David M. Shribman
As we approach the landmark 100 days of the second Trump ascendancy, the nature of his rule has become clear. It is, to be sure, chaotic, like his first term. But this Trump presidency differs in fundamental ways.
There is, this time, a consistency to the chaos. The trace elements that were visible in the first term have become the preeminent themes of the second term. And while he established himself as a consequential figure in American history in his first term in the White House, he’s reshaping American life in his second term.
Here are some of the themes of the first 100 days:
— William F. Buckley Jr., revised.
Though there are elements of the Barry Goldwater 1964 campaign in the 2025 version of Donald Trump — the iconoclasm, for example, and the big-shouldered rhetoric in which he traffics in language and ideas that were off-limits only months earlier — he has embraced an essential aspect of Buckley, the father of modern conservatism.
He is, in Buckley’s phrase, “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” But social and cultural change is resistant to the shout of “stop,” and while the president may stanch the drive for diversity, equity and inclusion, the broader social forces outside the White House and the walls of the Heritage Foundation are breeding diversity, seeking equity and demanding inclusion, though not through DEI programs. Gay and transgender people are not going away. Besides, the broader culture isn’t inclined to be shaped by presidential declarations, no more than John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s pleas for desegregation, as full-throated as they were, eased racial resentments and intolerance.
But as for the governing thesis of conservatism — respect for tradition and reverence for historical precedent, all wrapped in a blanket of restraint — that is not Donald Trump.
— The War of Jenkins’ Ear, redux.
Great Britain went to war against Spain in 1739 in part because of the outrage over the amputated ear of Capt. Robert Jenkins, who was said to have lost it after a confrontation with Spanish coast guards in the West Indies. The severed ear was a pretext; the real reasons for the conflict, part of the War of Austrian Succession, were trade disputes and conflicting land claims.
Trump has emerged as the master practitioner of pretexts. His attacks on Canada are based in part on concern about fentanyl seeping across our northern border; in truth, 488 times more fentanyl comes across the Mexican border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports. Separately, Trump is using antisemitism as a pretext for withholding billions of funds from leading American universities. This endangers research having nothing to do with antisemitism. For example, Harvard received seven times more federal money for the biological and medical sciences than for the humanities and social sciences, so “wokeism” isn’t the real target of his funding freeze.
In his statement Monday announcing Harvard’s intention to undertake legal action to challenge the cuts, university President Alan M. Garber said, “The consequences of the government’s overreach will be severe and long-lasting. Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes.”
— Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, modernized.
The Wizard of Oz, as he was popularly known, has a contemporary analog: Trump, the administration’s public face. But he isn’t coming up with five new initiatives a week; he’s being fed them. He didn’t personally conjure last week’s trial balloon, the effort to encourage women to have more babies and the notion that about a third of the Fulbright Scholarships should go to people who were parents or married.
— “Ivanhoe,” revisited.
Trump is not a known fan of Walter Scott, but he is a devout believer of the maxim in the Scottish writer’s 1819 novel “Ivanhoe,” in which students for generations (though likely not this generation of students) relished the phrase “Revenge is a feast for the gods.”
Even so, Trump shows no signs of being sated. He is pursuing revenge against news organizations, the Pulitzer Prize committee, members of Joe Biden’s circle, Hillary Rodham Clinton, those who pursued legal action against him, officials from his first administration whom he deems insufficiently loyal, law firms whose clients he reviles and various others.
By the way, Dorothy Parker came up with a corollary, saying, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” She also is remembered for saying — as Trump, who popularized the phrase “fake news,” devoutly believes — that “I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.”
— Joseph Schumpeter, revived.
The Austrian economist, who died 75 years ago, popularized the notion of “creative destruction,” which is what Trump is doing, with varying degrees of creativity, to the established order. International institutions, longstanding alliances, conventional views of political behavior, constitutional guard rails, customary guidelines for comportment in polite society — all of these have been challenged and, in some cases, laid waste by Trump, the ultimate disrupter in an age of disruption.
— Andrew Jackson, reincarnated.
Old Hickory didn’t really say, in reference to the chief justice of the United States and the high court’s decision in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia case, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” But Trump placed portraits of Jackson in the Oval Office in both his administrations, and he is known to be an admirer of the military hero and Indian fighter who was the first populist in the White House.
Soon we will know whether Trump embraces the apocryphal Jackson nostrum, which makes a mockery of the separation of powers and of the Supreme Court’s prerogative to adjudicate political disputes. Perhaps out of sloppiness, perhaps as a threat and perhaps as a genuine expression of administration views, leading members of the Trump team and the president himself (in his February remark, channeling Napoleon, that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”) have raised the question of whether Trump will defy Supreme Court rulings in the way he’s held out against lower-court orders.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
