Documenting the Damage 100 Harmful Policies from the First 100 Days of the Second Trump Administration

Brett Heinz. April 30, 2025 – “The United States of America is a different nation than it was 100 days ago. The opening months of the second Trump administration shattered the post-World War II record for the most executive orders issued by a new President. Within the first two weeks of his second term, President Trump had already signed more executive orders than he had during the entire opening of his first term. The events of the last 100 days will affect the trajectory of American politics for at least the next 100 years. The reforms of early 2025 constitute the most aggressive attempt at reshaping the United States government since the New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. But whereas the New Deal was intended to rescue the US economy from the depths of the Great Depression, the Trump agenda has focused on paralyzing the government, facilitating large-scale corruption, assaulting personal liberties, dividing the American people, polluting our shared environment, provoking conflict around the world, and redistributing money and power from the working class towards corporations and billionaires (a record number of whom serve in the administration). Some commentators have nicknamed the opening strategy of President Trump’s second term as “shock and awe,” a reference to the military strategy of the same name which aims to “seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels.” In this reading, the Trump administration’s adversary is the American people, who have been rendered helpless in keeping track of the “overload” of news stories about what all has changed. This rapid-fire approach offers several advantages to the second Trump administration. By changing such a wide variety of policies simultaneously, critics of the President’s agenda are forced to divide their efforts in a way which makes a sustained and unified critique nearly impossible. In addition, while many of these attempted reforms will be reversed through one means or another, many others will be overlooked and allowed to survive into the long-term, gradually becoming apart of what is considered “traditional” US public policy. This project is an attempt at highlighting many of the most important policy reforms and political changes made under Trump’s 2025 “shock and awe” period. Revealing the scope and scale of these changes is intended to gather these harmful policies in one place, enabling greater public debate about the severity of our present situation. In addition, highlighting the negative changes which have occurred will hopefully help to prevent them from becoming permanent, giving future policymakers a guide towards the reconstruction of a democratic government out of the ashes of whatever President Trump leaves behind. To create this project, I spent the first quarter of 2025 keeping track of every major policy change and political development I could identify. The result of this effort was a spreadsheet featuring more than 900 policy developments, most of which were then categorized into the 100 policy topics summarized in this report. Over the next two weeks, I will be releasing my findings in five thematic parts: I) democracy and government, II) civil rights and liberties, III) economy and public services, IV) environment and energy, and V) foreign policy…”

Read the full report in PDF format Read the full report on Medium: parts I II, III, IV, and V.