The Trump Regime's First 100 Days Of Chargeable Offenses— And Remember, It Only Gets Worse From Here

Not Fair To Compare Him To Hitler? Let's See How A Historian Does It

I don’t think the editorial boards of the Financial Times and The Guardian have a lot in common, at least not beyond their utter disdain for Trump. Yesterday, in its column Trump’s 100 Days Of Chaos, the FT laid it out for what I imagine is a pretty conservative readership, beginning with. Look at Steve Bannon’s “Flooding the zone” strategy meant to “generate such a blur of news that the media could not keep track.”

They suggest that now “Trump has elevated it in his second term to a method of governing. The blizzard of executive orders in the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 outstrips, by far, even that in Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. Yet FDR inherited an economic crisis and set about reforms that changed America for the better. Trump inherited one of the strongest economies of any recent president. In trying to remake the US in his own image he has created crises that threaten immense long-term harm to the American republic, and its place in the world. In Trump’s second term, efforts to flood the zone are making it hard for the courts, the opposition and even his supporters to keep up. Injunctions are halting some actions. But many have happened so quickly that they may be difficult or impossible to unpick: USAID largely shuttered and foreign aid slashed; thousands of federal workers fired; billions of dollars of research funding under threat.

Many core MAGA supporters see the disruption, so far, as proof positive that this president is actually doing something. Indeed, while he offers no penetrating insights, Trump has a gift for articulating concerns that matter to a large chunk of Americans: reversing the hollowing out of communities; reducing bureaucratic bloat and excessive “woke.” His positions sometimes contain more than a kernel of truth: Europe has for too long paid too little towards its own defense.

Yet while the Trump team shares a revolutionary zeal, it has no single, coherent plan and is composed of sometimes warring camps. The leader favours his own erratic instincts over heeding advice. The result is that policy responses are frequently so excessive, warped, overhasty or ill-designed as to be counter-productive or doomed. Resetting trade with China is not achieved through a multilateral tariff war that risks severe shocks to global growth. Businesses will not invest in creating jobs in America without stability and predictability. Securing a durable peace in Ukraine cannot involve ticking off almost all items on Vladimir Putin’s wish list.

Potential constraints are, though, beginning to appear. One is the financial markets. As equities and, unusually, US Treasuries fell in tandem, Trump paused for 90 days his “reciprocal” tariffs on countries other than China. Further market turbulence last week prompted him to rein back attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell and signal further potential softening in his China trade stance.

Another is the courts, and some key institutions of American democracy. Harvard University and others are starting to band together to fight the White House’s McCarthyesque attempt to exert control over higher education. Top courts are starting to find against the president, with the US Supreme Court ruling unanimously that the administration must facilitate the release from custody of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported to an El Salvador jail. The White House says it cannot retrieve him, but repeated attempts to defy the courts may prompt a wider public backlash.

A final constraint may yet be American voters. Beyond his core supporters, polling suggests Trump’s approval ratings are slipping as voters fret about their pocketbooks and retirement plans— and signs of lawlessness such as the Abrego Garcia case. Though both parties in Congress have been woefully supine, the latest polls point to gains for the Democrats in the 2026 midterms. The danger must be that if Trump sees his popularity sliding, he could try to double down and follow an even more authoritarian path. As Trump 2.0 passes the 100-day mark, the real battle for American democracy may be only beginning.

The Guardian, of course, is part of “the movement,” the way the FT would never want to be. And yesterday, Steven Greenhouse came right out and said what everyone should have known all along, the FT included: Trump’s Second Term Will Be The Worst Presidential Term Ever. He also started with a blast at the dangers to civil society of the right’s “flood-the-zone” head-spinning and stomach-turning strategy.

The regime, he wrote “seems to be powered by ignorance and incoherence, spleen and sycophancy. Both he and his right-hand man, Elon Musk, with their resentment-fueled desire to disrupt everything, seem intent on pulverizing the foundations of our government, our democracy, our alliances as well as any notions of truth. Tragically, Trump’s second term is already more lawless and more authoritarian than any in US history... Moving beyond his bombastic rhetoric, Mr Make America Great Again has been showing the world that the US is not so great. Because of Trump’s incoherent policies, bond investors are souring on the US and the dollar as never before as they question America’s reliability with such an unstable man at its helm. Investors are even questioning whether the US under Trump will make good on its debts— a fear that has caused interest rates to soar on treasury bonds. For the first time in modern history, they are questioning the dollar’s primacy and whether it should remain the world’s reserve currency. To the world’s investors, it’s clear that Trump is dragging American down, not lifting it up. Indeed, Trump’s economic stewardship has been so astonishingly inept that we went from economists saying early this year that there was no way the US would have a recession anytime soon to many economists predicting a recession this year.”

Sounds pretty bad, right? Peter Fritzsche teaches history at the University of Illinois and has written numerous books on Germany and the Third Reich, including Hitler’s First Hundred Days… so you can imagine who he decided to write about this week. He compared the two… using FDR has a counterweight. While he was launching the New Deal, Hitler “was busy consolidating dictatorial power— an effort in which he found remarkable success. That success came, in large part, because Germany’s institutions quickly, under the threat of force, fell in line with Hitler’s vision. Hundreds of thousands of previously unaffiliated Germans embraced the new Nazi rulers, assembled in celebrations, flew Nazi flags, and sought membership in the Nazi party. Elites in business, the universities, the civil service, the judiciary, and the army might have been uneasy about this or that part of the new order. But they much preferred Hitler’s ‘national revolution’ to the old system of the Weimar Republic, with its checks and balances and parliamentary compromise.”

Señor Trumpanzyy, he wrote “has employed many of the same moves as Hitler in working to swiftly consolidate power in the early months of his second term…. After gaining a slim but critical majority in that vote, Hitler moved quickly to establish the so-called ‘people’s’ government he had in mind by taking control of the individual states like Prussia and Bavaria, adding his storm troopers to local police forces, and creating massive performances suggesting national unity through ceremonies broadcast over radio. In the week after the elections, Nazi party loyalists all across the country helped in the effort. They banned socialist newspapers, ransacked trade-union offices, raised the Nazi flag over city halls, and assaulted Jews as well as the lawyers who came to their defense… This lock-step revolution in social and political life was enforced by violence. Without due process, thousands of political opponents were thrown into the Nazi party’s concentration camps, and thousands more were roughed up. Throughout, the public’s support for the political audacity and national unity of the Third Reich became more visible… After 100 days, Hitler was well on his way to outlawing rival political parties and coordinating civic groups into Nazi structures in an effort to break up divisive social milieus.

He noted that “In the same time period, Roosevelt had taken the U.S. by storm… There were striking parallels between Roosevelt and Hitler’s efforts: Both leaders took swift, strong action to upend the existing political order in their country. But there were even more striking differences: Not only was there no dictatorial Enabling Act in the U.S., but Roosevelt addressed Americans as ‘my friends,’ while Hitler, often wearing a brown party uniform, spoke to ‘racial comrades.’”

Trump, on that latter point, is not exactly following Roosevelt’s example. He addresses Americans as either believers or disloyalists— not friends. He has, too, governed as if he has an Enabling Act in place: declaring faux-emergencies, and ignoring laws, established procedures and court orders alike. He has renamed things in the name of patriotism— see the Gulf of Mexico, or, as Trump would have it, Gulf of America— and taken pointed measures against those who have refused to accept such pronouncements as law, including by banning the Associated Press from the White House press pool. There is a curated gleefulness about his administration’s arbitrary and excessive displays of power— say, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posing for photos in front of caged deportees in an El Salvador prison.

But Trump hasn’t mimicked Hitler or Roosevelt’s effectiveness. He lacks a cohesive ideological outfit, “the orderly component parts” of “careful planning” needed to construct the “connected and logical whole” that Roosevelt tried to explain in his fireside chat. And he doesn’t have the equivalent of Hitler’s two million ideologically vigilant storm troopers to enforce a revolutionary agenda, either.

There is another key difference to 1933: Unlike Hitler, Trump does not have the growing support of the public.

But Trump is succeeding on one front with terrifying parallels to Hitler in 1933: He has created a growing sense of uncertainty in America— uncertainty about the direction of government; the endurance of mandated changes; the dangers of speaking up; the fickleness or depth of his own popular support; and whether the future could possibly see a restoration of stability.

Germans in 1933 struggled to figure out who was a true convert to Nazism, who was an opportunist, and who was just frightened. But what they all learned was that there would be no moderating restabilization of the Third Reich. It kept on overreaching, with catastrophic consequences, until its defeat at the end of World War II.

Observers today don’t know what to expect. There is no apparent plan for stability or accountability, or even any sense of courtesy or mercy in those who govern. That vacuum makes it easy to be either overly optimistic about a return to sense and normalcy, or overly pessimistic about shifts in the entire gravitational field of American politics.

Out of kilter, we are susceptible to all sorts of anguished distortions about the integrity of our leaders, our neighbors, and ultimately ourselves. Germans in 1933, including the Nazis themselves, called the victims of this phenomenon “Märzgefallene”— those who had, for whatever reason, “fallen down.” One primary reason they did so: They assumed that everyone else already had.

The Financial Times warns that Trump’s second-term strategy— rooted in Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” ethos— has mutated into a governing principle: a blizzard of executive orders, loyalty purges, and norm-smashing chaos. As they put it, “efforts to flood the zone are making it hard for the country to even recognize itself.” And that’s where the reckoning begins. Because history is merciless to the collaborators of would-be tyrants— even when the tyrant escapes judgment himself. Nixon’s men were hauled into court and prison. The Vichy lackeys of Petain were disgraced and exiled. Even decades later, the names of enablers stick like tar. But this time, people aren’t content to wait for the historians. They want real consequences now.

The public isn’t looking for footnotes. We’re looking for indictments, convictions, accountability with teeth. We want to see Trump’s inner circle— his corrupt judges, his propaganda ministers, his billionaire funders— answer for what they’ve done in open court, not just in op-eds. We want more than disgrace; we want justice. Because if these people can help dismantle a democracy in broad daylight and walk away rich, powerful, and free, then what does that say about the rest of us?

This isn’t just about the arc of history. It’s about whether the rule of law means anything when the crimes are committed in designer suits on national television. And if it doesn’t, then we’re not just headed for authoritarianism— we’re already living in it.