President Trump’s first 100 days in office have included 143 executive orders, eight declared national emergencies, hundreds of January 6 pardons, DOGE, deportations, a war against higher education, an actual trade war, Liberation Day, MAHA, the return of the Iran deal, McDonald’s on Air Force One, Teslas on the South Lawn of the White House, lots of grant-freezing, a Zelensky showdown, the Gulf of America, the triumph of the plastic straw and, of course, Signalgate.

In other words, there’s a lot to make sense of. So we asked trusted writers, contributors, and friends of The Free Press to help us.

Here’s what Bill Maher, Mike Pompeo, Victor Davis Hanson, Tyler Cowen, Jamie Reed, Coleman Hughes, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Christopher Rufo, Nellie Bowles, Derek Thompson, Jed Rubenfeld, Kemi Badenoch, and many more think about the first 100 days of Trump’s second presidency.

Mike Pompeo on Sequels

If Trump 1.0 was a “come-as-you-are party” with a president who did not have time to prepare, Trump 2.0 is a “we’ve-seen-this-movie-before” throwdown.

The promises Trump made are the same: Stop illegal immigration, lower taxes, regulate less, don’t start new wars, and use common sense. The speed and breadth of attack this time around are of a different magnitude. Critics decry the ferocity, but having served in the cabinet for four years, 48 months is a whisper of time to reverse 12 years of Obama and Biden. I applaud the aggression, if not all the actions.

I’m counting on Trump not losing sight of the goals: Ending wars via surrender is just deferred maintenance, not victory; global tariffs are taxes; breaking institutions is worthy only when they grow back stronger and better.

Delivering on these objectives requires both incredible courage and pristine execution—and perhaps a gamble that only President Trump would bet on and throw the dice. Giddyup.

Nellie Bowles on MAHA

Trump himself is not a picture of health, no. Nor does he seem to be a man of health trends. I doubt his fork has ever touched kale, or even something more broadly in the category of “food that is green.” But his presidency has ushered in a new, radical movement around health, a shift like we saw in Berkeley through the 1970s, a thing called MAHA, short for Make America Healthy Again.

This new health movement has notched fast and enormous wins, specifically in that its leader, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now the secretary of Health and Human Services. And what is he doing? He is getting artificial dyes out of our processed foods, so that soon we’ll have the same beige-colored Froot Loops already sold to Canadians and Europeans.

It has been exciting to see how mainstream many health causes have become, now that MAHA figured out how to code them as edgy and right-wing. No longer are food dyes something only whispered about between San Francisco moms. The latest is that RFK is launching a research initiative to find out what’s causing autism, which the smart set likes to call a “superpower.”

No prior modern Republican president has sought to launch a counterrevolution aimed at reversing the economic, political, cultural, social, and military progressive trajectory of the modern era.

Trump has done just that—and in his first 100 days—in a comprehensive fashion that perhaps surpasses the ambitious agendas of even the first three months of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Ronald Reagan’s efforts to unleash the American free market and win the Cold War.

Trump has been in office for 100 days. Israel has been at war with Hamas in Gaza for 570. And Russia and Ukraine, 1,160 days.

Douglas Murray has had a front-row seat to all three of these unfolding stories, bringing us reportage and analysis that have illuminated the most urgent issues of our time.

While we love Douglas, his reporting and willingness to call out bad actors across the world and the political spectrum has earned him his fair share of adversaries. Earlier this month, Douglas went on The Joe Rogan Experience—the most popular podcast in America—to debate both Joe and comedian-turned-pundit Dave Smith. They sparred for some three hours, with the debate earning millions of views and becoming its own viral news story.

The interview became so popular in large part because Douglas, as always, refused to pull a punch.

George Orwell once famously wrote that “to see what’s in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Nobody knows that better than Douglas who, unlike many of his contemporaries, never gets lost in excuse-making and needless ideological abstraction. He sees the world clearly and reports it back to us, which is a big reason why he’s such a unique and valuable voice in our era of dishonesty.

That gift is on full display in his new and best-selling book, On Democracies and Death Cults, and in the conversation we had Monday in The Free Press newsroom.

Paying subscribers were able to ask Douglas questions—and we are doing more and more talks like this. So to join us live and get in on the conversation, become a paying subscriber today.

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Elon Musk blew into Washington after predicting he could deliver at least $2 trillion in cuts to the federal budget. That was the pledge he made to a roaring crowd in Madison Square Garden just before the election last year. After he arrived in D.C., the target was cut in half, but Musk’s goal was still wildly ambitious—and his confidence never wavered.

“Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier in March. “The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15 percent reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.”

Now, as the Trump administration hits the 100-day mark and Musk takes a step back from his government role, it looks more likely than ever that DOGE will miss his ambitious cost-cutting targets. And even the “estimated savings” of $160 billion so far, touted by DOGE on its website, almost certainly are drastically overstated.

Musk’s exit plans are opening the door for some Republican lawmakers and White House officials to agree with skeptics who study the federal budget and always said that his target of $1 trillion in savings was a pipe dream.

It feels like Trump has fit 500 days into his first 100. He was on Air Force One eating McDonald’s with RFK Jr., then signing executive orders, then hanging out in a Tesla in front of the White House, then getting into it with foreign leaders in the Oval, sometimes in the same week.

Meanwhile, the First Lady has put in roughly an afternoon of work over the past three months. And you know what? Good for her.

Joseph Massey says he tries to avoid politics in his poetry. But politics has found him, whether he likes it or not.

Massey, 46, has just released his fourth self-published poetry collection, America Is the Poem, and it is blowing up on Amazon: Earlier this month, it was in the top 50, peaking at No. 14—out of 32.8 million titles available. (Books of poetry usually underperform. As of right now, there are only two in the top 100, both by Dr. Seuss.)

And he has some high-profile fans.

“You get it, and unlike most of us, you can express it,” Megyn Kelly said recently while interviewing Massey. She meant the poet’s ability to conjure up the meaning of America—its promise, its majesty, its failures and disappointments.

Massey’s poetry is poetry, so it necessarily hovers far above the political, the daily muck—it’s about timeless things, questions, the natural world in collision with the man-made world, the impossibility of encountering the same place twice. One can easily imagine him reading his great 2015 poem “Illocality”—Gray oscillates gray / And the mountain / A line lodged within it / Gone slack at the end—three or four beers in, in a dive bar in the East Village 60 years ago.

But really, Joseph Massey is very much of this moment. His story is not dissimilar to Vice President J.D. Vance’s, as told in Hillbilly Elegy: the broken working-class family; the chaos; the abuse; the long, tortuous road out of that brokenness toward something better.

On top of that, Massey, at the height of #MeToo, was canceled.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a bouncy profile of an online influencer who has made millions telling Gen Z that socialism rocks. His name is Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, and he has 2.8 million followers on the livestream platform Twitch, where he broadcasts live from his West Hollywood home for eight hours every day, commenting on everything from the latest Supreme Court ruling to his workout regimen. The Times’ headline initially described him as “A Progressive Mind in a MAGA body”—it later changed to “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’ ”—and spilled much ink analyzing his sex appeal.

Buried in the prose is a passing acknowledgement of a far darker side of Piker’s appeal.

Today marks President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office. What to make of this dizzying first hundred days?

As our friend and former colleague Bret Stephens put it: “I’m hard-pressed to think of a more disastrous first 100 days of any presidency in American history. . . all of the wounds are self-inflicted.”

Even some of his most ardent supporters are struggling to understand and support his actions. As Rod Dreher wrote for The Free Press last week: “MAGA tempts the same sorry fate that conservatives like me suffered over Iraq. Do we hate our enemies more than we love liberty? More than we care about prudence and common sense? If the cost of victory is trashing the jobs and businesses of ordinary Americans with a reckless and unstable tariffs policy, abusing the Constitution, pointlessly sabotaging America’s allies, and replacing a domestic woke-left system with a woke-right one, MAGA risks destroying itself.”

On the other hand, there are people like Victor Davis Hanson, who see Trump as waging an existential counterrevolution: “He is waging a cultural, social, political, military, and economic shake-up to see if he can reboot the country. . . In other words, each day he is trying to stage a counterrevolution against the prior left-wing, neo-socialist, DEI, and green revolutions of the Obama-Biden years.”

Suffice it to say, the reaction to Trump’s policies has been a stark split screen.

Today, we have two Honestly favorites back to discuss these first 100 days: Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Democratic strategist and Free Press contributor Brianna Wu. Bari asks them about Trump’s war on globalized trade, elite campuses, illegal immigration, plus the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

We debate if Trump’s actions are what his base really wanted. And most importantly, Bari asks about the reach of his power, and the lengths he is willing to go.

It’s Tuesday, April 29. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large.

Today: Donald Trump, American revolutionary. Will the murder of the Lindbergh baby—the “crime of the century”—finally be solved once and for all? Why we should pay organ donors for their altruism. And much more.

But first: How did Canada’s conservatives botch the election of a lifetime?

Rupa Subramanya, The Free Press’s correspondent north of the border, has been chronicling the excesses and unpopularity of Canada’s Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau ever since her first story for us—on the trucker protests that captured international attention in February 2022. Since then, she’s reported on the country’s overzealous assisted suicide program; its war on internet freedom; an economic track record that was pricing young Canadians out of a middle-class life; and many other examples of the kind of hyper-liberalism that the American mind struggles to comprehend.

So when Trudeau resigned at the start of this year, it looked like Rupa had a straightforward story on her hands: Canada was bound to swing right again, and into the arms of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.

Except that’s not what happened.

Instead, Rupa has spent most of the last few months covering how President Trump’s “51st state” jibes scrambled Canada’s politics. She’s talked to Albertan separatists, business owners scrambling because of the tariffs, Canadians who want to become Americans, and even Canadians preparing for war with America (yes, really).

All of that takes us up to last night, when new Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney came out on top. Rupa was on the ground at what was supposed to be Poilievre’s victory party; his supporters drowned their sorrows at a cash bar.

As we went to press after midnight, it was still unclear whether Carney’s Liberals would win an outright majority or whether they would need to attempt to form a government through an alliance with minor left-wing parties. Regardless, it was an astonishing turnaround for the Liberals, who, at the beginning of the year, appeared doomed to defeat.

Why did Poilievre and his Conservatives lose? How does a party and its leader blow such a massive lead in such a quick time span?

Rupa answers all of that and more in her must-read piece today.

—Bari Weiss

Today on the podcast, we have two Honestly favorites back to discuss Trump’s first 100 days: Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon and Free Press contributor Brianna Wu. Bari asks them about tariffs, illegal immigration, deportations, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and much more. Click the play button below to listen to the episode, or follow Honestly wherever you get your podcasts.

• Widespread power outages struck Spain, France, and Portugal on Monday, shutting down entire cities throughout Europe. Officials found no sign of a cyberattack but trains, hospitals, and schools were affected by the blackout. As of Monday evening the cause was still unclear.
  

• The Trump administration has found the University of Pennsylvania to be in violation of Title IX by “denying women equal opportunities by permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.” The school, for whom transgender swimmer Lia Thomas participated in women’s competitions, has 10 days to be in compliance with Title IX before it faces a criminal deferral to Trump’s DOJ. Read Suzy Weiss’s 2022 story, “Watching Lia Thomas Win.”
  

• The Russian military is expanding army bases close to the Finnish border. It’s one of several moves that have alarmed Europeans and point to a wider buildup on NATO’s eastern flank. Finland joined NATO in 2023, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Global military expenditure hit a total of $2.7 trillion in 2024 in what is the largest year-on-year rise since the end of the Cold War. Spending surged amid a rearming in both Europe and the Middle East.
  

• A $70 million fighter jet rolled off a U.S. aircraft carrier, sinking into the Red Sea. The carrier was deployed to fend off attacks from Houthi terrorists on shipping vessels, with initial reports suggesting that the incident occurred due to a rapid movement of the ship away from Houthi fire.

• Kamala Harris is set to make her first public remarks since leaving office on Wednesday. The former vice president will speak at a gala for Emerge, a group that encourages Democratic women to run for office. She is expected to offer some “pointed criticism” of the Trump administration, according to one source.
  

• White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested that Trump was responsible for Shedeur Sanders getting drafted by the Cleveland Browns. “All I will say is the president put out a statement and a few rounds later he was drafted. So, I think the facts speak for themselves now.”

OTTAWA, Ontario—In an astonishing come-from-behind victory, Canada’s Liberal Party narrowly won Monday’s election under its new leader, Prime Minister Mark Carney.

As we went to press after midnight, it was still unclear whether Carney’s Liberals would win an outright majority or whether they would need to attempt to form a government through an alliance with minor left-wing parties. However, it was still a remarkable turnaround for the Liberals, who, at the beginning of the year, appeared doomed to defeat.

Nearly every poll released last year and into the start of this one showed the Conservatives, under leader Pierre Poilievre, leading the Liberals by some 20 points. Now, here at the official Conservative watch party at the Rogers Centre in Ottawa, Poilievre’s supporters drowned their sorrows by a cash bar, while a few others huddled around TV sets and held out hope for a late victory.

The Liberals have run Canada since Justin Trudeau became prime minister a decade ago, but their time in power has been beset by soaring inflation during Covid, an affordability crisis, stagnating income, and high unemployment. Over that 10-year span, the Canadian economy has grown by just 1.4 percent.

Poilievre, a gifted speaker and shrewd operator who was first elected to parliament in 2004 at age 25, appeared all but destined to become prime minister while running on a campaign that prioritized housing, affordability, and fighting crime. The Liberals, meanwhile, were disorganized, deeply unpopular, wedded to a much-hated carbon tax they implemented in 2019, and headed toward what many believed would be one of the worst defeats in Canadian history. Now, Mark Carney is victorious while Poilievre is projected to have lost his seat in the parliament.

So why did Poilievre and his Conservatives lose? Who’s to blame for this catastrophe for the Canadian right? How does a party and its leader blow such a massive lead in such a quick time span?

Let’s take it step by step.