SMU Perspectives
SMU Perspectives
SMU Professors Jillson and Wilson grade first 100 days of Trump 47
SMU Political Science Professors Cal Jillson and Matt Wilson routinely field journalist queries from all over the world. So we thought President Donald Trump's First 100 Days in his second term was an excellent time to pause and reflect upon the Trump 47 Administration to date. This SMU Perspectives Podcast delivers sharp commentary amid the context of Jillson's and Wilson's observations of The President's political career ever since his decent from the 'Golden Escalator' at Trump Tower nearly a decade ago.
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Welcome to the SMU Perspectives podcast. I'm Robert Ehlert, the SMU commentary editor. My guests today are SMU professors Cal Jelson and Matthew Wilson. Both Professor Gilson and Professor Wilson are political science specialists, authors, and commentators frequently asked to comment on political developments, everything from local and state to national and international issues. We couldn't think of a better duo to ask about President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office this term. But it's more than that, really. June 16th, 2025 will mark a decade since you both began paying serious attention to Trump's political career. So gentlemen, let's get to it. Normally, I'd refer to you both as Professor Jilson or Professor Wilson, but your last names sound so similar, I'm going to play it safe and call you Cal and Matt to avoid any Jilson-Wilson confusion. First First question is for Cal. We've had a previous discussion about how much territory there is to cover when discussing President Trump, who is capable of making news every minute, hour, and day, not to mention overnight on social media posts. But let's start with this. Please characterize Trump 45 versus what we know about Trump 47 so far.
Cal Jillson:In Trump 45, there was a lot of uncertainty about how the national government worked and how, as president, Donald Trump could make it abide by his preferences, follow his policy designs. And this time, in 47, he's much more experienced. He's got a better handle on the institutions of government, how to operate them, who to put in various places. So he's better at knowing how to accomplish his goals. And the second thing that I would note as a difference between 45 and 47 is that there was a lot of chaos in both 45 and 47, but the chaos in 45 was inside the White House. It was among the president's closest advisors, including his several chiefs of staff in the first term, There's still chaos in this 47 presidency, but it's not in the White House. Susie Wiles is the White House Chief of Staff. She's very good at ensuring that the trains run on time. And Russell Vogt, who is the head of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the lead authors of Project 2025, laying out what the Trump term might look like, have been able to keep the White House relatively steady. While there's chaos out in the Department of Defense and other parts of their government, but the White House has been steadier.
Robert Ehlert:Matt, your thoughts on 45 and 47? I
Matt Wilson:think the biggest difference is that Trump 47 feels much less constrained than he did in his first term for a variety of reasons. One of them is that he, despite his occasional half-joking protestations to the contrary, can't seek another term. So he's not going to go before the voters again. That is in some ways liberating. It means that you are less bound by public opinion, not unbound, but less bound than he was during the first presidential term. The other thing is that he feels like all of his adversaries have done their worst and he has remained standing. The way that he looks at the world, he says, look, they came at me with two impeachments. They came at me with multiple criminal charges. I survived in his heart of hearts what he must regard as his own mistakes on January 6th. And yet he rose after all that. Oh, and then, by the way, they tried to literally tried to kill me. Right. There were assassins. I took a bullet and I remain standing after all of that. He's emboldened by that. He feels like that those who would oppose him have done their worst. And he's come out the other side. Combine that with the fact that he doesn't. have to run for reelection. And I think that he feels like he's got much more latitude to act than what he felt during his first term as president.
Robert Ehlert:Okay, Matt, you're up for this question as well. I'm going to alternate. I'd like to give you the first crack at the next topic, campaign promises made and results so far. Okay.
Matt Wilson:Well, I would say that you have to give Trump credit for being serious about his campaign promises. Now, you may despise the substance of those campaign promises. You may not like one bit what he promised to do. But I think actually to a surprising degree, both for his opponents and for many of his own supporters, he actually is doing the things that he talked about on the campaign trail, many of which a lot of people assumed was just kind of bluster. A lot of it people hoped was just kind of bluster. But he's actually following through on it. The tariffs are the number one case in point, right? That he talked about a serious tariff regime being put in place. And in fact, he's followed through on that. Now we see that that has created all sorts of market turmoil. We're going to talk about that later. But the other thing is with regard to serious immigration actions and attempts to control the border and do significant deportations. Definitely he's followed through on that. He talked about fighting wokeness in the federal government in a variety of ways. Definitely he's following through on that. He talked about seriously cutting the federal bureaucracy. Definitely following through on that through the Doge initiative, so on and so forth. Again, the point is not whether any or all of those initiatives are good or smart or desirable but he promised all those things and in fact is doing all those things so love or hate the promises i think we've got to score trump as better than most presidents in terms of aggressive follow-through on the main themes that he sounded on the campaign trail
Robert Ehlert:thanks cal please on the promises your thoughts
Cal Jillson:yeah i i think that that donald trump has certainly addressed many of the promises promises that he made on the campaign trail, but how he has addressed them has surprised a lot of people. I think most Republicans assumed that Donald Trump had the economy as his principal campaign focus and that he would deal with it directly to bring down inflation, to rejuvenate the economy, maybe to bring back industrial jobs to the Midwest. And he has addressed the economy, but he's done it principally through tariffs, which are much broader and deeper than anyone would have expected. No one, I think, expected a 145% tariff on Chinese goods, even if they knew that he was going to use tariffs to address the trade imbalances with China. So I think that he has not addressed his campaign promises in the way many people expected and hoped that he would. He said, for example, on another topic I will end the war in Ukraine before I become president, and if not, on day one. And they are just about now to walk away through the Secretary of State and the president from those discussions to end the war because it's very difficult. They haven't made very much progress. So I do think that he is trying to address the topics he raised. I'm not sure that he's doing it in the way people expected and hoped, or that he's having the effect that even he had hoped.
Robert Ehlert:Well, thank you, Cal. I'm going to continue with you and ask you about the manner in which President Trump chose his cabinet and his advisors, the team that he's going to have working with him.
Cal Jillson:Yeah, this is one of the most remarkable aspects of Donald Trump's second term, because in the first term, he chose people who had reputations, four-star generals, CEOs of major corporations. And while he didn't get along with some of those people, they did provide a little bit of stability to his cabinet, but he bristled under that stability in many instances. So what he did in this second term is he selected people who generally he thought would follow his desires in regard to their departments and agencies. And usually these were people who were suspicious of those agencies, thought that they needed to be reformed very deeply. I'm thinking of people people like Russell Vogt at OMB, but Lee Zeldin at the EPA, and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services as he shades vaccines, those kinds of things. So I think that he selected a group of people that are sort of anti their own departments, and that has created much of that instability outside the White House I referred to earlier as characterizing this administration.
Robert Ehlert:Thanks, Kel. Matt, your thoughts on the way the cabinet was chosen?
Matt Wilson:Yeah, you know, I think fairly or unfairly, probably some of both. Trump concluded from his first term that much of the career federal bureaucracy was his enemy and that the career federal bureaucracy worked systematically to undermine him personally and to undermine important priorities of his administration. And he basically came into office this time saying, I'll be damned if that's going to happen again. And I think his cabinet choices and approach to staffing the federal government this time around reflect that. And so he put a much bigger premium on personal loyalty than he did in his first round of cabinet selections. That's really important in all of these choices, is that the people with varying levels of qualifications, varying levels of ties to the establishment are All of them had to be loyal to Donald Trump if they were going to get chosen. That was clearly an important criterion. The other thing is that he has been much more willing to reach outside the establishment. In fact, this time around, rather than seeing establishment credentials as a plus for kind of burnishing his own credibility and his own image with the Washington powers that be, he's basically decided to heck with the Washington powers that be. I don't care about that as much as I did even eight years ago. Instead, What he's done is emphasized outsiders like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and we could go up and down the list. But those are all people for various reasons that. conventionally would never have been appointed in the past, even by a conservative Republican president. And so Trump has broken the mold on what constitutes a plausible cabinet nominee, in some cases more than others. I mean, Marco Rubio was a pretty conventional, widely acceptable pick for Secretary of State. That's why he got unanimously confirmed. But he's the exception rather than the rule in this administration. And so I think this emphasis on loyalty and also willingness Willingness to really go outside the box for good or for ill has been a hallmark of the cabinet selections in this go-round.
Robert Ehlert:Thanks, Matt. You're up first for the next question about policy. Let's exclude tariffs for the moment because that will come up later. Because you're both used to grading papers and exams, what kind of grades would you give President Trump on policies he's pushed so far?
Matt Wilson:I think the grades vary a lot depending on the particular domain. I think you would have to regard his border policy thus far as highly successful on its own stated terms. He said that he was going to dramatically decrease flows of illegal immigration. And he said that he was going to act aggressively to deport particularly those who are here illegally who have criminal ties and associations. I mean, you'd have to give him an A on that. Now, if you don't think that's what we should be doing, that's a separate question. But most Americans are broadly sympathetic with those objectives. And he's been quite successful in terms of bringing down dramatically the level of illegal border crossing. So I think immigration is a thing that he can point to for the highest grade thus far. With regard to his efforts to combat quote unquote wokeness in the bureaucracy, he certainly has done all kinds of things on that and has gotten actually a lot of compliance in a mood shift or what some call a vibe shift in terms of American corporate culture, in terms of American higher education culture. Well, just a couple of years ago, various invocations of diversity, equity, inclusion were were all the rage and were seen as something that would be advantageous to be leading with in the corporate sector, in academia. Now, all these entities are scrambling to de-emphasize those policies, claim, oh, we were never doing that sort of thing. And Trump has been enormously successful in changing the whole conversation surrounding those kinds of issues. Again, people can agree or disagree with the objective, But he's been quite successful there. I know we're going to leave, we'll leave aside a discussion of tariffs for a little bit. But I will say that a big thing that he talked about was decreasing inflation. In fact, that was the major issue basis on which many people came into his coalition. And I think his grade so far there has got to be a lot lower. We have not seen a dramatic decrease in inflation. We haven't seen a huge spike in inflation yet either. But the precursors are That is, we're seeing a weakening of the dollar. We are seeing increased cost inputs for American manufacturers who have to bring in goods from abroad. A lot of the policies that President Trump is advancing on the economic front are inflationary. And the things that he has talked about doing will also be inflationary, right? Big tax cuts combined with high tariffs combined with no major cuts to entitlement programs. I mean, that's a classic recipe for inflation. So I would say the grade there is incomplete right now, but with some real warning signs on the horizon.
Robert Ehlert:Cal, your thoughts on the Trump policies?
Cal Jillson:Yeah, I have some similar thoughts, maybe a bit modified. I do think on the border and immigration, those numbers came down dramatically late in the Biden administration after there was an agreement with Mexico to become much more assertive in stopping people as they came out of Latin America and tried to come through Mexico to the border. But those numbers have continued down and they're at lows that go back many, many years. The other part of that immigration set of issues is the the campaign promise that we're going to deport millions upon millions, mass deportation of people in the country illegally. We haven't really seen that. It's very difficult to do. What we have seen is local sheriff's office handing over people in the country illegally to ICE and having them deported out of the country. So we haven't seen the mass deportation. What we have seen is some very questionable deportation of people who are in the country legally, some of them for many, many years, don't seem to have gang ties, certainly not to contemporary gang ties. So I worry about that. And on the economy, I think he's got to get a D or an F on both domestic and international economic policy and results. Domestic, Matt mentioned that he had promised to bring down inflation on day one. That has not really happened. Much of what he's done with tariffs, we won't talk about the international part yet, but in terms of roiling the domestic markets, not just the stock market, which about half of American adults have some exposure to now, but the bond markets and beyond the bond markets, the American dollar as the international reserve currency, all of those things seem to be tottering several days ago. And so the Trump administration has pulled back on the idea that Trump may try to force the chairman of the Fed out of his office before the end of his term and might treat China gently, be nice to them, as opposed to bat them about the head and shoulders as he had been doing to that point. So a lot of policy is unfinished at this point, so it's hard to grade a draft paper, but I would say that right now he's circling a D.
Robert Ehlert:Thank you, Cal. And you're up next for my next question about President Trump's dealings with some nations, sovereign territories, alliances, namely Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Russia, and Ukraine. Unscramble what you think are the stated versus actual goals regarding relations with these entities?
Cal Jillson:Yeah, there are some legitimate concerns that the United States has had for some time, literally for decades, but the last several presidents that the U.S. is supporting more of the cost of international organizations like the U.N., the World Trade Organization, and NATO than we should. At the end of World War II, we were 50% of the global economy. We built these institutions and and we largely funded them. Now, 70 years later, we are 5% of the world's population, 23% of the world's economy, so we probably shouldn't be paying quite the share of support for these institutions that we have in the past. So that discussion of should the NATO countries pay more for defense I think is entirely legitimate, and they're our close allies. I think that the way we're treating Canada Mexico is deeply suspect. These are two of our largest trading partners. They are our neighbors north and south. They are very much interested in being close allies with us and following our lead. So I think we should treat them as allies. And I would point to Greenland and the Panama Canal as two great puzzles. Greenland is a massive near continent of its own. 40,000 people live on Greenland. There are lots of valuable minerals, and it's placed on the Arctic sea lanes in a very interesting and important strategic position. So Donald Trump has said, we want Greenland. We're going to have Greenland one way or the other, and Greenland is part of Denmark. And Denmark has said, for God's sake, just talk to us. We're happy to cooperate with you. You want another base? You can have You can do anything you want. We're close allies. Just tell us what you want. And he says, I want Greenland. Similarly with the Panama Canal, I think that the sense of America in the world, how America acts, how predictable and dependable America is, is all at risk today in those places and in Ukraine, which we may address a little more later on as well.
Robert Ehlert:Thank you, Kel. Matt, you're feeling about these entities?
Matt Wilson:I completely agree about Greenland. That is that the objectives that the U.S. has there, and there are legitimate objectives to want access to the rare earth minerals that are there, to want a robust military presence, to combat our adversaries' ambitions in the Arctic. Those are legitimate things. They are legitimate things that could easily have been attained without talking about annexing Greenland. Denmark is our NATO ally. We already have, therefore, a framework of within which we could enhance our military presence in Greenland. Moreover, there is a Greenlandic desire for greater and greater autonomy, perhaps up through and including outright independence from Denmark. it seems that it would have been much more advantageous for the United States to simply be supportive of those ambitions and then work out a very favorable set of agreements with whatever new Greenlandic government emerged than to get everyone's nationalist dander up by threatening annexation. So strategically, the handling of Greenland seems very bizarre and ham-handed. Now, with regard to the Panama Canal, again, I think President Trump surprised people with his level of aggressiveness I will say, though, that has already yielded some fruits. That is that Panama has taken steps to cancel some of their arrangements with Chinese companies in terms of managing access to the Panama Canal, which is something that the Trump administration really wanted and has tried to reassure the United States that there is absolutely no threat involved there of American shipping not being allowed to use the Panama Canal, etc. One of the things we've seen thus far in world affairs is that Trump's aggressive foreign policy posture has yielded more results in Latin America than anywhere else. Latin American countries really are dependent on the United States, really do need good relations with the United States. And so various places, whether it's El Salvador, whether it's Panama, whether it's to a large degree even Mexico, have been surprisingly compliant with Trump's pressure campaigns. That has been less true in other parts of the have been shocked with the level, and particularly Canada, I think has been stunned by the level of aggression and hostility coming out of the White House. And all these kind of smirking references to Canada as the 51st state and annexing Canada, those are just bad form. I mean, that's not happening. And it's not clear what what good those do for the United States from anybody's standpoint. I mean, that is, we're not actually annexing Canada. There's zero chance of that happening. Trump knows there's zero chance of that happening. Even when people in the administration say it, they do it with a sort of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge. So what's the point of gratuitously antagonizing an ally and large trading partner to the north? That approach has been very, very strange. With regard to Ukraine, I think it's pretty clear that the Trump administration just wants that conflict over, wants that problem to go away and to have that off the agenda. He's been frustrated so far by the fact that neither the Zelensky nor Putin has wanted to march along to his script. That is, he had a certain relatively simple script for this is how we're going to wind this down, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, Russia does this, Ukraine does this. This plays into the idea that Cal mentioned before about we're going to end the war in a day, all that sort of thing. Well, surprise, surprise, neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians want this to play out exactly the way Trump and the White House envisioned. And so now they're getting very frustrated with the intractability of that conflict. So I will say more broadly about global affairs. What I most worry about in the administration is that it is absolutely a real thing that the United States bears a disproportionate burden of the expense and the military cost of maintaining the kind of liberal international order, right? The United States uses a wildly disproportionate amount of blood and treasure to sustain this liberal international order that's been built up over the last 80 years. And the Trump administration is right to ask more forcefully, frankly, than previous administrations have of the Europeans to don't just talk about theoretically increasing your defense spending in the future. Actually do it. Actually make the hard tradeoffs that are necessary for you to be like full adult functional partners in this alliance. And finally, they are doing that, but only in response to pretty dramatic moves by Trump. But the other thing we have to remember is that the United States also benefits in a lot of ways from having been the architect of this world order. A lot of the international financial arrangements bolster the strength of the U.S. dollar. They sustain and undergird the U.S. markets. And we've seen a remarkable multi-year run of prosperity in the U.S. markets. I think the administration needs to be really careful about tearing down that whole architecture, right? That the United States has a lot to lose if we give up that position of leadership in the international order. Yes, we bear a lot of costs for it, but we also derive a lot of benefits from it. And I think we need to be really judicious about measuring those things.
Robert Ehlert:Thank you, Matt. Let's move away from those global affairs and go to some domestic things like Doge and Elon Musk and what's going on in these efforts for government efficiency.
Matt Wilson:Well, it looks like the Doge era in some ways may be winding down. We have just heard the news that Elon Musk is going to be spending a lot less of his personal time on these efforts than he has been. He needs to tend to his own major company of Tesla that has lost a significant amount of its market capitalization for a variety of reasons. But clearly, the Doge effort was not just window dressing. It was real. For good or for ill, it was real. We've seen major personnel reductions across multiple government agent My biggest critique of the Doge effort would not be the principle. That is the idea that the federal bureaucracy is bloated in a lot of ways, that it ought to be streamlined, made more efficient. I think there's broad agreement about that. And moreover, in defense of Trump and Doge, there's been broad agreement about that for a long time in theory, but then nobody ever really does anything about it. This time they actually really did something about it. But in a lot of ways, it seemed to be at a kind of chaotic breakneck pace where they would fire a bunch of people only to turn around a few days later and bring some of them back because they decided, oh, well, the work that some of these people were doing, turns out it was necessary after all. And then the chaotic communications where federal employees would hear one thing one day and something that contradicted that the next day. And it wasn't clear who actually got to make these decisions. Was it the agency heads? Was it Elon Musk? What powers, if any, does Musk actually have? What access to information should he actually have? The whole effort, even for those who agree with it in principle, was, I think, unfortunately chaotic. And that... sowed a lot of seeds of doubt and lack of confidence in people who might otherwise have gone along with some of those reductions and streamlining.
Robert Ehlert:Cal, your feelings about Doge and government efficiency and Mr. Elon Musk?
Cal Jillson:Yeah, I think that the issue of government efficiency has been on the table for a long time. And when people think about that, they think of the fact that the Social Security Administration, the IRS and agencies like that are working off of computer systems from the 1960s and 70s, and they know that if better electronic services were provided, the government could be more efficiently operated. But even though Elon Musk was at the head of Doge, and he is an expert in that kind of efficiency, he didn't really bring very much electronic sophistication to his work. What he did is to collect fairly motley group of his senior executives and mostly young male technology experts to go into the departments of government, beginning with USAID, and just take it apart, top to bottom. And in many other agencies, reduce personnel by 20-30%, cancel contracts in a careless kind of way, and people just got the sense that chaos reigned and you could never see where this was going to stop and what the benefits were going to be. So the idea of government reform is one that people respond positively to, but this has been chaos rather than reform.
Robert Ehlert:Thank you, Cal. Let's move on to the big one, the age of tariffs and How has this played out for Trump, for Americans?
Cal Jillson:Yeah, it's a big issue in American history. The United States government, from the founding period well into the 20th century, was funded principally by tariffs. And tariffs are taxes on imported goods. And what are called sin taxes generally funded the government into the second decade of the 20th century And as you move through the 20th century, tariffs were discredited by bad performances late in the 19th century and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, which were seen as having deepened the Great Depression and added a great deal to American misery in the decade of the 1930s. So tariffs were minimized for the better part of a century after the Great Depression, only to be brought back by Donald Trump where he talked about reciprocal tariffs, which is sort of like asking NATO allies to pay more of their fair share. A reciprocal tariff says you're charging us 6%, we're charging you 2, we're going up to 6 unless you want to come down to 2. Reciprocity, fairness, evenness made sense to a lot of people. But then you see that these tariffs are not reciprocal, they're really designed to balance trade deficits, and we're going to do 10% across the board and 143% on China people's heads just exploded particularly economists who don't believe that tariffs are our effective policy anyway and Donald Trump has been forced to back off much of what he initially did by the stock market the bond market the the fall in in the value of the dollar and so we're not exactly sure where we're going to be tomorrow let alone a week Matt, your feeling on the tariff
Robert Ehlert:situation?
Matt Wilson:I think that there is very much a case to be made that significantly heightened tariffs vis-a-vis China. were warranted, but China's a special case. China really is, on a whole host of dimensions, a problematic actor in the global economic system. The theft of intellectual property, currency manipulation, coerced labor at home, I could go on and on. China's a problematic actor, and they're also a large and powerful actor. But if you have that underlying conviction, which many in the Trump administration do, and you're going to therefore take the step of significantly increasing tariffs against China to try to reset and rebalance that economic relationship. The way that you would do that is by rallying the rest of the world in support of your cause. Say, look, these are the reasons why those of us who don't like what China's doing in the international arena, economically, from a security standpoint, human rights standpoint, what have you, we need to work together to change the facts on the ground. But instead, the Trump administration went to trade war not only with China, but with everybody else in the world. So paradoxically, that pushes those other states into China's arms because China's the other big boy on the block, right? If you look at the size of global economies, I mean, after the United States, China's next. If the United States is basically telling everybody else in the world to go pound sand economically, well, I mean, that kind of forces them to... do more business with China, which seems defeating to the more, as I say, defensible purpose of wanting to rebalance the economic relationship with China. There's this idea among some in the Trump administration, and the leading proponent of this view is Peter Navarro, that that somehow the United States has just been getting systematically taken advantage of and abused for years in the global economic order, and that we're just treated grossly unfairly, and we just need to reset the whole system. The data just don't bear that out. That is, when we look internationally, the United States over the last couple of decades has done much better than the economies of Europe, the economies of Japan, the economy of Canada, American median household income has increased much quicker than the median household income in those countries. If those countries are taking advantage of us economically, they're doing a really bad job of it. Now, as I say, China is a different story. But the kind of huge, wide-bore approach of saying we're ratcheting up tariffs on everybody and then maybe we'll work a deal with you to bring them down should not have surprised anybody that that produced tremendous chaos uncertainty and wild gyrations in the global markets.
Robert Ehlert:Thank you, Matt. My next question, since we're talking about the 100 days, what are some good moves by Trump in this assessment of this time period?
Matt Wilson:Well, as I said, the assertion of control at the border absolutely was a good move. And that's something that will be widely supported. If we look at it just in terms of public opinion, that is things that the Trump administration is doing that enjoy broad popularity with the American public. Assertion of control at the southern border, quite popular. reigning in what Trump refers to as, quote unquote, radical gender ideology. Those kinds of moves are widely supported in public opinion, okay? Those would have to be regarded from a political standpoint as wins for the Trump administration. Some of his individual appointments have been popular. That's a mixed bag. Some of them are more popular than others. Some are popular with certain constituencies and not with other constituencies. But I would point to the immigration front and broadly defined the culture wars front as things where the Trump administration has had had success, because on the culture wars front, he's had a good instinct for where to push and where not to push, right? He's pushed much harder on the gender identity issues, where his positions are in the majority, and has been much more muted in talking about abortion, where his positions are more politically dangerous. So he showed a good instinct on those things. So for now, we're talking only about the successes, right? So okay, so I'll leave it at
Cal Jillson:that. Yeah, I think it's very difficult to sort out successes. You can point to the border in terms of the traffic illegally across the border. But aspects of achieving that, along with the idea of mass deportation, has led President Trump down the rabbit hole where he's challenging the rule of law and challenging the federal courts up to and including the Supreme Court, which people describe as a potential constitutional crisis. So I do think if you look at the border, the The answer is yes, not bad. If you look at attendant and related policies, you still have to be quite concerned. And so I am not going to strain to find something that I can say, yes, that was a good thing. That was a win. I'm glad that happened. And I would say, too, there are some good appointments. And you think of Marco Rubio. But if you look at Marco Rubio's face on a day-to-day basis, the man is in pain. He is barely surviving his tour as Secretary of State, which is an office he lusted for all his adult life. And now he has it. And much of what he's required to do, I think he finds somewhat distasteful, including USAID, although he did really pursue that to the destruction of that agency. But I think I'll be more fulsome on the failures.
Robert Ehlert:Well, Cal, that's what's up next. What are the Trump missteps in this first 100 days?
Cal Jillson:Yeah, I think Matt did a really good job in pointing to some of the strategic missteps in foreign policy, where the goal that President Trump might want to secure, which would be better access to Greenland, better military siting in Greenland, more control over the Arctic sea lanes, are eminently understandable, but the bull in a china shop approach to achieving them is a serious misstep. I also find Donald Trump's relationship and really Donald Trump taking the United States into a much closer relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia than we have ever had before in the modern history of these two countries. Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America 1835 said that there's a natural rivalry between Russia and the United States as continental powers. And that rivalry has been visible for many, many decades. But to see examples where Donald Trump and Vice President Vance are pummeling Zelensky in the White House and then cozying up to Vladimir Putin and siding with Putin in UN votes in which the U.S., Russia, North Korea, Iran, and assorted countries that form a list that we don't normally like to be on was a remarkable thing to see.
Robert Ehlert:Thank you, Cal. Matt, your feelings about missteps by Trump?
Matt Wilson:Yeah, I agree. I think that in some of these foreign policy domains, we've seen missteps. We've just seen things done that were not necessary and that were counterproductive. That is, the administration seems too cavalier, if not in some cases eager, about surrendering the role as leader of the free world or leader of the Western world. And there's a real price to that. I mean, yes, there is an economic cost for being the leader of the free world, but there are costs to not holding that position as well. There are costs strategically. There are costs reputationally. There are costs, frankly, morally for not playing that role. And so I think that's something about which I would be quite concerned. The other thing is that one can undermine one's own objectives when there's a consistent projection of an aura of chaos and disorder. It's hard for people that you're trying to persuade to take you seriously when messages are inconsistent from day to day, when things are constantly getting walked out and rolled back. That is, I would say, or Organizationally, it doesn't seem that the Trump administration came into office with, they came into office with very clear policy objectives, and they followed through on them, more so, one might argue, than most presidents do in terms of keeping the campaign promises. But it has not been systematic. It has not been orderly. It hasn't been, okay, first, we're going to do A, and then we're going to do B, and then we're going to do C. So I would, I would take issue with the aura of chaos that has prevailed. Thank you, Matt.
Robert Ehlert:And the last question is an open-ended one, and it's for you. Could you characterize anything about this Trump 100 days that we haven't discussed, touched on, that you feel is really important?
Matt Wilson:I do think the rule of law, separation of powers issues are going to be very important. I think the rule of law is going to be very important. We don't know yet where that's going to go. I think in a lot of respects, the Trump administration has walked right up to some important lines. I would argue they have not yet crossed those, that we have not seen Caesar crossing the Rubicon yet. If we get to a moment where Trump, like Andrew Jackson, says, you know, Mr. Marshall, at that time Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Mr. Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. That's a huge problem. We're not there yet. I hope we don't get there. But some of the groundwork is being laid to potentially allow us to get there. And I think that's something to watch going forward is do we come out of this administration with the balance of powers between the branches of government intact and the respect for the constitutional order intact and the judicial review powers of the Supreme Court intact. And I think the jury is out on that right now.
Robert Ehlert:Thank you, Matt. Cal, your feelings about something we haven't talked about that you think is really important we should bring up here?
Cal Jillson:Yeah, I think the thing that I'll be watching going forward is, you know, the instability in Donald Trump's first term, as we talked about earlier, seemed to center on the White House. This term, it seems to center not so much in the White House, but as a result of White House appointments of major bureaucrats agency leadership. And I would point to Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services. Those are the two biggest departments in terms of personnel and budgets. And both of those are in turmoil, particularly the Department of Defense where Pete Hegseth, who had previously been a television Fox News personality and had run three small veterans organizations, all with a lot of instability and chaos associated with them. And he's had a very, very rough opening number of months as Secretary of Defense, sharing defense information that would have gotten a lot of people fired earlier. The question is how long he lasts, and is he replaced by somebody of his own ilk, or is he replaced by somebody who is sort of more stable, maybe more experienced, moving toward the establishment, but not an establishment figure? And with Robert F. Kennedy, it's the same thing. You've got a man who has firm opinions on many matters regarding health, but many of those opinions seem ill-founded to the medical community. And so the question is whether after Robert Kennedy has worn out his welcome, who replaces him and are we moving toward a little more stability? If the answer is no, then Katie, bar the door. We're in trouble. If these people are improvements, that will be a great mercy to all of us.
Robert Ehlert:Professor Cal Gilson and Matt Wilson, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing your insights about President President Trump's first 100 days in office in his second term. I'd also like to thank my colleague, Stephen Fasaro, for his technical support and the SMU Office of Engaged Learning, which makes the SMU Fondren Library podcasting studio available to us for our recordings. Until next time.
