Shock and Subordination: The First 100 Days of Trump 2.0
Trump's desire for power seems limitless. But people are beginning to wake up to the real-world consequences of his policies.
From the MAGA perspective, Trump has spent the first 100 days of his second term well. Clearly intent on making better use of his time than the last time around, Trump has embarked on what I have called a blitzkrieg presidency: a frenetic politics of shock-and-awe intent on “flooding the zone.” Policies range from from the bizarre, such as ordering the federal government to stop buying paper straws, to the world-impacting, like the infamous April 2nd tariffs. As the Washington Post writes, “No president in modern times has moved more swiftly than Trump to remake so many parts of government, as well as some outside institutions.” In so doing, the 47th president seems to have hoped to disorient and overwhelm any opposition to his administration’s far-reaching program of institutional, economic, and cultural transformation.
By April 25th, Trump had issued more than two hundred executive orders, far more than any of his recent predecessors—though as multiple critics have pointed out, the exact obligations these orders have given rise to remain dubious; as Hillary Clinton has observed, “Executive orders are not royal decrees.” Trump has in effect gone to war on the judiciary, ignoring judges’ orders, and even arresting a judge in Wisconsin. Trump 2.0 clearly means business in a way that Trump 1.0 simply didn’t, which almost immediately got off to an amateurish start with Sean Spicer’s “abnormal press conference,” as the New Yorker described it. The first term was beset with chaos and undermined by halting action, ultimately resulting in Biden defeating Trump by nearly 7 million votes in 2020.
This time around things are different.
On April 2nd, or “Liberation Day,” tariffs were imposed on most parts of the world at levels not seen since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Trump’s tariffs have largely had a disastrous effect on market confidence and US consumer sentiment, now at its lowest level since May 2020. But after some backtracking and a “pause” (which isn’t really a pause), the truly exorbitant protectionist rates have been reserved for China; under the influence of China hawks like Pete Navarro, the Trump administration appears intent on attempting to single out China and isolate it, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in April.
Meanwhile, academic institutions are being disciplined, all with the aim of stamping out progressive, or even just minimally critical, thought from college campuses; as J. D. Vance said back in 2021, in an allusion to a remark made by Nixon in the 1970s, “The professors are the enemy.” Trump 2.0’s campaign against academe aims to quell dissent and stamp out the kind of autonomous thinking that, at its best, is the hallmark of the university as an institution.
To Eject and Confine
Strikingly, a machinery of deportation, kidnapping, and brutal incarceration is being mobilized, aided most conspicuously by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who is, of course, just one cog in the American “expulsion-industrial” complex. Trump’s ICE agency celebrated “record-breaking immigration enforcement in the US interior” at the 100 day-mark, arresting 66,000 individuals and deporting some 65,000 “illegal aliens” (a horrific phrase).
The Trump-Bukele axis has been long in the works. Last year, the Congressional El Salvador Caucus was established, founded by the now-disgraced Matt Gaetz. Under the terms of their unholy alignment, individuals like Kilmar Abrego Garcia have been denied due process and sent to the hellhole dungeon CECOT, a “Terrorism Confinement Center” an hour’s drive from San Salvador that practically makes California’s Pelican Bay look like a holiday camp.
One revealing, and chilling, detail from CECOT life: Inmates are “never allowed outdoors” in this prison that can hold 40,000 prisoners who are, moreover, denied any form of animal protein and given very little in the way of plant-based proteins. “Forbidden to use utensils,” the New York Times reports, inmates “eat paltry meals—tortillas, rice, beans, instant pasta—with their hands. It makes for a malnourished, lethargic, and compliant prisoner population, kept in cells for 23.5 hours a day. “Some are held in solitary confinement cells, which are completely dark,” Human Rights Watch records. One telling detail shown in a video report from the facility: In one mega-cells, the toilet was was conspicuously located next to the water basin from which prisoners draw all their drinking water—an arrangement practically guaranteed to result in pathogenic exposure. By design, CECOT appears predicated on deprivation, control, even terror—ironic for an institution purportedly meant to contain terrorism. CECOT’s medieval cruelty combined with penal austerity and industrial-style panoptic surveillance makes for a uniquely degrading institution.
Little wonder, then, that Trump has embraced Bukele and, by implication, CECOT: The “El Salvador solution” allows him to pose as the strongman Father-figure who will beat back (purportedly) criminal immigrants and protect the (allegedly) innocent majority, all while evading constitutional prohibitions on “cruel and unusual” punishment. During Bukele’s White House visit in mid-April, Trump warned that “homegrowns are next,” meaning that US citizens could find themselves exiled or banished—“deported” isn’t the right word, for these aren’t non-nationals—to a CECOT-like dungeon in the near future. Trump asked that Bukele “build about five more places” like CECOT, appearing to set in motion plans to construct American-funded gulags in this Central American country, which is quickly becoming a vassal in the starkest sense, a mere appendage to the MAGAmerican Empire.
Subordination and Coordination
To what end is all this being done? What the first 100 days have been about, fundamentally, is the implementation of a systematic program of subordination and coordination. Trump is asserting his authority over state, civil society, and the market—in other words, the totality of societal existence. All social, cultural, and economic actors are being forced to relate to the Trump administration one way or another. The administration’s assertion of authority may not always be successful, and there may even be a number of misfirings in the months and years ahead. But the attempt at asserting this near-total control is in itself concerning.
The Trump administration has tried to effect a kind of enforced submission of numerous consequential institutions and actors, including universities, Big Law (with multiple major law firms largely submitting to Trump’s dictates, the most recent of which have promised to provide $600 million in pro bono work “to causes supported by the president”), and the media (the target of multiple Trump lawsuits, including a highly consequential battle with CBS over 60 Minutes). Culturally, it’s telling that a sitting US president would essentially name themselves board chair of an institution like the Kennedy Center: It shows the granular nature of Trump’s concern with remaking the American cultural landscape. LGBTQ events around Pride Month have been cancelled by the Kennedy Center.
In the realm of the economy, while there is some speculation that Trump has bought into the outlandish theory that tariffs could ultimately replace income taxation as the government’s leading source of revenue, which his own recent comments suggest, far more important is the power tariffs give the state over corporations through the power of exemptions. As Carl Schmitt famously observed in the 1920s: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.” With tariffs, Trump can essentially control the lifeblood of all trade-dependent businesses: His administration can in effect preside over, precisely, the “state of exception” governing these firms, their wider sectors, and geographic partners. Tariffs create the possibility of a court-like system of economic tyranny in which corporate petitioners must grovel before their ruler, prostrating themselves before almighty Trump to “make a deal” in return for possible relief. This is, in a nutshell, fascist economics. Apple’s announcement that it aims to shift production of US-bound iPhones from China to India by the end of 2026, is a stunning example of corporate America, and Silicon Valley more narrowly, bending the knee to the Trump administration.
Signs of Resistance
Still, the shock-and-awe tactic hasn’t been nearly as successful as Trump may have hoped. Economists now believe the risk of recession, both for the US and global economy, is greater than it has been in years. Millions of Americans have taken to the streets—most notably, the Hands Off protests in early April saw an estimated three to five million participants—to rally against what amounts to a revolutionary remaking of the American social and political order. Numerous lawsuits opposed to various elements of the Trump agenda have been launched, whether from businesses challenging the consequences of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs or civil-society actors bristling against an immigration crackdown that has run roughshod over the right to due process, and more. A Trump 2.0 “Litigation Tracker” currently counts more than 200 ongoing cases against the administration.
Both allies and adversaries on the world stage, too, are pushing back against Trump’s swaggering neomercantilism, including an assertive China that so far shows little sign of backing down from a trade war with the world’s number-one economic power. As one BBC commentator put it: “Beijing is not going to surrender.” Some social media users in China reportedly refer, half-jokingly, to Trump as Chuān Jiànguó or “Trump the Nation-Builder,” a “pseudo-Chinese name” riffing on the idea that Trump’s economic policies are actually aiding China’s rise.
Additionally, Europe is more unified than ever, largely against the US, following Trump’s ugly attack on Zelenskyy in an awful Oval Office showdown in late February. Trump’s imperialist designs on Greenland, a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, itself a NATO ally and loyal participant in the US’ post-9/11 wars, haven’t helped either.
Trump failed, too, in his bungling efforts to bring Canadian voters to his camp. He committed the almost comical tactical blunder of recommending—on election day—that Canadians vote for a nameless candidate who would fit the MAGA ideological bill, while simultaneously threatening to turn his northern neighbor into a “51st state.” Unsurprisingly, Canadians ended up favoring Mark Carney’s Liberal Party. In his victory speech, Prime Minister Carney said: “President Trump is trying to break us, so that America can own us. That will . . . never, ever happen.”
In short, Trump has made skeptics out of friends, and strengthened the hand of his adversaries.
If Trump is a fascist, which I have argued he is, then his attempt to forge a specifically American version of fascism now seems less certain than it did when he first took office in January. For one thing, business leaders are beginning to wake up. Amidst declining business activity in the country’s second-largest state economy, Texas, executives there “used words like ‘chaos’ and ‘insanity’ to describe the turmoil spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariffs,” according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. A Republican president losing Texas business conservatives is remarkable.
Similarly, and quite sensibly, the e-commerce giant Amazon reported that it now plans to display how much Trump’s tariffs will cost consumers next to each item listed on its website, which the administration immediately labeled a “hostile and political act.” (Amazon later walked back the proposed changes after Trump pressured Amazon owner Jeff Bezos.) MAGA is fracturing the American capitalist class, with the trade-oriented merchant class-fraction increasingly hostile toward Trump 2.0. Elon Musk’s disparaging remarks about Navarro being a “moron” and his repeated efforts to block the tariffs from being implemented are another case in point. The contradictions are intensifying, just as I predicted they would when I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration.
More democratically, Trump’s 100-day approval rating is lower than that of any other president in the past 80 years. At the near-100-day mark, a poll showed that 39 percent thought Trump had been a “terrible” president, whereas only 18 percent thought he had been “great.” Many are finding that the far-right’s revolutionary remaking of the state, social order, and economy threatens their livelihoods. Approval ratings won’t stop fascists in their tracks, of course, but the socio-political legitimacy that any revolutionary project necessarily relies upon has deteriorated rapidly. Trumpism, as a specifically American invariant of 21st-century fascism is, quite simply, not very popular: Whether that in itself will be enough to derail this revolution from the right remains to be seen.