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On the 2024 campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to launch a massive overhaul of the federal government if reelected president, and, he said, change would come fast.
To be sure, Trump’s first 100 days have seen a frenetic pace of change. But while Trump has boasted that some have called it “the most successful 100 days in the history of our country,” his agenda has also been challenged in the courts and by other economic and political realities.
Here, we look at a half dozen of Trump’s most consequential pledges – ones that he said would happen immediately — and the progress Trump has made toward fulfilling them.
Tariffs
In early April, Trump followed through on his August 2024 campaign promise that the U.S. was “going to have 10 to 20% tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years” — although the tariffs, a form of tax, are paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries.
Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on April 24. Official White House photo by Abe McNatt.
On April 2, Trump issued an executive order implementing a minimum 10% tariff on U.S. imports of foreign goods, as well as higher tariff rates for goods imported from certain countries. A week later, after stock market declines partly attributed to his new policies, Trump paused for 90 days some of the higher country-by-country tariffs.
However, Trump didn’t pause the higher tariff rates for goods coming to the U.S. from China. Instead, he incrementally increased them to 145%, after China retaliated to Trump’s tariff announcements by raising its own tariffs on imports of U.S. goods. During the election campaign, Trump had floated putting at least a 60% tariff on Chinese imports.
Trump also has kept in place 25% tariffs on certain goods imported from Canada and Mexico that went into effect in March — tariffs that Trump initially paused after announcing them in February. (Goods from the two countries aren’t subject to the 10% rate for other imports.) Other previously announced tariffs still in effect include 25% tariffs on imports of steel, aluminum, automobiles and certain auto parts.
How long the 10% universal tariff remains in place, and what happens to the higher rates after the 90-day pause, is still to be determined. In his April 22 Time interview, Trump claimed to have since negotiated “200 deals” on trade that he said will be announced at a later date. He also has signaled that the 145% tariff on Chinese goods will “come down substantially.”
Ukraine-Russia War
On March 4, 2023 — just over a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland that he could and would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours once he was elected and even before he was back in the White House.
“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly. Quickly. I will get the problem solved and I will get it solved in rapid order and it will take me no longer than one day,” Trump said.
It was a claim he made repeatedly during his third presidential campaign — at least 53 times, according to a search of his public remarks by CNN.
But over three months into his second term in the White House, Trump has found ending the conflict more difficult than he claimed. The fighting continues, with more than 160 Ukrainian civilians killed and over 900 injured by Russian attacks in March, according to monthly data compiled by the United Nations.
The Trump administration has brokered indirect negotiations between the warring nations, but the president’s frustration over the process has vacillated between wrongly blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war to chiding Russian President Vladimir Putin for a missile and drone strike on Kyiv on April 24 while ceasefire talks were underway.
In recent days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed “there are reasons to be optimistic” that a deal between the countries is getting closer, while also warning that the U.S. is ready to walk away if the war drags on. “We have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in or if it’s time to sort of focus on some other issues that are equally if not more important in some cases,” Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 27.
As for his campaign promise that he’d easily and quickly make peace between Ukraine and Russia, Trump told Time magazine in an April 22 interview, “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point. … Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest.”
Illegal Immigration
It was perhaps the most enduring of Trump’s campaign promises: “On Day 1, I will close the border and I will stop the invasion of illegal criminals coming into our country.” On his first days in office, Trump — among an array of other immigration actions — issued an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border and deploying military to help stem the flow of illegal migration.
In his first 100 days in office, illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle. Apprehensions of migrants who illegally crossed the border in February and March fell to 8,346 and 7,181 — the lowest monthly totals since at least the 1960s. That’s an 83% drop from November (46,615) and December (47,324) of 2024, the last two full months under President Joe Biden. The most recent monthly totals are a fraction of the figure in December 2023, when apprehensions of illegal border-crossers peaked under Biden at 249,740.
“Just as happened during the beginning of his first term, migration at the border has absolutely plummeted since January 20th,” Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told us via email. “The main reason for that is first, migrants and smugglers always stop and go into ‘wait and see’ mode when they know that a crackdown is imminent, and Trump was elected promising an enormous crackdown.”
But, “perhaps even more importantly,” Isacson said, Trump issued a proclamation declaring “that an invasion is ongoing at the southern border” as justification for shutting down the right of migrants to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, the Trump administration boasts that just nine migrants were released into the U.S. between Jan. 20 and April 1, a 99.9% decrease from the same period in 2024 under Biden.
“That is illegal,” Isacson said, noting that a legal challenge of the Trump asylum policy is currently before the courts.
Trump also promised to launch the “largest deportation program in American history.” The White House says the U.S. has deported more than 135,000 people in Trump’s first 100 days. That pace lags the average number of deportations over a similar period in fiscal year 2024 under Biden, but the Trump administration argues the Biden figures are inflated because so many more people were illegally crossing the border.
On March 15, Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a rarely used law that dates back to 1798 — before sending hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The Supreme Court has said that detainees must get a court hearing before deportation, and in late April, the court temporarily blocked the administration from using the law to deport Venezuelan men being held in Texas.
Facing criticism for failing to provide due process rights, Trump has argued it’s not feasible to have hearings for all the migrants who want to challenge their deportation.
At a press conference on April 28, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt vowed the administration is “in the beginning stages of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in American history.”
Isacson said that while deportations are “nowhere near the million-a-year pace that the Trump people have been saying they expect to hit,” the House Judiciary Committee is beginning work on a spending bill, “which in the House version has $45 billion for detention and $14 billion for deportation.”
“Once that passes, they will have the resources—even if they have to call in the military to back it up—and we might see a gigantic increase in the tempo of mass deportation,” Isacson said.
Birthright Citizenship
In a May 30, 2023, video posted on Truth Social, Trump revived a pledge he hadn’t fulfilled in his first term: If elected, he would “sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”
And on Jan. 20, he did exactly that, signing an executive order that argues the longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment to grant birthright citizenship to all children born in the U.S. is incorrect. The order said that it’s U.S. policy to not issue or accept documents recognizing citizenship if a person’s mother was in the U.S. unlawfully, or in the country lawfully but only temporarily, and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.
In signing the order, Trump acknowledged when asked by a reporter that the issue could face legal challenges (and several lawsuits were soon filed). “We think we have good grounds, but you could be right. I mean, you’ll find out,” Trump said. “It’s ridiculous. We’re the only country in the world that does this with birthright, as you know.” (The U.S. isn’t the only country with birthright citizenship. As we’ve written, about 30 countries have similar policies, including Canada and Mexico. The CIA World Factbook lists 38 countries, many of them in Latin America and the Caribbean.)
Within a few weeks of Trump’s order, four federal judges in four different states had issued preliminary injunctions, blocking the executive order from taking effect. The case is now on the Supreme Court docket, with oral arguments slated for May 15. A decision is likely to come this summer, as SCOTUSblog explained.
Most constitutional scholars have said that changing the birthright citizenship policy in the U.S. would require a constitutional amendment. A few experts disagree and have said Congress could pass legislation to change it. In 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision in a case involving a man born to parents who were citizens of China but legally living in the U.S. The court hasn’t specifically ruled on this issue concerning parents living in the U.S. without legal authorization.
Stock Market
Back in August 2024, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank more than 1,000 points, Trump blamed his presidential campaign rival, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, for the decline. “Of course there is a massive market downtown,” Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social on Aug. 5. “You can’t play games with MARKETS. KAMALA CRASH!!!”
Then, at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, the eve of his first day back in office, Trump took credit for a rising stock market and referred to it, and other economic measures, as “the Trump effect.”
“Everyone is calling it the — I don’t want to say this. It’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway, the Trump effect. It’s you. You’re the effect. Since the election, the stock market has surged,” Trump said.
But the glow was short-lived, due partly to the uncertainty over Trump’s tariff policy. The S&P 500, an index that tracks the performance of the leading companies on U.S. stock exchanges, has had its “worst first-100-day performance for a new administration in over 50 years,” MarketWatch reported on April 29. At that time, the S&P 500 was down nearly 8%; the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 7.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite had fallen 11.5% since Jan. 20.
Trump has typically touted the stock market as a measure of his economic prowess. But in a March 9 interview on Fox News, Trump said, “You can’t really watch the stock market,” and suggested a longer-term view. “If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective. We have a quarter. We go by quarters. You can’t go by that.”
Prices
At another campaign rally in August 2024, Trump promised, “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make America affordable again.” Then, in a December interview after he was elected, Trump said, referring to prices, “I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.”
Indeed, the price of many products hasn’t declined under Trump, according to the latest federal data. For one, egg prices, which Trump frequently claims are down by large percentages, were still increasing, on average, for consumers, as of March. Average wholesale prices, which retailers pay for the eggs they sell in stores, have declined by 46% since Trump was sworn in. In March, the Department of Agriculture credited “no significant outbreaks” of the bird flu for declining wholesale prices. But that hasn’t yet translated to lower prices for grocery shoppers.
Average grocery prices overall, which Trump has claimed “are down,” were up in March as well, according to the Consumer Price Index for at-home food items.
For drivers, the average price of gas, which Trump also mentions often, hasn’t declined, either, according to the Energy Information Administration. The EIA said the national average price of a gallon of regular grade gas was $3.14 for the week ending April 21 — up from $3.11 during the week ending Jan. 20, which is the day that Trump began his second term. The price of crude oil, however, has dropped, after OPEC+ announced it would move up a planned production increase due to recent tariffs imposed by the U.S. and China.
Inflation growth has come down since Trump took office, leading Trump to claim on April 14 that “we’ve already solved inflation.” The inflation rate of 2.4% for the 12 months ending in March was lower than the annualized rate of 3% in January, but that doesn’t mean prices are going down. It means prices are increasing at a slower pace. Economists also said that the tariffs Trump announced in April could cause inflation to rise again, as importers pass along most of the tariff costs to consumers in the form of higher prices.
In a campaign rally last July, Trump had said, “Starting on Day One, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.”
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