President Trump’s first 100 days

Editor’s note, September 2, 12:10 pm ET: This week, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Russia, along with around two dozen other heads of state, are in China for a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which doubles as an advertisement for China’s bid for global leadership. In February, Vox reported on how American policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking at these four countries as a cohesive unit, brought together by a mutual interest in overturning a US-led international order.

Since then, the limitations of this alliance have been illustrated: Iran’s allies notably did not provide much aid when it came under Israeli and US airstrikes in June. The Trump administration has also been far less interested than Biden’s in isolating and pushing back against these regimes, as shown by President Donald Trump’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. But this week’s festivities in Beijing also make clear that these countries continue to work closely together and that others — perhaps India — may be falling into their orbit in the face of an increasingly erratic US foreign policy. The story below was originally published on February 3.

Editor’s note, August 7, 10:30 am ET: On August 7, Trump’s tariffs went into effect for about 90 countries. The story below was originally published on April 2.

Since President Donald Trump announced a slate of new tariffs on about 90 countries last week, global financial markets have tumbled. False reports about a potential pause in tariffs gave Wall Street a brief moment of false hope on Monday, but the White House has only doubled down, threatening to add more tariffs on China. Economists have also raised the alarm, projecting that Trump’s tariffs have increased the odds of a recession.

Editor’s note, August 7, 10:30 am ET: On August 7, Trump’s tariffs went into effect for about 90 countries. The story below was originally published on April 2.

President Donald Trump has said that “tariff” is the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.” And throughout his first months in office, he has given Americans plenty of cause for googling that word’s definition.

It’s perhaps the most urgent reason Democrats lost in November: The party has solidly lost the support of working-class voters across the country and doesn’t have a solid sense of how to win them back.

Now, a group of Democratic researchers, strategists, and operatives are launching a renewed effort to figure out — and to communicate to the rest of their party — what it is that these voters want, where they think the party went wrong, and how to best respond to their concerns before the 2026 election cycle.

Last year, a coterie of tech billionaires rallied behind Donald Trump’s candidacy. Many had not been lifelong Republicans. In 2016, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared Hillary Clinton the “obvious choice” for president, saying Trump’s immigration agenda “makes me sick to my stomach.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, had once been an Obama-supporting climate hawk. Yet they, and many others in their circles, found their way to supporting an openly authoritarian insurrectionist in 2024.

They offered many explanations for this decision, some of which were unabashedly self-interested — Trump had promised to limit regulatory scrutiny of their companies and taxation of their capital. But right-wing tech moguls generally insisted that their fundamental concern was for the country, not their profits: Trump’s pro-business policies would accelerate economic growth and technological progress — thereby ensuring America’s prosperity and global supremacy.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, went into a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont on Monday for his scheduled naturalization interview. But instead of being granted citizenship, he was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which started the process to deport him. In a memo reviewed by the New York Times, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Mahdawi’s activities — like the protests he helped lead at Columbia — undermined US foreign policy and threatened the Middle East peace process.

What happened to Mahdawi is alarming on many levels. Mahdawi has legal status as a permanent resident and has lived in the United States for the past decade. He wasn’t charged with a crime, but, like Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian Columbia student and green card holder, was detained and ordered to be deported simply for having and expressing views that the secretary of state does not like.

This story appeared in the Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Today I want to add a little perspective to President Donald Trump’s attack on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, which made headlines but might not be a crisis — at least, not yet.

In late 2021, I stood in a forest about two hours from Mexico City and watched as a river of butterflies passed overhead. They were monarchs — the iconic, Halloween-colored butterflies — and they were coming here from the US to rest for the cold winter months.

Nearly all of the monarchs east of the Rocky Mountains spend winter in this one forest in Mexico. They often fly more than 2,000 miles to get here, pollinating plants as they go. And by December, there are tens of millions of them in the branches of native fir trees, which droop under their weight. Scientists believe the trees provide just the right temperature and humidity for the butterflies to survive winter before they return north.

Editor’s note, April 14, 4 pm ET: On April 14, after this article was published, Harvard University announced that it would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands. This article has been lightly updated to reflect this information.

For the past month, President Donald Trump has been stalking the richest universities in the world like a horror movie serial killer picking off a group of frightened teenagers one by one. Why aren’t they using their multibillion-dollar endowments to fight back?

The facts underlying Noem v. Abrego Garcia are shocking, even by the standards of the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants. The Supreme Court just ruled that the immigrant at the heart of the case get some relief — but that relief is only partial.

In mid-March, President Donald Trump’s government deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he is currently detained in a notorious prison supposedly reserved for terrorists. He was deported even though, in 2019, an immigration judge had issued an order explicitly forbidding the government from sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador because he faced a “clear probability of future persecution” if returned to that nation. This court order is still in effect today.

After a week of intensifying market turmoil, President Donald Trump stepped back from the brink of financial crisis Wednesday, announcing a 90-day “pause” on the exorbitant tariff levels he’d imposed on dozens of countries.

It was not a total climbdown: Trump intensified a trade war with China by hiking its tariff level up to 125 percent. And he is also keeping in place a 10 percent tariff for other countries. (Details on exactly which countries remained murky as of mid-Wednesday afternoon.)

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expanding his crusade to turn back the clock on federal health policy.

Having undermined the government’s support for childhood vaccines amid the worst measles outbreak in years, he is now targeting another longstanding pillar of American public health: water fluoridation.

In less than a week, President Donald Trump’s tariffs have already created economic chaos in the US and abroad.

On Wednesday, he announced a minimum 10 percent tariff on almost all imports, with dozens of countries facing far higher rates.

President Donald Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” last week unleashed a set of sweeping tariffs — what he calls “reciprocal” tariffs, although they’re anything but — on imports from nearly every country in the world. The result has been a tanking stock market, immediate layoffs of US autoworkers, and widespread recession fears.

The pre-history of this disastrous set of policies, which will only make America poorer and alienate it from its closest allies, is as long and weird as you’d expect from Trump. Part of the story seems to involve him losing an auction in 1988 for a piano used in Casablanca to a Japanese collector, thus confirming that Japan was an economic threat. Sure, fine, that seems par for the course with this guy.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s tariffs, and the economic havoc they’re wreaking, are still dominating the headlines. But today I want to focus on a story I worry is going under the radar: the president outsourcing national security staffing decisions to a far-right conspiracy theorist.

Donald Trump’s tariffs were at once predictable and shocking.

Predictable, in the sense that Trump had been crystal-clear about wanting across-the-board tariffs during the campaign. Shocking, because they have been implemented in a manner that appears extreme and incompetent even by previous Trump standards. As a result, the world is historically unsettled: One metric of global economic uncertainty shows higher levels of concern than at any point in the 21st century, worse than the 2008 financial crisis and even the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

On Thursday, one day after President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs, what appears to be the first lawsuit challenging those tariffs was filed in a federal court in Florida. That alone isn’t particularly surprising. The tariffs are expected to drive up the costs of goods in the United States, and have already sent the stock market into a nose dive. That means that a lot of aggrieved potential plaintiffs have standing to challenge the tariffs in court.

What is surprising is that the plaintiff in this particular case, known as Emily Ley Paper v. Trump, is represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a right-wing legal shop that previously backed Trump’s efforts to expand executive power.

President Donald Trump’s new tariff chart, which he unveiled Wednesday at the Rose Garden, had a mixture of surprising and predictable countries on the list. A high tariff on China? Not so surprising. But among the top 10 countries on his chart, eight are in Asia.

Many close US allies like South Korea and Japan were stunned by the steep rate increases applied to their exports.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are already wreaking economic chaos in the US and abroad.

On Wednesday, he announced a minimum 10 percent tariff on almost all imports, with dozens of countries facing even higher rates.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought to be confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he had to overcome a long record of fringe anti-science beliefs. He had indulged in conspiracies about chem trails, questioned whether HIV was the actual cause of AIDS, and, most notably, spread the repeatedly debunked theory that childhood vaccinations could lead to autism.

In private meetings with senators and public confirmation hearings, he downplayed that record and claimed he wasn’t anti-vaccine: “I am pro-safety,” Kennedy said in his opening statement at one hearing. “I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care.” He gave assurances to Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, an MD and one of the last Republican holdouts on his nomination, that he would not change federal vaccine guidance

The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?

One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited West Virginia on March 28 to promote his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda at an event where he cruelly criticized state Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s weight. Kennedy suggested that he would host a public weigh-in and celebration once Morrisey had shed 30 pounds, and Kennedy had an idea about how the governor could do it: “We’re going to put him on a carnivore diet,” Kennedy said.

Weeks before, science journalist and meat enthusiast Nina Teicholz argued in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Meat Will Make America Healthy Again” that when the US government updates its dietary guidelines this year, it needs to keep meat and other animal proteins firmly at the center of the plate.

Democratic voters just won a 10-point landslide in a state that President Donald Trump won last year. How?

The answer is a defining trend of modern elections: There are two different kinds of electorates who come out to vote in the Trump era.

In God and Man at Yale, the 1951 book that made William F. Buckley famous, American conservatism’s founding father argues that academic freedom is premised on a fiction.

While professors claim that they are merely attempting to equip their students with the tools necessary to comprehend the world and succeed in it, they are in fact engaged in conveying a particular set of truths and values to their students — meaning, at the time, liberal and socialist values. In response, Buckley argues, university trustees and administrators should “banish” favorable discussion of such ideas from the classroom, replacing them with a curriculum that emphasizes the eternal truths of Christianity and capitalism.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Today my colleague Nicole Narea and I are focusing on the Trump administration’s admission that it wrongfully sent a migrant to a Salvadorian mega prison — a reminder of the danger of suspending due process.