When Stephen Miller left the White House in 2021, the key adviser to Donald Trump turned in his badge with a parting quip: “I’ll see you in four years.”
Almost immediately, Miller and a cadre of loyalists set about devising a flurry of actions and orders they’d unleash if the 45th president was able to mount a comeback.
The fine print was later drawn up in a nondescript building in West Palm Beach, the nerve center of Trump’s 2024 campaign and, eventually, the transition. A floor-to-ceiling likeness of Trump bearing the words “Welcome to the Thunderdome” – covered one wall. The team repackaged some of Trump’s first-term priorities to make them more likely to become entrenched. And they were girded for legal fights they expected, if not sought – in part thanks to the work of conservative groups founded by Miller and other Trump allies after his 2020 election loss.
That preparation, described by people familiar with the process, enabled what has been a defining feature of the first 100 days of Trump’s second term: A breakneck speed that is both one of the administration’s most effective tools and most glaring vulnerabilities.
It allowed Trump to put his black Sharpie signature on a dizzying number of executive orders on everything from energy to education and diversity efforts that have overwhelmed opponents of his MAGA agenda and exploited the slow-moving nature of court challenges. Senior administration officials tout their rapidly enacted immigration policies as helping to dramatically slow illegal crossings at the US Southern border.
But the quick tempo has also sent the administration hurtling toward economic and political peril. The president’s hastily implemented and frequently revised tariff policies have sown deep uncertainty among trading partners and in financial markets. Economists say the levies have increased the odds of a US recession – a potentially devastating blow to credibility for a president who reclaimed the White House on the promise of taming price increases and delivering prosperity.
“The president was elected to tackle the border crisis and to address the economy,” said Marc Short, a first-term Trump aide. “One he is doing well and one he is not.”
Another signature effort, Elon Musk’s DOGE cost-cutting campaign, has fueled chaos as it moved rapidly to fire thousands of government employees and gut a raft of programs, including initiatives some Republicans would have preferred to keep.
Now Trump faces the enormous challenge of implementing the cavalcade of executive orders he has enacted, a task that is likely to be especially daunting when the ranks of staff remain thin at key agencies such as Treasury, Commerce and the Energy Department.
“It’s nice that they’re moving quickly, but this is going to take persistent effort for all of the four years,” said Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Trump’s aggressive pace is accompanied by greater confidence in his political instincts and an inner circle even more stocked than last time with loyalists. That combination has left him emboldened to test the limits of executive power like never before, such as his exploration of whether he can fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell – an idea he appears to have backed away from.
Trump and his team say they’ve learned lessons from the first term about who to hire and how to effectively ingrain their agenda – even as polls offer warning signs that his moves so far are weighing on his popularity. Trump heads to Michigan Tuesday to tout his manufacturing agenda and 100-day blitz.
“We’re setting records right now – we’re getting more things approved than any president has ever done in the first 100 days; it’s not even close,” Trump said in an April 8 speech. “And we’re going to continue that way, if not more so.”
Feedback Loop of Affirmation
Trump has slipped comfortably back into the trappings of the presidency. He spends time cloistered in the White House and decamps nearly every weekend to Palm Beach, humming with MAGA acolytes and administration officials. Trump observed a strike on the Houthis from a temporary situation room set up at the golf club.
He remains a voracious consumer of cable television and has been listening to podcasts when he can’t sleep, including one on the Civil War and another by his crypto adviser, David Sacks, according to a person familiar with his habits.
One former president is occupying his mind: William McKinley, who as a member of Congress rolled out tariffs on the scale Trump is now contemplating. McKinley’s tariffs were widely seen as unpopular. To Trump, though, they made America rich.
Trump’s trade agenda is part of his larger plan to drastically overhaul how the federal government does business and to reject what he sees as failures of the existing world order, said one senior administration official.
Tariffs have been a rare issue to pierce what is often a feedback loop of affirmation for Trump that includes his top advisers and cabinet leaders. US automakers won a reprieve from levies after appealing to Trump, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent largely has taken over talks with trading partners after Trump paused them to stem a market rout.
Despite that key role for Bessent, tariff hawk Peter Navarro still occupies a special place in the Trump orbit. Trump views the Harvard-trained economist as one of his most loyal aides after Navarro served four months in jail for defying a subpoena to testify about the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
Trump aides and allies have downplayed the 100-day milestone – they insist the pace will not abate and cast it as an artificial metric. One senior administration official said there are many other initiatives, particularly on culture war issues, that the Trump team has yet to unveil.
But Trump himself has hinted he’s not exactly ignoring the measure.
In a rally a day before his inauguration, he promised “the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”
Flood the Zone
Perhaps the most frenzied day of the second Trump administration came on April 9, when the president made a surprise announcement that he would pause most of the sweeping so-called reciprocal tariffs that had gone into effect roughly 13 hours earlier, while further raising the rate on China. The retreat fed a euphoric rally in a stock market that had just plunged close to bear-market territory.
Yet on that hugely consequential day, the president quickly turned to another subject close to his heart – or, at least his head – when he signed an executive order directing the repeal of conservation standards that limit showerhead water flows.
“I have to stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet,” he complained to reporters in the Oval Office. “It comes out – drip, drip, drip – it’s ridiculous.”
The moment reflected the flood-the-zone strategy Miller has encouraged, with the president ping-ponging from his global-order-busting tariff policy to something seemingly so mundane. And the policy itself puts in sharp relief the administration’s wider strategy for executive orders.
Trump, who has said the curbs on water pressure make it difficult to wash his “beautiful hair,” had already tried to unwind the limits during his first term. Those 2020 changes were reversed under former President Joe Biden – and Trump’s advisers had been plotting a redo ever since.
This time, they came prepared, armed with plans to get the regulatory pivot in motion right away. The order Trump signed this month includes a controversial – and legally risky – gambit to expedite the change by waiving requirements that significant regulatory shifts be accompanied by public notice and comment periods. Instead, Trump declared in his order: Such “notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”
It was classic second-term Trump – using an executive order to address a grievance and unfinished business from his first four years, while testing the bounds of presidential authority in novel ways.
And, it was in keeping with a message delivered repeatedly to officials and lawyers who’ve helped draft executive orders. Instead of questioning whether something can be done, ask why can’t we do it, said a person familiar with the matter.
Trump has used executive orders to push the limits of the power of his office, invoking emergency powers and national security concerns to impose tariffs, deport foreigners in the US, freeze federal funding in defiance of Congress and strip security clearances from law firms with ties to political opponents. Many of Trump’s orders also seek to extend the reach of the federal government well beyond Washington, directing Justice Department probes and mandates that have prompted changes from statehouses to corporate boardrooms.
Critics say some of Trump’s orders are blatantly contrary to federal law. But that may be a feature – not a bug – for administration officials and advocates who’ve openly relished the opportunity for Supreme Court rulings on the president’s power.
‘Intellectual Godfathers’
The roadmap for Trump’s second act has been years in the making. Allies in 2021 launched the influential America First Policy Institute think tank and Miller created America First Legal in a bid to avoid the legal pitfalls of the first term. Two years later, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025. All three groups, along with a wider constellation of think tanks, policy analysts and lawyers, effectively stocked ready-made policy options that were designed in response to Trump’s public remarks to deliver on his vision.
“Preparation is key, and in some cases, preparation is king,” said Chad Wolf, a former top Trump official who’s now executive vice president of America First Policy Institute.
Mike McKenna, a former White House adviser under Trump, said it was largely a trio of “intellectual godfathers” teeing up the next term: Miller, longtime Trump whisperer (and occasional public critic) Steve Bannon, and trade adviser Navarro.
As Trump’s 2024 campaign heated up, his allies used that scaffolding. Conservatives aligned with the Heritage Foundation held dozens of listening sessions with hundreds of experts and representatives from key industries, including health care, finance, energy and agriculture. The events were run like focus groups, with leaders helping coax participants to go beyond outlining routine policy wish lists to share more original and innovative ideas. The sessions led to policy recommendations, but, just as importantly, said one participant, served to knit together a network, with some of the experts now serving in the administration.
Meanwhile, teams of conservative lawyers, former government officials and think tank representatives across Washington were drafting potential language to implement policy changes, including unfinished business from Trump’s first term. The effort spanned subjects from energy to financial services, with participants going beyond just writing executive orders to developing the framework of other key regulatory documents, according to people familiar with the initiative.
Not every major Trump effort has had extensive groundwork. A White House official conceded that DOGE, the Musk-led project to remake the federal government, was an effort that took shape throughout the first 100 days, on the fly. Musk’s moves sometimes surprised and dismayed administration officials, who were not always kept abreast of his plans and who did not always agree with his tactics, like locking federal workers out of offices for show.
That may help explain why its ambitions appear to have narrowed. Musk once mused about finding $2 trillion in savings, but he’s since floated a $150 billion target.
Transition Team
After Trump defeated Kamala Harris in November, Miller and another policy aide, Vince Haley, led the effort on orders and presidential memos, helping to ensure a flurry of actions awaited Trump’s signature hours after inauguration. The transition policy team also included Russ Vought, Mark Paoletta and May Mailman – all veterans of Trump’s first term – who helped shape the executive orders, people familiar with the matter said.
The transition team purposefully didn’t let the cabinet picks know the full extent of the plans, so they could avoid them coming into play in confirmation hearings, one Trump adviser said. Meanwhile, a separate team of aggressive, online-centric operatives mapped out a strategy to ensure even the most controversial nominees got confirmed by the Senate. They threatened to bully and mount primary challenges for any lawmaker who did not comply.
Vice President JD Vance served as a key conduit to Capitol Hill during contentious confirmation processes.
Vance and the entire White House team are “returning calls, they’re reaching out, they’re initiating conversation and they’re not letting you be surprised by what is going to happen,” said Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Many of the aides who arrived in Washington with Trump had worked on his campaign, helping make his operation more cohesive than last time. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, holds clear authority – a contrast to early in Trump’s first term when Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner and Bannon were competing centers of power.
Trump’s top advisers are also committed to swiftly translating the president’s policy utterances into reality. The dynamic means asides in speeches or quips to reporters can rapidly form the basis of new policy – but also add to the workload for staff tasked with developing new initiatives instead of focusing on long-term administration priorities.
Take, for instance, Trump’s surprise commitment at an April 8 event to offer government guarantees meant to keep coal companies in business despite political shifts in Washington. Trump confessed he’d just come up with the idea “about 15 minutes before I got up here,” but staff were already working on it.
Looking Abroad
Trump has told aides he’s delighted with the early pace, hanging photos of his order-signings through the West Wing.
Still, some of his pledges abroad have fallen flat – his promised swift end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t materialized, there’s little to show for his vow to confront Iran and he’s expressed misgivings about the outcome so far of the hostage deal between Hamas and Israel that he once took credit for. One official summarized his next 100 days in four words: trade deals, peace deals.
At home, the “one, big, beautiful bill” to overhaul taxes is a core part of his plan for the border, and to offset the economic headwind of his tariffs. However, it’s anything but a sure thing to pass and could add trillions to the budget deficit.
Trump has turned his attention to pressuring Republicans lawmakers to pass the bill. “IT MUST BE DONE,” he wrote in one post Sunday. In another, he floated that tariff revenue could offset income-tax cuts, with a focus on those making under $200,000 annually.
Democrats, meanwhile, are grappling with how to counter it – and Trump himself.
“We have to have the backs of the American people and focus on showing how we can deliver the things that he’s not delivering, the unkept promises,” said Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Democrats should also highlight Trump’s clashes with courts and attempts to expand presidential authority, she said. “But most of the people out there in my state are talking to me about the economy.”
Polling suggests her party may have an opening there, with a majority of voters disapproving of Trump’s handling of the economy. The president will likely use his Tuesday appearance in Michigan to try to bolster his standing on this issue, talking up his vision to use tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US.
“They want to continue to push the envelope, and they want to do more, and they want to do better,” said AFPI’s Wolf. “So I don’t think they’re quite satisfied yet.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
