President Trump’s first 100 days

Conservative activists have been dreaming of dismantling the Department of Education for decades.

They’re closer than ever to achieving their goal.

One of President Donald Trump’s biggest targets in his second term has been the Education Department, a federal agency established in 1979 that oversees the enforcement of federal law in schools. He’s called the department “a big con job,” and expressed his hope that Linda McMahon, confirmed on March 3 to head the agency, will “put herself out of a job.” On March 20, he finally signed a long-expected executive order directing McMahon to dismantle the department.

Trump cannot legally close the Education Department without cooperation from Congress. (During her confirmation hearing, McMahon agreed that congressional action would be necessary, and said some programs would continue.) But the administration has already started making massive changes. In early March, the department announced the layoffs of more than 1,300 workers, bringing the agency to about half the size it was when Trump took office, according to the New York Times. The department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces federal disability law and anti-discrimination protections in schools, faced especially stark cuts. McMahon said in a Fox News interview on March 11 that the layoffs were part of Trump’s plan for the department: “His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education.”

Over and over again, the Trump administration has claimed to be fighting antisemitism while wielding power against its domestic enemies. Yet, at the same time, there’s been a troubling surge in antisemitism among MAGA influencers and even some Trump administration staff.

Concern for the safety of the Jewish community has been the stated motivation for two of Donald Trump’s most recent aggressive moves — cutting $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University and attempting to deport one of its graduate students, green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil, in retaliation for his pro-Palestinian activism.

The next phase of Elon Musk’s plan to entangle his companies with the workings of the federal government is well underway. That entails not only President Donald Trump’s photo op with a Tesla in front of the White House but also, surprisingly, the future of your internet connection.

More specifically, Musk is making moves that could change the way millions of Americans access the internet by boosting Starlink, the satellite-based internet company operated by his company, SpaceX, of which he is the founder, CEO, and major shareholder.

President Donald Trump has invoked an 18th-century wartime law to carry out a large-scale deportation operation.

As he promised on the campaign trail, Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of people with alleged Venezuelan gang ties to El Salvador, ignoring a court order blocking their deportations. The law, passed in 1798 as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, allows the president to detain and deport noncitizens from countries at war with or invading the US.

A legal showdown this past weekend shows that the Trump administration is continuing to test the limits of how far they can get away with ignoring or defying court orders.

On Saturday, Trump officials attempted to rapidly deport a bunch of people they said were Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador — based on a new and initially secret legal rationale — before progressive activists could sue and judges could stop them.

The question of what happens if the Trump administration openly defies a federal court order has hung over the United States since President Donald Trump’s second term began. If that happens, it will trigger a constitutional crisis. Now, that long-awaited crisis may be upon us.

On Saturday, Trump issued a proclamation claiming the authority to deport Venezuelan nationals that, he claims, are members of a criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua. Trump alleges that these foreign nationals may be swiftly removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law that has only been invoked three times in American history — the last time in World War II.

Over the weekend, the stakes of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts reached a new level after the White House invoked an 18th-century legal authority to expand its powers. A federal judge attempted to block the removal of hundreds of alleged gang members, but the administration carried on with the deportations, arguing the order came too late.

More than 200 Venezuelan immigrants, which the White House accused of being members of a Venezuelan gang, were flown — along with some suspected members of a Salvadoran gang — from the US to a supermax prison in El Salvador on Saturday. The White House claims the court order didn’t apply to this flight because it was already over international waters on its way to El Salvador by the time it was put into effect. The Trump administration says it welcomes a coming legal fight over its expanded immigration authority.

Throughout his first term as president, Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance that in his view allows other countries who don’t spend enough on their own defense to get a free ride on US security guarantees. His former national security adviser John Bolton has written that he believes Trump would have followed through on the threat if he’d been reelected in 2020.

This term, though, despite deepening tensions with Europe, Trump hasn’t said much about leaving the alliance. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has avowed, “The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop.”

On Monday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on X that it would terminate over 400 grants, adding up to some $250 million in funding, to Columbia University over its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The following day, the Trump administration pulled $800 million in USAID-related grants from Johns Hopkins University, academia’s biggest research and development spender.

These cuts come on top of last month’s announcement of major rollbacks to what are known as indirect costs — money the NIH gives research institutions on top of project-specific grants to cover necessary expenses like building maintenance, utilities, and administrative staff salaries. Many universities — both large and small, public and private — rely on the NIH to sustain a lot of their day-to-day operations.

In about three short months, the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to foreign aid, threatening millions of lives and livelihoods around the world. After initially pausing all US foreign aid spending for 90 days, President Donald Trump handed over the reins to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The damage as DOGE went about clear-cutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was swift and extensive. Health clinics from Afghanistan to Burundi shuttered. Oxygen tanks, HIV and malaria medications, and other medical supplies amounting to at least $240 million remain stuck at ports or storage facilities around the world. Ebola prevention and response funding, which Musk claimed at the end of February was restored with “no interruption” during the 90-day freeze, is reportedly still not operational, according to several public health experts. Whether it’s aid for malnutrition, clean water, or outbreak response, even a handful of days can undo years of progress in the making.

President Donald Trump has put millions of lives at risk by shutting down most of America’s humanitarian and development work abroad. After freezing almost all spending on foreign aid, the administration this week finished its purge at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), announcing that 83 percent of its programs are being axed.

But you can help keep some of these lifesaving programs going. Experts who see the immense value of these programs — which prevent and treat diseases, supply food and clean water to people living in extreme poverty, and help refugees fleeing war — have spun up new emergency funds to enable the programs to continue their operations. And they’re seeking donations.

The US and Canada are meant to be the best of friends, but they’re in the midst of a pretty ugly fight.

It began with President Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, when he began referring to his outgoing Canadian counterpart as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”

Once again, the country is on the brink of a government shutdown.

Unless the Republican-controlled Senate passes a spending bill, the government will shut down on Friday at midnight, when last year’s appropriations run out.

Candidate Donald Trump promised an economic renaissance. President Donald Trump is delivering economic turmoil.

The US stock market, once the only measure of economic performance that the president cared about, has seen a significant selloff amid fears of an impending recession — and the US is underperforming relative to its global peers.

It is a political truism that it’s bad to be the president in charge when the economy turns sour.

It may be especially bad for President Donald Trump — because, through endless controversies during his decade in politics, voters’ belief in his economic savvy has been his most consistent polling bright spot,

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. The news on that front has been chaotic — a draft executive order to close the department was leaked, then walked back by the Trump administration, and newly minted Education Secretary Linda McMahon has pledged to guide the department through its “final mission” without providing specifics on what that mission is or how it is final.

Donald Trump has a gift for inheriting valuable things. And the economy of January 2025 was no exception.

When the president took office, stock values were hitting record highs, unemployment was hovering near historic lows, and consumer confidence was stable. Wall Street expected that business conditions would only improve. Among investors, conventional wisdom held that Trump was serious about corporate tax cuts — but not about launching an unprovoked trade war against America’s closest allies (a proposition too pointless and self-destructive to be sincere).

Earlier this week, we learned that a senior State Department official called Secretary of State Marco Rubio stupid. The insult was delivered using peculiar phrasing — “low IQ” — that’s actually quite telling about the nature and ideas of the American right today.

The official in question, Darren Beattie, is the acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy — a fairly important job. He is also a creature of the internet fever swamps with a history of offensive behavior: He was fired from his speechwriting job in the first Trump administration for giving a talk at a white nationalist conference.

Exactly five years ago today, after more than 118,000 cases and more than 4,200 deaths across 114 countries had been recorded, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic.

With the virus spreading rapidly around the world, the need for a vaccine was desperate — but the prior record for the fastest development of a new vaccine to a new virus was four years. Yet vaccines using the new technology of mRNA were developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in a matter of months, and were already being put into arms by the first anniversary of the pandemic.

The beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidential term has most certainly been full of sound and fury. What has it signified?

As in the first Trump administration, it’s been challenging to distinguish between the controversies of the day that will soon be forgotten, and the concrete changes that truly matter and will last.

President Donald Trump is going after a pair of major law firms — and attacking the First Amendment in the process.

Trump issued an executive order on Thursday that took aim at Perkins Coie, a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump in 2016. Notably, Perkins Coie hired a research firm that produced the infamous “Steele dossier,” which alleged the president colluded with Russia to steal the election. Trump’s order aims to strip the firm’s attorneys of their security clearances and asks the government to review all contracts with the firm with the intention of terminating any they can.

A lot has happened in the last six weeks, to put it mildly, and it can be hard to see through the dust and tell what’s actually ongoing.

The government threatened tariffs, backed off, then did the tariffs, and then started carving out tariff exceptions for connected-enough constituencies.

Welcome to The Logoff. Today I’m focusing on Donald Trump’s effect on the economy, because we’re seeing some early indications of how the president’s policies are affecting the rest of us — and because the markets may influence his behavior going forward.

What’s the latest? We got two early signs of how Trump’s economy is doing today. The government reported that the US added a net 151,000 jobs in February — slightly less than the average growth for the past 12 months (168,000). And the financial markets closed their worst week since early September.

The iconic musical Hamilton canceled its high-profile plans to perform next year at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, reports the New York Times. The news comes just weeks after President Donald Trump got himself declared chair of the Kennedy Center.

“This latest action by Trump means it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it,” Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda told the New York Times. “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center. We’re just not going to be part of it.”