Eight years ago, in this space, a survey of the first hundred days of the initial Trump Presidency described just how “demoralizing” the Administration had already proved for any citizen concerned with the fate of liberal democracy. In both rhetoric and action, Donald Trump had undermined the rule of law, global security, civil rights, science, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. As we noted,

The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office.

Trump never concealed his motives or his character. He came to office in 2017 celebrating the illiberalism of Andrew Jackson and William McKinley and waving Charles Lindbergh’s banner of “America First.” At the Inauguration, he took in the spotty attendance on the Mall and instructed his press secretary to declare the crowd the “largest ­audience to ever witness an Inauguration—­period.” Trump went on from there, demagogue and fantasist, striving to ban travellers from predominantly Muslim countries and to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Media-drunk, he tweeted at Kim Jong Un, Hillary Clinton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, while hate-­toggling between CNN and MSNBC. He appointed Michael Flynn, a QAnon favorite, as his national-security adviser––until he regretfully had to fire him three weeks into the term. He amused himself by antagonizing close European allies and declaring nato “obsolete.”

There were many more moments of chaos and cruelty to come, but now we know that Trump’s first term, his initial attempt at authoritarian primacy, was amateur hour, a fitful rehearsal. The reflexes and ambitions were all there; he just didn’t know yet what he was doing. His victory over Clinton had been a shock, so when he frantically prepared for office he threw together a motley staff of bug-eyed ideologues, silver-haired establishmentarians (who “looked the part”), and family members and retainers who hoped to profit from the job while getting off on all the super-cool trappings of power. As a result, his first term was characterized by an ambient contempt for him inside his own Administration. His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was reportedly convinced that Trump was a “moron,” and both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and the chief of staff, John Kelly, eventually concluded that the Commander-­in-Chief was, in a word, a fascist.

Trump still managed to exact plenty of damage, yet the feuding in his midst, along with the episodic flashes of congressional opposition, popular protest, and resistance in the courts, forestalled some of his fondest ambitions from being realized. Time ran out. He lost reëlection. His insurrection failed.

But he was not done. During his four-year interregnum at Mar-a-Lago, Trump gazed down the fairways and concluded that Joe Biden was too diminished to win again. On this, he was right and the Democratic leadership deluded. What’s more, Trump resolved to be himself, only more so: Trump Unbound. While the commentariat saw his increasingly bizarre improvisations at the lectern as no less disqualifying than Biden’s confusion during the fatal debate, Trump kept faith with his dominant source of inspiration––retribution. With a wink, he denied any knowledge of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s vision for the ­exercise of executive power, but few doubted that he would enact its plans. For would-be advisers and Cabinet officers, obedience was the sole qualification. The Administration is now stocked with the greasily obsequious. Rank incompetence also seems no impediment to employment. How else to explain Pete Hegseth’s move from the weekend desk at Fox News to the big office at the Pentagon? And in what other Administration would bulbs as dim as Howard Lutnick or Peter Navarro be called upon to craft the future of the world’s largest economy?

The record of failure after a hundred days is, at once, astonishing and predictable. With no evident purpose, Trump has alienated Europe, Japan, Mexico, and Canada, further undermined NATO, and made even more plain his affection for Vladimir Putin. He has sanctioned his benefactor Elon Musk to hoist a chainsaw and commit mayhem against government agencies that save countless human lives. With evident pleasure, Trump has deported more than two hundred ­people (nearly all of whom have no criminal record) to a Salvadoran gulag. With his tariff proposals, he managed to destabilize the global economy in a flash, perhaps the worst own goal in history. As part of his revenge campaign, he has waged a war of intimidation against dozens of scholarly, commercial, and legal institutions. Some, like Columbia University, Amazon, and Paul, Weiss, have caved, choosing the path of obedience over principle. Shari Redstone, of Paramount, would rather trash the independence of “60 Minutes,” the most respected investigative outlet on television, than resist the absurd attacks of Trump and his lawyers.

The enduring emblem of this Administration and its duplicity is undoubtedly $TRUMP, a meme-coin scheme that has brought many millions of dollars in profits to the President and his fellow-investors. Few seem to mind. Trump has normalized Presidential corruption. If one were forced to choose two representative events in the life of this Administration so far, they would surely be the White House meetings with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and, six weeks later, with the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele. In the first, Trump treated a moral hero as an ungrateful scoundrel. In the second, he treated a sadistic dictator as a soulmate. It is hard to recall a scene in the Oval Office more revolting than that of Trump’s smiling request to Bukele to build five more prisons, because “the homegrowns are next.”

In recent weeks, there have been encouraging signs of opposition to Trump, on the streets and in the courts. Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are among the clearest voices of dissent on Capitol Hill. But accommodation and cowardice remain the norm. “We are all afraid,” the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said to a gathering in Anchorage. No doubt. The threat of retaliation is no joke, but the Senator’s plaintive cry does not exactly meet the demands of the moment. This is not primarily a matter of competence or a clash over policy. The Trump Administration is carrying out a coördinated assault on first principles. “The limits of tyrants,” Frederick Douglass said, “are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” The President will persist in his assault until he feels the resistance of a people who will tolerate it no longer. ♦