Donald Trump has opened his second presidential term with a bang.
He brought in Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to fire swathes of government employees. He launched a global trade war with the highest tariffs in more than a century. He implemented an immigration crackdown that included deportations to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. He moved to end any diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program he could find.
The President has put everyone from major law firms to Columbia University under his thumb, with the former agreeing to do hundreds of millions of free work for causes chosen by Mr. Trump and the latter offering up a string of campus policy changes, by threatening them financially.
While there are gathering storm clouds for the administration – Mr. Trump reversed most of his tariffs following a stock-market rout and courts have started to rule against him – he is vowing to keep up the pace. “We’re just getting started,” he told a rally in Michigan marking 100 days in office.
Here are five Americans – from the Arizona desert, the forests of Montana, a small town in North Carolina and the metropolises of New York and Los Angeles – each well-situated to understand a specific aspect of Mr. Trump’s agenda. What follows are their perspectives in their own words, edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Jonathan Cathey
Owner of The Loyal Subjects toy company in Los Angeles
I started the company in 2009 out of the living room of a Spanish, flat-roofed adobe in West Hollywood. Toys just seemed interesting to me because I’m creative – a musician, a painter, an illustrator. I took the last 500 bucks I had and put it into the company.
Now, I have a team of 30 employees and we also support other businesses of all different sizes – sales forces, marketing agencies, warehouses. The toys are designed here – all of the intellectual-property creation, all of the high-concept innovation is done in the United States – and manufactured in China.
When the tariffs on China went to 145 per cent, the entire industry shut down that day. We can’t afford to bring toys over at that price. You can’t sell them. Retailers have frozen their ordering.
The entire toy industry is paralyzed right now. We have some inventory, so we have a few months where we can continue supplying retail.
Come summer, the shelves are going to be empty. Everybody is in danger of missing Christmas.
This toy factory in Yiwu, China, specializes in solar-powered plastic gadgets, but it also has figurines of Mr. Trump.Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images
There has to be a solution or Mr. Trump is going to crater the global economy. The idea that all production – from first materials to end procurement – can be done in a single country is hilarious. The world hasn’t worked that way since Marco Polo.
It’s a pipe dream that you could just clear out fields in Iowa and build up a bunch of concrete box toy factories. You couldn’t get an item made there unless you were paying US$3 an hour for labour. We don’t even have the labour to fill the jobs that exist – there are 480,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs that are open today.
Global trade has disproportionately benefited Americans by giving convenience, cheap products that improve our lives and all the jobs that supplies. I get what they’re saying, that China has reverse-engineered U.S. intellectual property, but I’ve got to tell you – I’m not about to go grab my hat and go down to the local church and say “hey, Google is really hurting right now, they need a few bucks.” Why would we destroy small business in America to help out Google?
All the blood, sweat, tears and investment can’t just be turned on a dime. I’ve been to China 80-plus times. Even if I said “okay, I’m going to move my manufacturing to India,” that would take 10 to 12 years. Once you’ve established high-quality manufacturing and your partners have figured out how to make your products, it’s nearly impossible to duplicate that.
Mr. Trump has no sense of U.S. history. It’s just shocking that somebody got in his head and said that McKinley was a great president. That was the age of the robber-barons – it was a good economy for 0.5 per cent of people and everybody else was living in squalor without plumbing. Who wants to go back to that?
Our company provides joy and happiness and childhood development. To take that away and turn it into a luxury experience, where a US$5 ball is going to cost US$60, is insane.
Cochise County Sherriff Mark Dannels says federal co-operation has been more visible in the second Trump administration.Cassidy Araiza/The Globe and Mail
Mark Dannels
Sheriff of Cochise County in Arizona
Cochise County is the 38th-largest land mass county in the country, a little more than 16,000 square kilometres. We have 133 kilometres of international border.
We’ve always had border crime. But the magnitude – the high percentage – we’ve seen over the last four years was new to us. More than 40 per cent of my jail population was border-crime-related under state violations, not immigration.
We had no engagement with our federal partners when it comes to our elected officials at the White House, and I blame 51 per cent of Congress.
Today, with the prioritization of this President saying where we’re going to secure the border, he has put management back into the border. We used to go on two to 10 pursuits a day under the former administration. We have two to three a week now. What a difference it makes.
The big difference is we’ve re-employed our federal agents to do the job. Their morale was in the dirt over the last several years. To see them now, back, spirited to do what they were hired to do – is just night and day.
I’ve had more contact with this administration in the first 100 days than I had in the last four years with the previous administration. I’ve talked to [Mr. Trump’s border czar] Tom Homan – just went to a meeting with him. We’re just doing so many things as we collaborate and work together for the good of the people.
En route to a recent TV interview, border czar Tom Homan passes the placards set up around the White House purporting to show arrested immigrant criminals and their alleged offences.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
I’ve always been a fond believer in our democracy on due process, and I’m not going to change on that. Do we have a sidestep on the [Kilmar Abrego] Garcia case? Let’s put it back in perspective here for just a minute. We can’t forget the fact that what Mr. Trump is doing is protecting. It’s amazing in our country that we’re actually debating whether a terrorist should be in this country.
I think about the damage that was done over the last four years, the people in this country that are here not to prosper, but to, I think, provide vulnerability and risk to our communities. We have to find those people. We have to show accountability back into the rule of law, because if we don’t, we will pay the price.
We have to continue to work together, and these communities that refuse to work – shame on them. Because the oath of office doesn’t say one dang thing about politics. It says protect, safeguard the homeland.
We are an international community. The tariffs – I don’t know where that’s going to take us. I mean, the bat’s been swung. Let’s see if we get the ball now and see if we can find a middle ground.
But as a world power, why should America be losing every year when it comes to tariffs? We need to look at how we can do it better. That’s putting America first. Doing nothing is never the answer.
Mary Erickson
Retired Forest Service leader
I spent 40 years with the Forest Service in the western United States in various capacities, the last 17 as forest supervisor on the Custer Gallatin National Forest, which is based out of Bozeman, Mont. It’s this diverse gem that borders Yellowstone National Park on the west and north side. It has grizzly bears and wolves and the complement of large carnivores.
I retired at the end of 2023. Earlier this year, I went on a women’s trip in Stanley, Idaho. But two of the women couldn’t make it because they had to stay behind and fire people. It was just horrible. There were these letters saying, “you are being fired for poor performance and you’re no longer needed.”
That kind of got me thinking – this isn’t right.
The national talking points about these DOGE cuts was that it was 10 per cent of workers who were probationary, that they didn’t have any experience. But a lot of them had worked for the Forest Service for a long time.
The way they did this to probationary workers was just cruelty. It was just meanness.
Of the 42 people who were fired at Custer Gallatin, probably 30 are back.
Inside the agency, though, it’s just sad. And chaotic. No one knows what’s coming next.
It really has compromised the ability of the agency to do its broader mission. Some places in the Forest Service have functional trail crews and will have their district positions filled. Others have big holes. They have no one at their front desk, and don’t know how quickly they can fill their positions.
The Forest Service fire lab in Missoula, Mt., is stocked with firefighting gear and an experimentation table to show how fire behaves. Understanding and preventing fire disasters is one of the agency's jobs.Matt Mills McKnight/Reuters
I’ve heard some Forest Service people make these dramatic pronouncements that there’s going to be fatalities because of the cuts. I’m hesitant to say that as a blanket statement. But if we had a horrible wildfire season across the West, all these people who took buyouts can’t come back on fire assignments. You don’t know what’s going to happen and where it’s going to happen.
I always thought government was supposed to do those things that private interests weren’t necessarily going to do. The things that are designed to help people for no specific reward – because it’s the right thing to do.
I always thought, too, we were a generous nation. Now I wonder, what does this whole America First view mean? This idea of pulling back from support for Ukraine. Or pulling back from NATO. I just feel like it’s a turtle pulling back into its shell.
If you think about Montana and public lands, I don’t see anyone winning from this. In this part of Montana, people care about public lands tremendously. They want to see them cared for and maintained.
Public lands are not all about making money. They’re about enhancing people’s quality of life and protecting wildlife species. But people don’t tend to understand the services that they’re losing.
I feel as if the only ones winning are the people who already have the wealth.
Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor, has been following the administration's attacks on the Justice Department, law firms, universities and other institutions that could keep his agenda in check.Natalie Keyssar/The Globe and Mail
Jennifer Rodgers
Law lecturer at Columbia and New York University, and former federal prosecutor
There has been a purposeful, concerted attack on the rule of law, and on lawyers, and on judges.
I’m thinking of it in two categories. One is the lawyers themselves, including at the Department of Justice (DOJ). The post-Watergate idea that we had an independent law-enforcement system that would not be deployed based on personal or political desires is gone now. It has allowed Mr. Trump to use the DOJ to defend the administration against all of the lawsuits against his executive orders.
His attacks on law firms are the other side of that coin. When people bring lawsuits against the actions and orders of the administration, a lot of law firms are involved, usually on a pro bono basis. So he is undercutting those lawyers who would be standing against what he wants.
These firms that made deals with Mr. Trump thought they weren’t really giving away all that much because they already do pro-bono and you can do pro-bono for veterans and other groups that the administration should be happy with. But ultimately, the administration is going to want different kinds of legal work than the firms would want to do. Some of them are going to find out that the deal they made was not what they thought it was.
There’s also the personal grievance part of it, where you see the President pardon people he likes or who support him, such as Jan. 6 defendants.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a Maryland man deported to his birth country, El Salvador, even though the Supreme Court said authorities should not have done that.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The other half of it are the attacks on the judiciary.
In our system, there are three branches of government and a system of checks and balances. So we’re seeing these threats to judges, calls to impeach them, the administration defying lower-court rulings, stonewalling on giving them information. In the Abrego Garcia and Alien Enemies Act cases, the administration is both not following the rulings and mocking the judges. All of which is designed to make clear to the judiciary that they should not stand in the way of what Mr. Trump wants to do.
The real question now is, with all of these lawsuits pending, are the judges going to push back and tell the administration that they can’t do that? And if that happens, is the administration going to live with that? What the Supreme Court does is obviously going to be a critical question in a lot of these cases, and what the reaction of the administration is to that.
The universities are in a similar situation as the law firms. But I think they have a bigger obligation to push back when control over the way they teach and what they teach is being threatened like this for purely ideological reasons.
Harvard’s position in pushing back is the right one. That takes a lot of resources to be able to do that, to be able to keep things going if federal funding is frozen.
Columbia, similar to what some of those law firms did, thought they were making a deal that they could live with, thought that it wouldn’t be too intrusive and too disruptive. I think they are now rethinking that because I think the deal is going to shift on them and they’re not going to be able to live with that.
Mondale Robinson
Founder of the Black Male Voter Project and mayor of Enfield, N.C.
Donald Trump is threatening not just America’s democracy, but what democracy means around the world in his first 100 days. I’ve seen damage to what we’re trying to do in my position as mayor, but also what we’re trying to do with Black men through the Black Male Voter Project. This is the most anti-Black administration since slavery.
We’ve seen the President and his administration attack all of the protections that Black people have long fought for in so many different ways. And while it may not seem anti-Black on its face, when you talk about attacking the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, that is a direct attack on what it means to be Black in America and have the right to vote.
When you see this President doing away with programs at the federal level and also attacking institutions that support DEI, that is a direct attack on Black people, because we know it was created to ensure that Black people had a level playing ground.
Beyond the stupidity of Mr. Trump’s administration – his lack of knowledge of what tariffs are, his lack of knowledge of how economies work, his lack of care for diplomacy, his willingness to treat Denmark as if it’s a chess piece and Canada as if it’s a 51st state – it’s a recklessness at which you destabilize international policy, making people in this country and around the world less safe.
Mr. Trump has also eliminated the Justice40 initiative that Joe Biden created to send 40 per cent of the funds from some federal investments to the poorest communities. My town is one of those places.
America in 2025 is divorcing the words on the plate of the Statue of Liberty. The words of our Constitution.
We must be seen through the lens of the authoritarian regimes around the world. Mr. Trump is disappearing without due process people who are here on the protections put forth by the last administration.
I can’t name a good thing that’s happening under this administration.
Organizers in the South spent the fall of 2024 trying to mobilize voters at historically Black colleges, such as North Carolina A&T State University. Reaching Black voters is critical for the future, Mr. Robinson says.Jonathan Drake/Reuters
I’m a lifelong registered Democrat, and I’m superprogressive. But what are we doing as a party to reach the people who did not vote in 2024 – the nearly six million voters who voted in 2020 but chose to sit out this time? It’s not rallies to hear Bernie Sanders and AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez].
We need to stop turning over rural spaces to Republicans. We need to be in Mississippi year-round, reaching Black voters. We need to build relationships that are not putting up Jay-Z and Beyoncé, but are raising up the voices and the cries of the poorest Black people.
My optimism lies with millennials and the years that are to come, two of the largest generations in the history of this country, and their ability to see and experience and expect more from a government that was built by boomers who were self-centred, without acknowledging that it was the collective we that built America.