<Music> Welcome to Party Politics, where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out with us and talking politics.

We're going to deviate a little bit this week from our usual kind of coverage of state and national politics, and talk about a deep subject that we, of course, care a lot about.

And it's really important that President Trump's first 100 days were a little late on this, but we wanted to kind of take a step back because there's so much happening and it's so critical that we understand this in the context of the rest of presidential history that we wanted to take kind of one full episode and work through it.

So Trump's shock and aw presidency is 100 days and maybe two weeks passed.

But it's important for us to really kind of think through all the implications to it.

But before we talk about Trump and the specifics of his second term, let's talk about why we think of 100 days as a reasonable barometer for presidential success.

Nobody knows there's a mystery.

No, I mean, I think the first 100 days is important because it's just a or represents a symbolic and practical window, for new presidents to set the tone of their administration.

It's a honeymoon period where they can push forward in major policy initiatives and have these, political momentum from the from the election.

Right.

And obviously is it's I guess that would be the context in which political capital is at its highest moment.

It has agenda setting, power.

And it's just, you know, historically speaking, it's also when FDR, had and used the first 100 days to basically reshape the government back in, in, in, in 33 to combat the Great Depression.

Yeah.

That's a great point.

Yeah.

And like so many things in presidential history, it's all about FDR.

And the reason we think of 100 days, because that was the kind of benchmark that FDR set.

And he had a whirlwind of activities, executive orders, legislation, just kind of cornering the Democratic Party to his ends.

Donald Trump has done some of these things which we can talk about, but it's really an FDR thing.

But the 100 days is kind of an arbitrary mark in a way.

Right?

Right.

It's like how we ask, like during the NFL combine, for the players to run the 40 yard dash like it's a lagging indicator of how good you're going to be as an NFL player.

Right?

Right.

But 100 days is simply kind of one measure.

But it's symbolic.

And I think you're exactly right about that.

Like the base wants to be satisfied immediately.

And that kind of immediacy is something that we see presidents really trying to embrace.

Right?

The faster they can do things, the more likely it is they can appease the base and sort of prove that they have done the right thing.

The problem is there's a risk there, right?

As politics becomes more competitive and as partizanship becomes more prominent, it's harder for presidents to get things done.

So increasingly they're relying on kind of unilateral power to do that and sometimes kind of their own rhetoric, which at the end of the day may not amount to much.

And so that's really kind of the conundrum that the kind of president Trump feels here.

Right.

So presidents try to act under the guise of unilateral action where it looks like they're doing a lot, but in some cases, they're actually not a lot of changes or changes that can't be kind of quickly undone.

So that's the real issue, for them.

And of course, because voters attention span is so short, there's a kind of goal here for presidents to try to, you know, make sure they can sort of push things as quickly as possible.

But let's talk about President Trump in particular, okay.

We'll talk about kind of what grade we might give them.

We're in grading season right now doing finals and you know kind of sending off grades.

So maybe we'll, kind of have that as a point of discussion.

But at least at the offset, to me, Donald Trump is like a REO Speedwagon song.

It's constantly in the state of breakup with the American people.

There's this constant kind of friction, in this case, about the economy or it's about immigration, or it's about just the general kind of separation of power story.

So he's always in breakup.

And every REO Speedwagon song, in my opinion, is about a breakup.

So we've officially become a A.T. Stan podcast.

But that, to me, is like the kind of role that, we're seeing here with the American people.

Donald Trump is just seems like fighting so many battles on so many levels, engaging in this kind of grudge agenda, which, you know, has its limits politically.

At some point, the voters who aren't kind of the most committed voters in the, you know, right or left are going to say, like, what are we really doing here?

And so that's the question to you.

It's like, how is it that this is really playing for voters in the first hundred days?

Uncertainty.

Yeah.

I think that.

Is that what he wants or.

This is like a just a sort of accident?

I think it's an accident.

I think President Trump's agenda is extremely ambitious.

In, in in a sense, whether people agree or do not agree with with his political agenda.

I mean, in terms of public policy, he's extremely, extremely ambitious.

Right?

So I think you have to look at it from, I guess, a two tier, perspective.

The first one is the core principles and tried to extract, the politics out of it one way or the other.

Oh, that would be quite the surgical thing.

It would be the, surgical feed.

But it's the basic premise of, perhaps going back to an era where we had, industrial protectionism, in which, we're talking about the 1970s.

Right.

In terms of having your own manufacturing, consuming what you produce, and basically isolating yourself.

From, the rest of the world.

I need has, a very American ethos in terms of being, for example, separated by two big oceans and having that, position of being isolated from the world and just say, like, you know what?

I'm going to do my thing, I don't care.

What do you do?

You deal with your problem.

So historically, and I guess substantively, that's that's an issue.

The problem with that is that we cannot implement such a, for example, an industrial policy nowadays, I agree in the sense that, yes, manufacturing should be something here.

But again, the question is, are the younger generations willing or wanting to work on manufacturer?

It's a great question.

Yeah.

And is the American people, are they willing to wait for that to happen?

And that's.

Yes, that's the real question.

Absolutely.

And I think the president thinks, yes.

And so I ask you the question deliberately about whether this uncertainty was designed to be this way.

I think you're right that it wasn't necessarily designed this way, but it definitely is a byproduct of this way of going about things where it's like impossible for it to be able to be kind of structurally made clear at the outset.

Right.

And for people to understand not only step one, but also step ten, that could take five or so years in more in some cases.

The thing to me is that the, you know, President Trump has remade the federal government, and he's done so in a way that is in some sense durable, in some sense not that durable.

He's redefined the scope of executive power.

He's tested and defied the courts, which could reshape the way that the separation of powers functions.

He's targeted his perceived political enemies.

Specifically, he's killed Temu.

So no more sheep goods for you from China, my friend.

I'm sorry.

He's saved TikTok.

Sort of.

Maybe we'll see how that plays out.

He's banned plastic straws.

He released an image of himself as the Pope.

Yeah.

It's a bizarre combination of kind of politics and policy that is definitely, like, emerging in this kind of, muddy mess.

In his first hundred days, he's tried to do everything all at once.

That's really hard to do.

And I think we talked about this a second ago.

Right.

But like, the sort of sense for president is that we should do all of this all at once.

That's not the best strategy right now.

Got four years.

And although, of course, you know, you punctuate this by the elections, but you do have to have this sort of set so that you're pacing yourself well and they really haven't pace themselves that well.

So if you look at the specifics, there are storm clouds that are gathering.

Right.

His numbers, which I'll talk about in a few minutes, are, or less strong than they have been.

Right?

Even on issues like immigration, on the economy, where he was seen to be the best choice in the election and as he started the presidency, are now kind of below where they were, below where Joe Biden was when he started.

That is definitely a potential problem.

Of course, the notion and specter of there being this recession because of the trade wars is another kind of looming liability.

So with all this context, I ask you kind of what grade would you give President Trump before you answer?

Tommy Tuberville, who was a senator from, from Alabama, said that he gives the president an A+, didn't hesitate.

Okay.

You won't let us give eight pluses, right?

Yeah.

He gives you either a minuses and then you can get a B plus B minus.

Yeah.

Are we talking about lower than that?

Where are you.

Put him.

I would put him in an incomplete.

Okay.

Incomplete and incomplete means that, he started his assignments, but the semester is, or these hundred days are done and the assignments are not completed.

There is no indication that this is work.

Okay, but he has not fully materialized.

So my grade is just an incomplete.

Well, and at the university, they give you a year to complete the incomplete.

So like it's still a pretty tight time horizon.

Maybe we give him four years, right?

I mean, and I think that makes sense.

Right.

Because like we said, you know, the more you can do, to set yourself up for success down the road, the better your policy becomes will be.

But that's a tough call.

I can give him, like a kind of meaty part of the curve right now, like a C, because not so much because of what he's accomplished or that it's been good or bad, but that this is sort of how we think about presidents and their actions.

Right?

You have to be able to structurally kind of contain what they're interested in doing.

They have to be able to maintain their executive power while also maneuvering it in ways that makes their policy outcomes more preferable.

This is something that he's done a little bit right.

He's definitely has kind of set that up right.

It's like you set the job up so that can use use the jab to set up your cross right right.

As a boxing analogy, we're still kind of seeing the early rounds here.

So I think that'll definitely be something that he will be successful at.

But but in the sort of setup to that is really is really worth noting.

But as it is now, there's still a lot of kind of incompleteness.

And so just some of the numbers I think make this clear.

Yeah.

The number of unilateral orders is far exceeded.

Even what FDR did, 142 executive orders.

And if you add in memos which are just kind of agency rule promulgation or proclamations, which are just sort of findings of fact, which do have triggers in other legislation, you see that basically that's about 200 plus unilateral orders.

The problem with unilateral orders is that they can be easily undone, right?

All the the next president has to do is to come in and say, but whatever happened before Executive Order 2118, reverse it.

It's fine.

That's not a durable policy change.

And so like I said earlier, like you need to be able to manufacture something here.

And if you just kind of compare this to the number of bills signed into law, Donald Trump has five.

And that is gone compared to, say, Joe Biden at 11.

And even Donald Trump at 30 during his first administration.

So he's well below where he was.

And I guess my question is like, why?

Why isn't it the case with majorities in both houses?

He controls the Republican Party.

The momentum was definitely in his favor.

Why is it the case that he's governing by executive order instead of by legislation?

I guess the answer to that question, I think, is, the urgency.

Yeah.

So he cannot wait for the legislative process to go forward.

One number two, I guess it's a way of the underlying, political outcome that he's expecting in the sense of, absorbing and having these unilateral power to control the executive and be basically the CEO of the United States and the CEO says, we're going to do this thing, and that thing gets done.

So that's two.

And then number three that I think is extremely important is, yes, the Republican Party has majorities in the houses, but the Republican Party is not a unified Republican Party, which.

Is a real trick.

Right?

Yeah.

And the fact that you have so slim of a margin to pass legislation and you have two, three, maybe 4 or 5 Republicans the same, I don't know.

Then it could stall everything.

Right, right.

So if you're in DC, pay that.

Yeah.

And I'll give it to President Trump.

And his legislative team is like yeah we don't have the votes.

Forget about the votes.

Yeah.

Use this strategy and let's get it done.

Yeah.

And I think that's I think it makes total sense.

Right.

This is a kind of made for TV presidency in a, in a, in a good way because it promotes sort of the centrality of executive power which presidents have used for a very long time to make their cases.

But it also, of course, highlights the fragility of the executive, where if you try to just govern by tweet alone, it's not going to work.

So underscoring what you're saying here, the president has far exceeded the number of tweets and words posted on Social Truth and Twitter than any president in history.

Right?

4000 plus words a week on Truth Social.

That's nearly 70% more than during his first term, and dramatically more than his predecessors, who average right 400.

So he's really making this a kind of public presidency in a way that the framers did not intend, but that the administration and the executive branch has grown over time.

And I think that the fact that he is confronting these political problems definitely is going to be the trickiest thing for him.

But I think that if you look at the way it's going, when there's been a close call, he has been able to work with the speaker and with the Senate to be able to get what he wants.

Right.

We're still negotiating through a budget deal.

Is there still lots of legislation they want to pass that they might not get passed?

But this is really the moment where he has to flex his executive muscle.

And the question is, are all these things he's doing?

Are all the social media posts are all of the bluster, you know, with other countries, all of the sort of trade wars, unilateral powers, leading to the point where he can just tell the Republican Party what he wants.

That's something that it took most presidents a really long time to get to.

I think about Reagan and the way that he was able to kind of administer his executive authority and use his presidential leverage to his to his positive utility, to his policymaking ability.

That was a tough call because, like, they had much more heterogeneous ideological distribution then than there is now.

Now it's like a lot easier to kind of cordon people and Republicans.

That is.

So is it the case that you think that all this is leading to the point where he can lead the party in an effective way, so that in the future, after 100 days, we're going to get to the point where he can just say, this is what I want.

Everyone pass this.

And two weeks later, it's signed and sealed.

No.

It doesn't work like that.

No, I mean, it doesn't work like that because when you're thinking about, the Republican Party, especially in Congress and also applies to Democrats, you know, every single member of Congress, every single member of the Senate, they are rational politicians seeking reelection.

Right.

Let's make you, yes.

So when you have that right, is So when you have that right, is tricky because when you look and confront reality and when you look, for example, at public opinion polls, the president's approval has gone very, very, very, badly in the, in the past weeks.

And popular presidents don't lead as effectively that we know from political correctness.

So when you look at the issues, the only issue that is above water is immigration and has only declined.

0.2 percent or something like that in terms of approval.

But the economy, yeah, tariffs, so etc.

have taken a deep, deep dive into negative territory, you know, around 15, 20%, lack of approval.

And that makes or I assume would make wander these individuals are in Congress saying, yeah, Jesus.

But my constituents don't want or have not seen, for example, the economy to the levels that we promised.

We're we're going to get them.

And we have seen those things in town halls.

Yeah.

Where Republicans go and they get yelled at and, so on and so forth.

The pictures of like, you know, protesters being carried out or people who are like disagreeing or asking questions in some cases, like getting carried out.

Yeah, it feels authoritarian in a way.

And that's the kind of alarms that are going off.

Right.

The basically, you know, the president is using the executive capacity in ways that are not like intended and or that are unconstitutional.

That is, again, sort of the underscoring the fragility of what the president is trying to do.

So you can govern by tweet.

You can, like, make it clear that you think that this should happen.

And we're going to take Canada and we're going to, you know, you know, take the fight to these other kind of, sort of enemies perceived in real.

But that doesn't mean it's real, and that doesn't mean people are going to believe it or that Congress is going to believe it.

So to me, like a lot of the bluster about kind of Trump maybe running for a third term is just that, right?

It's just a way to make sure that people don't see him as a lame duck, because at some point, Trumpism will fade.

Donald Trump's power as a politician will no longer be the potency that no as potent as it is now.

So that is going to be a conundrum that he is going to face sooner than later.

So I think it makes total sense, then, to understand the first hundred days in the context of him trying to do as much as possible because he knows that the clock is ticking.

I mean, for me, you know, he didn't need to have the picture of him getting almost assassinated, in the Oval Office.

He needs a clock.

And the clock countdown is the days until his, his presidency is over.

But by the time the the midterm election.

Right, right.

Any publicans worried about Trump?

I mean, it's only been 100 days.

Again, this is all just sort of in the context of it being very early.

But are Republicans worried about this?

I think that they should be worried about this.

And especially because you're starting to see in the Democratic Party some voices that are speaking louder and louder and louder, saying we should primary out these, Democrats that have been there forever.

Yeah.

And and that he's going to put pressure into that and pressure into action.

Yeah.

And also for Republicans, that means that, not very likely they're going to deliver on these very basic things.

Right.

Tariffs, for instance, if you're, looking for a new vehicle right now, a car, a truck.

Yes.

Jesus.

I mean, if you have the cash right now, you go and pull the trigger and get your new truck.

Yeah, but if you don't have it and you were thinking, well, maybe I'm going to change it or get a new car in a year or something like that.

He's an old boy.

I don't know what's going to happen.

You're talking.

My language hits me in my wallet.

I need a new car.

I love beer.

I also like, yeah.

All of a sudden it's more expensive than it was.

It is.

And this is a small fraction of kind of how people perceive this.

But you're exactly right.

The economy is been an advantage.

He's lost.

And more than the fact that people are distrustful of the economy or don't like the tariffs and the fact that prices haven't come down, these are all logistical issues.

To me.

The biggest problem is the following.

And that is that for the president.

Now, the polling indicates people see the economy as his responsibility.

And the reason that's important is not just for some like functional reason.

It's because politically, he can no longer blame the Biden administration for the problems, whereas in principle, like he could.

Right, the economy doesn't move fast enough that you can say now you own it.

But the his actions and the way he's sort of just controls the kind of political narrative essentially gives him the sense and sort of encourage people to believe that he does control it.

And so he's a kind of victim of his own success here in a way.

Right.

Where he's always talking about this kind of trade balance.

He's always talking about how he's going to bring prices down.

He's talking about the way we're going to fix the economy.

Those are all things that people watch him and say, oh, okay, well then do it.

And if he doesn't do it, I think to your point about how Republicans are worried about this, that could be a real liability for them going forward.

But there are lots of promises he's made, some of which haven't really come to fruition.

Let's talk about DOGE.

Let's talk about Elon Musk, right?

Yeah, he of the chainsaw and of the electric car.

That process of course, started out really hot, right to the point where even places like Texas were having like new committees that were formed on the Doge of Texas campaign.

Right.

This is sort of a phenomenon that took off.

But the actual findings, the actual savings are actually really small.

And so I'm wondering if this has the kind of resonance with the voters that in the first hundred days that he intended it to have?

Well, it's I think that that issue is very, particularly very muddy.

I'm very cloudy and very, I guess, esoteric to some extent.

To really understand the felt budget, you need to have a lot of knowledge and spending a lot of time, on, on, on research.

Yes.

Which the American people love to do.

Exactly.

By closely monitoring what agencies are getting what.

But we shouldn't expect them to do that, right?

Oh absolutely not!

That's why I think that the DOGE story is in some ways better than the actual outcome.

Right?

Oh, yes.

Absolutely.

And the numbers are, you know, kind of replete right there.

Say we're going to find $200 billion.

They find maybe five.

Look, $5 billion is nothing to sniff out.

This is definitely like a, a kind of cost saving measure.

It has to be codified by Congress.

But again, that gets to the point where they have to get Congress to agree and lump.

Some of these cuts are pretty intense, to the point where voters may say, yikes.

Yeah, I mean, Doge started with 2 trillion, then like, yeah, maybe 1 trillion, and now some, independent analysis by the partnership for Public Service that is done, in theory, a nonpartisan, organic quantum theory, a nonpartisan organization, so that in reality, the $160 billion that Doge has found, at least kind of documented is going to cost around $135 billion because reduced services lost revenue, so on and so forth.

So, as you say, it's it's a great idea.

Yeah.

But unfortunately there is not enough meat to say, oh, yeah, but now, as you say, $5 billion is $5 billion.

I don't have them know.

And again, it's like it's a it's expectations question.

Right.

Correct.

And if you play into the notion that the first 100 days has to be the best of the days, then you fall into the trap where you try to do everything all at once.

And if you promise you're going to do 2 trillion and it comes up to be 5 billion, you know.

Yep.

If you promised 10 billion and you found 5 billion, people would be like, oh great.

But I promised way over promised and you under deliver then that's I think I can't solve the real problem.

So again, it's, the problem is the president's falling into this trap of, like, saying this is kind of where we're ending.

Right?

And this term doesn't end after 100 days, really only just begins.

Let's talk about the judiciary, because that's been a big kind of conundrum for a lot of voters.

It's the sometimes called the third branch.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

If you look at the Constitution, it's like that much, right?

Just a little bit, but nevertheless pretty important.

Donald Trump remade the federal judiciary in his first.

Yes.

Actually, this still needs to be discussed and written about, more than it has been.

And the second term hasn't been as successful.

The Biden administration and the Democrats got wind of this.

They know President Trump is going to get reelected or by the time he did, you know, they had to rush through a bunch of judgeships.

They did.

So in his first term, Donald Trump had about 100 additional vacancies at the start.

Now he's got about 40.

Still a lot, but he's got to fight through a bunch of issues right.

So in the last couple of weeks, we've seen federal judges block enforcement of executive orders requiring proof of citizenship to vote, blocking federal funding, denials to sanctuary cities, sort of battering the president's, policies when it comes to deportation, the blocking the president's plan to cut funding for K through 12 schools, diversity programs and on and on and on.

So again, not that durable.

Right.

And some of these may go, but at the end of the day, it seems to me like these things are still being fought over.

And after 100 days, the president doesn't have any tangible outcome to show except just the pugilistic spirit, which is an executive is something that we said is important.

So what do you make of the kind of political fights and as they traverse the legal agenda?

Well.

There's two things.

One can be, well, these, pugilistic style that you mention and picking off fights with every single federal judge.

But I think the real issue here is how the judiciary is going to survive these.

If the judiciary says to the Trump administration, a Trump administration, you cannot do that, and the Trump administration say, hey, I don't care what you say.

I'm going to say, I'll do it.

Do it anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

It gets to a point that is like kind of like, wait, what?

And the Supreme Court has given President Trump some wins and not, other, and some, I guess, lose case.

Some temporary losses.

Right.

But all of it's temporary, right?

All still fight these things out, right?

Yes.

And eventually again, this thing, especially when it moves through the federal judiciary system.

Yeah.

Take a long time and can take years.

In some cases, no.

And, I mean, I think that's what they want is, like, you set the stage early, then you fight it out politically, right?

If you don't get the outcome you want legally, then you can go to the voters and say, hey, look, you know, they're in our way.

We should have our approach.

And to me, that's one thing where he has been successful is changing the culture.

Right?

I mean, yeah, all of the DEI stuff has come down off all the federal websites.

The Democrats are in disarray.

The kind of resistance that happened in the first term didn't really happen.

So, you know, big tech universities, law firms, foreign countries are all kind of, you know, bending the knee.

So that's a big change.

And for a president, that's a pretty successful outcome for 100 days.

Well, absolutely.

Because the culture is going to be something that is going to stay for a couple of years or decades or so.

No.

And now the turn would be for the Democrats to try to redefine what's going to be their culture.

But obviously that is something that we're going to be keeping track, in the next, couple of weeks.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

The conversation keeps up next week.

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