PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP AFTER 100 DAYS: TWO VIEWS – JAMES MORROW

On Wednesday 30 April 2025, The Sydney Institute held a discussion of the Trump administration at the 100-day mark. After a breathtaking number of executive orders and administrative targeting of Trump enemies, the discussion evaluated the pros and cons of the Trump “correction”. Bruce Wolpe, commentator on US politics & Senior Fellow (non-resident) at the United States Studies Centre and James Morrow, National Affairs editor at The Daily Telegraph and presenter of Sky News Australia’s US Report led the discussion offering two very different reflections on what had been happening. The paper which follows has been taken from an edited transcript of James Morrow’s talk.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP AFTER 100 DAYS: TWO VIEWS

JAMES MORROW

Thank you so much Gerard. It is so great to be here to join all of you lovely folks at The Sydney Institute for the 100th day anniversary of the Trump administration. It’s great that we’ve been asked here to do this. Whether you love Donald Trump or hate Donald Trump there are so many things that we have to acknowledge. He is an historical figure. He has achieved, in 100 days, things that I never once would have thought possible.

Think about this. Democrats who once bought Teslas to show how cool they were and how they were saving the planet, now look at Elon Musk’s EVs as if they were disgusting. Meanwhile, around the world, most recently, we’ve seen in Canada that the left has decided all of a sudden that patriotism, nationalism and national pride no longer makes you a Nazi. Especially if you believe in your country and like to wave your flag and stand up for yourself because they’re standing up to Trump. On the economics front, we have to agree here that some wild things have happened too. Liberals – and I use that in the American Democrat, liberal, progressive sense of the word “liberal” – have now become libertarians when it comes to free trade and objecting to tariffs. Almost to the point where if they keep it up, they’ll all be wearing fedoras and growing neck beards.

Let’s look at the first 100 days of Trump. By the numbers, it’s extraordinary. Particularly, when you consider what came before. To understand Trump, you need to understand how we got here. So far, by my account, there have been 142 executive orders on everything from DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) to paper straws. I note that he has not yet made the old school light bulb the law of the land. According to the President’s office, he’s taken at least 106 questions from the press. They’ve also noted that there have been 26 American hostages released around the world from places like Russian dungeons. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has cut something like $160 billion in spending, nice but not enough. Tom Homan tells us that there have been 139,000 criminal deportations already in 100 days – a pretty impressive record.

We need to look at Trump in the context of history. He is a world historical president in so many ways. He’s touched so many third rails. He’s gone against so many things that were the accepted orthodoxy, that we say, “Oh this guy is completely nuts, he’s completely crazy and we haven’t seen anything like this before.” Of course, all of the people who benefited from the old system are furious about that. That’s why they’re doing so much to oppose him. If you look at the sweep of American presidential history, what we see with Trump is a model of president that is not exactly out of step with what we have seen in the past century.

Remember that from Roosevelt to Nixon and the Watergate scandal, presidents very often acted in a fairly “Caesarion” manner – I mean that in the Roman sense of the word. Watergate turned that around and that was when the bureaucracy fought back and said, “No, no, no we’re running the show.” In that sense, we’re switching back to a mode of president that we have seen before.

Successive presidents tried to cut the bureaucracy but Barack Obama made a go of it. He created the Department of Digital Efficiency, which became an executive office which then Trump repurposed as DOGE. The fact is that Obama tried and he couldn’t do it because the bureaucracy was too big. Trump has just simply said, “Well, we’re going to take a baseball bat to it.”

Then there was FDR. In 1942, a group of German saboteurs were caught in New York and Florida planning to blow up hydroelectric plants and other key locations of American industrial power. They were eventually ratted out. Roosevelt knew exactly what he was not going to do. He told his Attorney-General Francis Biddle, “I want thing one thing clearly understood. I won’t hand them over to you or any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus understand?” This was war. There was no civilian due process for these chaps, and they all met a very quick and highly leaded end.

Finally, we also talk about the shock of tariffs. But a few of you might recall that, in 1971, Nixon shocked the global system with the ending of the Bretton Woods system. Much like Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, which I don’t fully agree with. The point is that it was another moment in history when the American dollar as the world’s reserve currency had become out of value, out of whack, out of balance and there were urgent changes that needed to be made. Yes, it caused a recession but then it unleashed prosperity and eventually led to Australia floating its own dollar, which led to a whole era of reform.

The key thing here is that Trump has provided a much-needed shock to the system. The United States could not simply have kept going on the way it was, whether in terms of its border, whether in terms of its relations with China, whether in terms of its relations with the rest of the world. Something had to change. Let’s look at one of the big ones here – the border. Illegal crossings of 10,000 a day have stopped. And not a lot needed to be done to change the situation under President Joe Biden. Which tells me that under the Biden administration there was never any seriousness about dealing with the border. In fact, what they had allowed to develop, is what some people call, a crisis by design.

Meanwhile, we have the situation with deportations. The fascinating thing about this is that the idea of deporting criminals has become such a horrifying thing to the left. We have now seen a case where a judge in Colorado let an accused wife basher, who was a second time illegal, into the United States. He’d been deported once before. She adjourned the case to help him slip out the back of the court and get out onto the street. She did not realise that ICE agents were outside looking to pick this fellow up and send him back to his native central America. Leftist media like David French and the New York Times have commented that to punish the judge is a fascist move and a judge should not be in trouble for helping a criminal escape.

The whole fight against anti-Semitism, political correctness, wokeness, DEI mostly at universities, but also throughout the country has been fantastic. Frankly, Trump’s absolutely right to turn the screws on Harvard. If Harvard wants to be Hillsdale College and not take any federal money, that is their choice. But they have become a $53 billion hedge fund with tax-free status and classrooms with a diploma printing machine attached. I’m happy to see them get taken to the woodshed, particularly because they came dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression (FIRE) Free Speech index. The Justice Department being turned to go after antisemitism and other things like that is great.

The executive order ending the idea that disparate impact is proof of racism is very important – that’s the idea that if a policy has difference in racial outcomes, then that’s automatically judged to be disparate impact and racist and therefore, a violation of civil rights law. Ending that has been absolutely key. This is before we even get to the other great things, like the executive order requiring federal agencies to recognise two sexes and stop promoting gender ideology and that flows through to women’s sport – letting biological men participate in women’s sports. States which resist will lose federal funds. Again, this is good, this is common sense, this is what we voted for, I voted for. But this was something that even Republican administrations weren’t able to touch because it became such a political third rail.

Getting rid of the Department of Education was fantastic. It was a waste of time. The states run education. DOGE has been good, but it hasn’t gone far enough, although one thing that has been excellent has been the demolition of the US Agency for International Development, which under the cover of providing foreign aid – and it did do some useful foreign aid things – was basically largely funding protest movements in the United States and abroad. Also funding NGOs that were driving the vast influx of migrants from the developing world into the first world, not just the United States but outfits like Catholic Charities that were pouring migrants into Europe as well.

Tariffs are the big issue. I disagree with the strategic approach. I’m generally not a tariffs guy, but again you do have the point that the issue of China was a huge problem, and you had unbalanced trade. The threat was Chinese dominance and forever debt. Selling China debt to get cheap consumer goods could not go on forever. We know what China has been guilty of. The mercantilism, the IP theft, the spying, the currency manipulation, inflating their own GDP, predatory trade practices, all of this had to end. The hope is that through some short-term pain – as with the Breton Woods decision in 1971 with Nixon – you can create a better system. China knows that they have a problem too. That is because their GDP is artificially inflated by all of their mercantilist practices; they are under consuming essentially, they’re an under consuming economy. Their economy is very much out of balance. They know that there’s a problem.

We need to look at the counterfactual here. Let’s not forget that Joe Biden was essentially demented, especially in the last months of his office. The press lied and lied and lied about it. The White House lied and lied about it. People like me would go on Sky News and say, “Hey look at this. This guy’s not all there.” The left would respond saying, “That’s fake news. You’re a right-wing agent of disinformation.” Well, here we are. We also know Kamala Harris was unelectable. We knew this because Josh Shapiro – who I rate very highly as a Democrat politician – was canny enough to tank his interview with the Kamala people in order to keep from being selected as vice presidential candidate. That’s why they wound up with that great paragon of American masculinity, Tim Waltz, who was meant to get those working-class male votes. Remember Tim Waltz?

Finally, busting norms. Donald Trump is always supposed to be the guy who is destroying the norms. Except, if we think about things like the weaponisation of the CIA, the FBI and the NSA against Trump. The Russia hoaxes. The Hunter Biden laptop. Cries of “Oh no, no, that’s not real. That’s really Russia”. The letter from the 51 former intelligence agents, the various different ways that they tried to control the media. Norms were being busted all over the place by the left.

Someday we’re going to get back to an equilibrium of norms. But, to people who act like they’re shocked by things that are going on in this White House, I just say, remember your history and imagine if President Trump was doing the things that those guys did.