What Have We Learned So Far from the Start of Trump’s First 100 Days?
As the new president continues to sign a dizzying number of executive orders, immigration, climate change, and tariffs surface to the top of his priority list

The sheer volume of executive orders from the White House gives us an insight into what we can expect from President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. Photo via AP/Matt Rourke
What Have We Learned So Far from the Start of Trump’s First 100 Days?
As the new president continues to sign a dizzying number of executive orders, immigration, climate change, and tariffs surface to the top of his priority list
The first 100 days in office for any new president generally spells a time of bold new direction for the country. It’s a time when they can make an impression and signal their management style, priorities, and speed in implementing campaign promises. Franklin D. Roosevelt used his first 100 days in office in 1933 to declare a bank holiday, which stopped a disastrous run on banks, to take America off the gold standard, and to pass groundbreaking legislation for farmers and homeowners and for the unemployed. Or consider Ronald Reagan, who used his first 100 days to push through sweeping budget and tax policies that reduced the size of the federal government.
So, what do the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term spell for his first 100 days? Already, Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders designed to make good on campaign promises, particularly in three major areas of focus for himself and the Republican party: immigration; economic reform; environmental deregulation.
Among the dizzying number of orders Trump signed during his first day in office were several designed to bar asylum for people arriving at the southern border, end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants, declare migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border to be a national emergency (thus unlocking federal funding), direct federal agencies to investigate trade practices, order the government to assess the feasibility of creating an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs and duties, withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, roll back a variety of regulations on tailpipe pollution and energy-efficient appliances, and open the Alaska wilderness for oil drilling.
Many of the orders are already being challenged in the courts; in one example, attorneys general from 22 states (including Andrea Campbell in Massachusetts) sued Trump to block the order to end birthright citizenship, and a federal judge did block the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Lawsuits have also been filed over Trump’s executive order to make it easier to fire thousands of federal agency employees and replace them with political loyalists and his executive order to create an advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency.
Regarding three major issues Trump has identified as important to his administration’s strategy, BU Today spoke with research scholars at Boston University in the areas of immigration, economics, and climate policy about what they expect to see in the weeks and months ahead.
Immigration
“Big picture, what we’re seeing is the creation of a climate of fear, chaos, and anxiety within the immigrant community,” says Sarah Sherman-Stokes, a clinical associate professor at Boston University School of Law, who is also the associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Clinic at BU.
“I’m incredibly worried for my clients. I’m incredibly worried for many of our students who either themselves are noncitizens or come from mixed status families and mixed status communities where their loved ones are at risk of detention and deportation.”
Trump’s actions were no surprise—he made the promise of mass deportations a cornerstone of his campaign. Within the first hours of the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded Biden-era guidelines that prevented immigration officers from entering “sensitive” areas, including schools, healthcare facilities, and places of worship. This, and other policies, will open the door for immigration enforcement officers to arrest undocumented migrants and will likely result in dramatic, high-profile raids, Sherman-Stokes says.
“Could the US deport 11 million people tomorrow? No,” she says. “Could the US deport 11 million people in 100 days? Also no—but that doesn’t mean it can’t create mass fear and chaos, displace a lot of families, and terrorize a lot of communities.”
In the meantime, state governments have tools to resist federal policies, Sherman-Stokes points out, and Massachusetts leaders appear willing to stand their ground. “States don’t have to agree to help federal law enforcement carry out deportations,” she says.
But what will happen if a state doesn’t go along? On January 22, the interim leadership of the Justice Department issued a three-page memo that ordered US attorneys around the country to investigate and prosecute law enforcement officials in states and cities if they refuse to enforce the administration’s new immigration policies.
A week later, in response to a Republican-led congressional committee’s call for her to testify next month about the city’s so-called “sanctuary” status, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu told reporters: “The federal government can implement their laws, and we’re not forced to participate in their actions. We have our domain, and we feel very strongly that we’re on solid legal ground.”
Still, Sherman-Stokes hopes that people in the United States will ultimately lose their appetite for mass deportations in the coming weeks, months, and years.
“I believe there will be a devastating economic impact if we deport people, but my hope is also that people care about the humanitarian part of it too,” she says. “Undocumented folks—folks without US citizenship—are part of the fabric of many, many families and communities. I don’t think people recognize the impact this is going to have on their neighborhood, their family, their places of worship, their schools. So I guess I’m hopeful that when the chickens come home to roost, so to speak, people say, ‘Oh, wait a second. This is way worse than I anticipated.’”
Tariffs
In the first few days of his second administration, Trump has been less muscular on economic measures than immigration measures, but trade imbalances and the threat of tariffs as a bargaining tool still loom large. In a social media post, for example, Trump threatened to impose new sanctions and tariffs on Russia if it didn’t negotiate the end of its war on Ukraine. During a public spat with Colombian President Gustavo Petro toward the end of Trump’s first week in office, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Colombian imports such as oil and coffee. And on Saturday, February 1, tariffs on goods from the three largest trading partners with the United States were to go into effect: China, Mexico, Canada.
Trump’s big-picture argument is that tariffs would make the United States wealthy—by sheltering it from competition—and safer—because they could be tools to force other countries to reduce illegal immigration. (This was the rationale behind Trump’s threat to Colombia, which came after the country refused to receive US military planes carrying deported immigrants.)
“Tariffs, I told you, most beautiful word in the dictionary,” Trump said recently, repeating a phrase used on his campaign trail.
But tariffs, says Mark Williams (Questrom’93), a master lecturer in the BU Questrom School of Business, “can’t be looked at in isolation.”
“Tariffs themselves, of course, create an added cost for one party, the importer, and then they can trigger retaliation,” Williams says.
The United States is the largest importer of goods in the world. And its three main trading partners are Mexico, Canada, and China. “When we say to them that we’re not going to allow their goods to cross our border without slapping on a fee or tax, then they’re going to retaliate,” he says. “So it becomes a trade war.”
And that escalation of trade hostilities isn’t likely to create a favorable economic environment at home, he says.
“In general, what strong academic research has demonstrated is that tariffs themselves are not effective, as they increase the cost of goods to consumers within the country that puts up tariffs, fueling greater inflation,” Williams says. “And that can be very harmful to economic growth.”
With Mexico in particular, a country that exports the majority of its goods to the United States, the result of aggressive trade tariffs could end up being “a massive disruption to our supply chain, similar to what we experienced during COVID-19,” Williams says, a period when the costs of automobiles, groceries, and technology reliant upon semiconductors all rose sharply because supply chain issues made them harder to obtain.
“You can imagine the inability to buy certain goods because they’re just not available, tariffs are high, and the producing countries are not willing to send those products to us,” he says. “Under this scenario, the cost of goods increases. Inflation increases. Interest rates would also increase. So that’s ultimately bad economic policy and a tax on US consumers.”
Climate
Trump’s early executive orders show him casting a wider net when it comes to climate policy—much of his focus thus far has centered on unraveling his predecessor’s work, says Anne Short Gianotti, an associate professor in the BU College of Arts & Sciences department of Earth and environment.
“The kinds of signals that we’re seeing from the first week or so show a clear commitment to pulling out of the Paris Accords again, and a clear commitment to going beyond what happened in his first term,” Short Gianotti says. “We’re seeing Trump actively trying to shift the balance [between renewable energy sources and fossil fuels], and slow the movement on renewables and other non-fossil-fuel energy development.”
One notable difference between Trump’s second term and his first is his close relationship with billionaire Elon Musk, whose Tesla company manufactures electric vehicles. Additionally, Biden-era investment in clean energy has been a boon for heavily Republican municipalities in the last several years. Might those relationships influence the president’s thinking on renewables?
“It could, in theory, slow divestment from electric vehicles and perhaps other renewables. But the early executive orders signaled the opposite,” Short Gianotti says. “These early executive orders signaled a doubling down on the anti-renewable and pro–fossil fuel agenda. So, I expect to see an expansion of natural gas and oil. But I think it remains to be seen if and how economic interests—from Musk and/or states with interests in renewables—balance the agenda of divesting from renewables.”
While Trump’s domestic energy agenda is still a bit murky, his international focus is crystal clear: among his earliest executive orders was one to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty on climate change.
In some ways, Short Gianotti says, this is a huge shift. As a global leader and a major carbon emitter, the US pivot away from the international agreement signals a drastic shift in the country’s political attitude toward climate change. But in other ways, it may not be as big a change as one might think.
“China has become the leading manufacturer of electric vehicles and has dramatically expanded renewables, and that’s not going to stop,” she says. “While there have been strong critiques of the withdrawal from leaders across the globe, several European leaders have already said that they would move ahead with climate-change plans with or without the US. And so I think the days where it felt like the US had to act in order for other countries to act are over.”
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