The First 100 Days of Self-Dealing Trump’s Thugocracy

As we reach Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office (again), two leitmotifs stand out. Number one is the in-your-face corruption of these people—Trump’s cabinet and inner circle of advisers, including many of the world’s wealthiest individuals, who know nothing about empathy but everything about exploitation. Number two is the way they revel in the spectacle of cruelty and humiliation. These are men and women with the withered, cankered souls of slave traders, who are turning the entire federal apparatus into an atrocity-generating machine.

I would need a Bible-sized volume to list every despicable, unconstitutional, unlawful act this gangster government has carried out over the past three months, and a whole section of a library to catalog all the atrocities they are likely to attempt over the coming three years and nine months.

One day, there will likely be entire museums dedicated to the horrors they unleashed, both stateside and globally, on the most disadvantaged among us. But, until such a day arrives, I offer some highlights, first of the corruption, then the cruelty.

Before he was inaugurated, the president set up a $Trump meme coin, essentially using the wide-open crypto landscape to spin money for himself and his family out of whole cloth. One day, there was no Trump cryptocurrency; the next, there was a Ponzi scheme—supported by the endless gullibility of the MAGA base and its willingness to send ever more cash to its cult leader—worth billions of dollars. Weeks later, its value cratered, but not before the Trump family had made yet another fortune. Then, in late April, Trump announced an explicit pay-to-play scheme, saying that the top 220 meme-coin holders would be invited to a private dinner with Trump at his private golf course near DC. (It initially suggested a tour of the White House, but that language has since been removed.) Within hours, as buyers flocked to $Trump, its value soared an astounding 58 percent.

In any other era, this behavior would have resulted in the initiation of impeachment proceedings. But there are no longer any guardrails in the executive branch. The DOJ, for example, is no longer enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, effectively giving a free pass to Americans who seek to bribe overseas political figures, and US political leaders who’ve all but put up shingles in front of their offices making it clear they are for sale. Perhaps that’s why the Saudis have lavished attention on Trump in recent months, as Trump and the Saudi leadership look to broker a deal merging the US-backed and Saudi-backed professional golf leagues, which could hugely benefit Trump, who owns golf courses around the world.

The administration has also neutered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, giving lenders free rein to exploit the most vulnerable borrowers. It has announced plans to scrap an array of inspection agencies, which will likely result in more dangerous workplaces as employers see they can get away with taking safety shortcuts while making it harder for unions to organize workers. Pick pretty much any workplace or environmental or health standards enforcement agency, and it has been either weakened or destroyed in the past 100 days, leaving the federal government in many ways less of a regulatory actor than at any point since the 1920s. That is a massive gift to private businesses and a massive invitation to corruption.

So intertwined are public and private interests in this particularly American version of crony capitalism that Trump hasn’t even attempted to decode whether his DOGE enforcer, Elon Musk (who is planning to pull back his public presence in government starting in May, though will likely remain a behind-the-scenes force), is working on behalf of the government or simply on behalf of his own business interests. When Musk met Indian leader Narendra Modi in February, Trump was asked in which capacity the world’s richest man was meeting the Indian leader, and he punted, saying it was an official meeting but he expected Musk to talk business as well.

Meanwhile, Musk himself hasn’t made the slightest effort to disentangle his two roles, using his unique insider-outsider status to identify business rivals and then secure an advantage for his companies when it comes to securing government contracts. Take, for example, his use of X to criticize Verizon’s efforts to upgrade the FAA’s communications system—and the revelations that the FAA was exploring working with Musk’s Starlink instead.

Critics worry that the unprecedented vacuuming up of data about virtually everyone living in the United States as well as every business in the country by DOGE engineers will, ultimately, make Musk a kingmaker for decades to come. Musk now has the government data to bludgeon enemies and business rivals in a way that will make them less able to compete fairly with his companies for government contracts.

Outrageously, after activists began protesting Tesla because of Musk’s role in destroying huge swaths of the federal government and firing tens of thousands of workers, Trump used the White House lawn to televise a tacky sales pitch for Tesla cars. And, with Musk by his side, the president declared that those who protested against Tesla should be considered “domestic terrorists.”

Speaking of the White House lawn, Trump offered companies sponsorship rights over the annual White House Easter egg hunt, providing yet another form of pay-to-play for companies seeking the administration’s favor. No surprise, Big Tech was all over this, with Meta, Amazon, and YouTube all being sponsors.

So obvious are the market manipulations around tariffs— with Trump raising tariffs to absurd rates and then telling his TruthSocial followers to buy stock hours before he paused those same tariffs and sent stock markets temporarily soaring—that it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump is deliberately manipulating markets. Indeed, a number of senior Democrats, including Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called for SEC investigations into possible insider trading and market manipulation. But the SEC, which is now directly controlled by Trump in the wake of an executive order taking away the independence of many government agencies, has been silent. Those crickets speak volumes to where the country is heading.

I could go on, but you get the gist. This isn’t a government of, by, and for the people; the first one hundred days have shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it’s a government of, by, and for American oligarchs.

As for the cruelty, it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s begin with Musk feeding USAID “into the wood chipper,” in the grotesque phrasing of the world’s richest man. The damage? Thousands of USAID workers left without work; tens of thousands of overseas consultants and contract workers left without income; and millions of people globally left without access to critical, life-saving medicines and vaccinations for everything from HIV to TB, diarrhea, malaria, cholera, and Ebola.

The estimated consequences, in lives lost, are almost unimaginable. Infectious disease mathematical modelers at Boston University estimate that 103 people per hour are dying because of these cuts. As of late April, they estimate nearly 43,000 adults and nearly 90,000 children have died as a direct result of the decision to end USAID and its distribution of vital medications, vaccinations, and its work on preventing famines. By the end of the year, they estimate an additional 176,000 people will have died because of a cutoff of their HIV/AIDS medications; 62,000 will have died of TB being left untreated. Internal documents from USAID analysts warned Trump that cutting off polio vaccinations and malaria treatments would lead to 200,000 children being paralyzed by polio over the coming decade and 166,000 dying of malaria. Every one of these deaths is the all-too-predictable result of the demolition of USAID.

Then there is the deporting of hundreds of Venezuelan and El Salvadoran men to indefinite detention in CECOT, the massive gulag in El Salvador. Among these men are Kilmar Armando Garcia, who was deported in the face of a judge’s order saying he could not be returned to El Salvador—and who remains there despite lower-court and Supreme Court rulings that the government had to “facilitate” his return to the states. Pouring salt into the constitutional crisis wound, the DHS then published Garcia’s wife’s home address in social media postings, forcing her to go into hiding to avoid violence from Trump-inspired goons. Then there is Andry Hernández Romero, a young, gay Venezuelan who was in the process of applying for asylum when ICE agents decided his tattoos marked him as a gang member. With no pretense of due process, they flew the terrified young man out to the mega-prison, and sat back while he became a denizen of President Bukele’s forced labor regime.

There is the extraordinary decision this past week to deport three US citizen children along with their undocumented mothers to Honduras, despite the fact that one of these children, a 4-year-old boy, had stage 4 cancer and was being deported without medication or access to his doctor. This isn’t just flagrantly unconstitutional; it’s also as vile an act of deliberate, wanton, indifference to life, as any ordered by a US government official or agency against US citizens that I have ever read about. For this action, I hope Tom Homan, Steve Miller, and all the other ghoulish architects of this fascist anti-immigrant agenda spend the rest of their miserable lives haunted by the fate of this sick child.

There is the kidnapping of graduate students in broad daylight by masked agents of Trump’s authoritarian state, and their detainment in privately run immigration facilities thousands of miles from home. They have been slated for deportation, not for having committed crimes but for having committed thoughts.

There are the increasingly brutal encounters between ICE agents and immigrant families, many of them with the paperwork to show they have filed asylum claims, none of which now serve as protection against the snatch-squads, these latter-day fugitive slave hunters. Take, for example, the imagery of ICE agents using massive hammers to smash their way into a car just outside of Boston, in which sat a terrified immigrant couple, currently in the country on asylum, waiting for the man’s lawyer to arrive. I’ve watched this footage scores of times, but however often I watch it the sense of disbelief that this could be happening in America floods my mind.

All of this is accompanied by the cheers of state-level GOP leaders. Florida is deputizing campus police as de facto ICE agents and ordering hundreds of local police departments to coordinate with ICE in mass roundups. The early results of this collaboration: a two-day haul of 800 people arrested in the Sunshine State this past weekend alone. And Texas is building an extraordinary network of detention facilities to house the thousands, and then the tens of thousands of immigrants—including children—whom Trump’s thugs are now rounding up around the country and sending the Lone Star State’s way.

Finally, there is the torture-porn imagery of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in CECOT, surrounded by bare-chested, tattooed prisoners. This is on a par with the imagery of Nazi bureaucrats engaged in promotional tours of the concentration camps.

However you parse it, this first hundred days represents a stunning new low in American politics. The corruption and the cruelty are hiding in plain sight. Welcome to the thugocracy.

The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.

Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.

At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.

In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.

We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.

This is the journalism that matters in 2025. But we can’t do this without you. As a reader-supported publication, we rely on the support of generous donors. Please, help make our essential independent journalism possible with a donation today.

In solidarity,

The Editors

The Nation

Sasha Abramsky

Sasha Abramsky is The Nation‘s Western correspondent. He is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar, and most recently Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Follow him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.

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