Here’s What Trump Has Done During His First 100 Days in Office

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re coming up over the three-month mark or the proverbial “100 days” are on the horizon of a new administration.

When that happens, people like to take stock of it. Given the furious pushback against Trump—both from the Left, from the Democratic Party, and many centrist independents, even libertarian Republicans—you’d think that things were not going well.

But a recent poll by CNN showed that President Donald Trump had wide approval. Another poll has just come out where he was up to 54%. Given the media hostility, you would think that he would be completely negative, but he’s not. He has the confidence of the majority of the American people. Why is that? Let’s just take a quick tour of what he’s done in the first 100 days.

He has completely reversed 10,000 people coming in a day—over 300,000 a month, 12 million in four years—to essentially 97%, 98% of the border is secure. In fact, there is no open border now.

Now he has pivoted to try to address the 12 million people that former President Joe Biden not only let in but scattered all over the United States on often state, federal, and local subsidies. That’s gonna be a task. But he has shut the border. No comprehensive immigration reform. None of the things they said was necessary. None of the things that said that it was impossible, that hampered by. He just did it. We’ve never seen anything like it.

He has revolutionized energy. There is no New Green Deal. There’s no electric vehicle mandate. We’re not going to be funding more boondoggles of high-speed rail. We’re going to burn clean coal, restore the Appalachian coal fields, those in the West as well. We’re leasing out new oil fields. We’re trying to get liquid national gas shipped to Europe, that’s in dire need of it. We’re continuing fracking.

We’re producing so much energy that the price of oil has gone—at one point in the Biden administration, it was $120 a barrel. It’s down to almost $60. And by the way, he’s not draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And he won’t do that before a midterm. If anything, he will begin filling it again pretty soon.

On the diversity, equity, and inclusion front, he didn’t have to get into DEI. That’s the third rail. He just said it’s over with because it violates the recent Supreme Court ruling that found that Harvard and the University of North Carolina were culpable for racist practices against Asian-American applicants.

The law is on Donald Trump’s side. The court decisions are on Donald Trump’s side. And now DEI is being purged from government auspices and private corporations.

Everybody says, “I’m Rip Van Winkle. I woke up. What were we doing?” We were doing exactly the opposite of what Martin Luther King—we were judging people by the color of their skin, by their superficial appearance, not the content of their character. That is a revolution.

And then suddenly everybody said he wiped out the stock market because he insisted on not just free trade but fair trade. And he said he was going to sanction China. And he did. Now all of a sudden we have 70 countries trying to negotiate. And as I’m speaking, nations such as Italy or Japan want to make a deal. What is a deal? A deal is they’re not going to run up surpluses at the same extent.

We have a $1.1 trillion trade deficit. Donald Trump is going to get in the next few weeks a few major nations, and once he does—to make a deal—all the others will not want to be without a chair when the music stops. They will want to follow. When they follow, China will be eager to negotiate because its efforts to get Europe on its side have failed.

If you look very quickly abroad, Donald Trump is still trying to find peace. And no, he’s not Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet. He’s been very tough on Putin. He suggests he would have a secondary oil boycott on nations that bought Russian oil, something Biden never imagined. But he is getting frustrated by both sides. And he’s putting renewed pressure.

In the Middle East, Iran is at its weakest point. Israel’s ready to take out the nuclear facilities, to the extent it cannot without sophisticated, heavy bombers. And Donald Trump is not looking for an optional war. He’s telling the Iranians, “Time is running out. Settle. Dismantle your nuclear facilities or else.”

The Red Sea is open for navigation. The Houthis are in retreat. There is nobody in the United States who wants to negotiate with Hamas or Hezbollah. It’s an entirely new game.

China is very worried that its companies are gonna be delisted, that are fraudulent, from the stock market in the United States. They’re very worried. There are 300,000 students—that is their pipeline to the ex-appropriation of technology in the United States—might have to go home. There’s so many levers to pull against China and so much culpability on their part that I think they will make a deal.

So what am I getting at? Forget what the media says. Forget what his opponent said. Forget Kilmar Abrego Garcia, forget Luigi Mangione, all of these distractions. The first 100 days have been revolutionary. We’ve never seen anything like it, not during the Reagan administration, not during FDR, in terms of the magnitude of the changes. And that is why people are furious.

No one in their right mind thought anybody would try to stage a counterrevolution and be so successful in the first 100 days.

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