President Donald Trump emerges through a pair of handsome wooden doors on the third floor of the White House. On his way down the wide, carpeted staircase, he passes portraits of his predecessors. Nixon is opposite the landing outside the residence. Two flights down, he has swapped the placement of Clinton and Lincoln, moving a massive painting of the latter into the main entrance hall of the mansion. “Lincoln is Lincoln, in all fairness,” he explains. “And I gave Clinton a good space.” But it’s the portrait around the corner that Trump wants to show off.

It’s a giant painting of a photograph—that photograph, the famous image of Trump, his fist raised, blood trickling down his face, after the attempt on his life last July at a rally in Butler, Pa. It hangs across the foyer from a portrait of Obama, in tacit competition. When they bring tours in, everyone wants to look at this one, Trump says, gesturing to the painting of himself, in technicolor defiance. “100 to 1, they prefer that,” he says. “It’s incredible.”

Making his way out to the Rose Garden, he walks up the inclined colonnade toward the Oval Office, describing the other alterations to the decor, both inside and out. His imprint on his workspace is apparent. The molding and mantels have gold accents now, and he has filled the walls with portraits of other presidents in gilded frames. He has hung an early copy of the Declaration of Independence behind a set of blue curtains. The box with a red button that allows Trump to summon Diet Cokes is back in its place on the Resolute desk, behind which stands a new battalion of flags, including one for the U.S. Space Force, the military branch he established. A map of the “Gulf of America,” as Trump has rechristened the Gulf of Mexico, was propped on a stand nearby.

If Trump is making cosmetic changes to the White House, his effect on the presidency goes much deeper. The first 100 days of his second term have been among the most destabilizing in American history, a blitz of power grabs, strategic shifts, and direct attacks that have left opponents, global counterparts, and even many supporters stunned. Trump has launched a battery of orders and memoranda that have hobbled entire government agencies and departments. He has threatened to take Greenland by force, seize control of the Panama Canal, and annex Canada. Weaponizing his control of the Justice Department, he has ordered investigations of political enemies. He has gutted much of the civil service, removing more than a hundred thousand federal workers. He has gone to war with institutions across American life: universities, media outlets, law firms, museums. He pardoned or gave a commutation to every single defendant charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attacks, including those convicted of violent acts and seditious conspiracy. Seeking to remake the global economy, he triggered a trade war by unleashing a sweeping array of tariffs that sent markets plummeting. Embarking on his promised program of mass deportation, he has mobilized agencies across government, from the IRS to the Postal Service, as part of the effort to find, detain, and expel immigrants. He has shipped some of them to foreign countries without due process, citing a wartime provision from the 18th century. His Administration has snatched foreign students off the streets and stripped their visas for engaging in speech he dislikes. He has threatened to send Americans to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Says one senior Administration official: “Our success depends on his ability to shock you.”


What shocks constitutional scholars and civil libertarians is the power Trump is attempting to amass and the impunity with which he is wielding it. Trump has claimed Congress’s constitutional authority over spending and foreign trade, citing a loosely defined emergency. He has asserted control over independent agencies and ignored post-Watergate rules designed to prevent political meddling in law enforcement and investigations. When lower courts have ordered him to slow or reverse potentially illegal moves, he has at times ignored or publicly ridiculed them. In one case, he defied a Supreme Court order. Issuing a ruling in that fight, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee and arguably the most influential conservative jurist outside the high court, said the Administration’s behavior threatens to “reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”


In an hour-long interview with TIME on April 22, Trump cast the first three months of his term as an unbridled success. “What I’m doing is exactly what I’ve campaigned on,” he says. Which is true, in part. From deportations and tariffs to remaking America’s alliances and attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Donald John Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, is carrying out pledges to radically reshape America and its role in the world. He didn’t invent most of the problems he is aggressively going after, and supporters say he is doing more than predecessors from both parties to fix them. America’s immigration system has been broken for decades; Trump’s moves have slowed illegal border crossings to a trickle. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. strategists bemoaned military “free-riders” in Europe and East Asia; Trump has triggered previously unimaginable moves by Germany and Japan to spend more on their own, and their neighbors’, collective defense. China used its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 to launch a multidecade attack on those who sought to do business with them; Trump’s latest tariffs are the most aggressive effort to fight back. “I have solved more problems in the world without asking for or getting credit,” he says.

Trump has benefited from an enfeebled Democratic Party and compliant congressional Republicans who have abdicated legislative powers and long-held beliefs, whether out of cowardice or a desire to ride his coattails. There has been little meaningful or sustained backlash from the public. The civil-society leaders and corporate titans with the most political capital have largely acquiesced to Trump’s rule, choosing supplicancy over solidarity. The capitulation has only emboldened him.

It’s possible that Trump, 100 days in, is at the peak of his power. A resistance—if not one that resembles the first-term Resistance—is stirring to life. Trump’s protectionist policies threaten a recession of his own making; businesses big and small face the imminent threat of closure as they cut workers, close production lines, and try to stay afloat in the face of disruptions to supply chains and revenue of a scale not seen since the pandemic. Universities have found greater courage in the face of Trump’s threats to their multibillion-dollar research budgets. Communities that rely on immigrant labor have bristled at the uptick in deportations. With consumer confidence at its lowest level in three years and inflation expected to climb as a consequence of the trade war, even meek Republicans have raised complaints about the impact of some of Trump’s moves on their political future. Polling finds that a larger share of Americans now live in fear of their government and Trump’s approval rating has slipped to 40%, according to a Pew survey, lower at this early stage in his term than that of any other recent President.