival, Mr Trump is trying to uproot the same globalised trading system that the US pushed on the rest of the world for decades. He wants to resurrect America as a manufacturing powerhouse and is convinced his tariffs will bring the US untold wealth, even though it is American companies and consumers that must pay the bills.

To achieve this, he is bullying friends and foes alike with “reciprocal” tariffs that have little to do with supposed taxes charged by other countries.

Many economists warn that his policies will lead to shortages on American shop shelves, increased prices as tariff costs are passed on to the consumer and eventually to a recession as supply chains buckle.

Mr Trump was forced this week to reckon with the reality of the financial markets, which took another nosedive on Monday as he seemed close to attempting to fire Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, something Mr Powell maintains the President has no authority to do.

In his first term, Mr Trump bragged about stock market highs, so we know he would have been feeling queasy watching all the major indices bleed red for weeks on end.

Amid the rout, he insisted he wouldn't fire Mr Powell and he has ordered a 90-day pause on his tariffs on all countries except China. Few expect him to fully resume the tariffs when the time comes in July.

The markets acted as an unexpected check on Mr Trump's power, but not before he sustained political damage. According to a Pew Research Centre poll this week, only 40 per cent of Americans approve of how he’s handling the job – a decline of 7 percentage points from February and the lowest level of any recent president at this point in their term.

Another target of the Trump administration's ire this year has been American universities and their purported support of pro-Palestinian student protests, which Republicans claim were anti-Semitic. Mr Trump wants to cut multibillion-dollar research grants unless institutions agree to an ideological takeover by the government. Several acquiesced but Harvard University this month rejected demands for control of its student body and is now suing the government for trying to freeze its research grants. Other universities are now joining the pushback.

The Trump administration’s philosophy is to move fast, break things and see what policies it can push through before judicial or public disapproval forces a change in course. That disapproval is only going to increase as the economy sours and voters blame Mr Trump.

The President has long prided himself in ignoring counsel, and is so certain in his convictions that he recently displayed red baseball caps in the Oval Office emblazoned with the phrase “Trump was right about everything!”

“I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,” he famously said back in 2018.

But recent weeks have shown that Mr Trump must contend with forces much bigger than his own intuition, and his next 100 days in office are likely to be harder for him than the first.

President Donald Trump holds up a hat as he talks with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington. AP