Trump marks 100 days in office with an event outside Detroit

Donald Trump loves being president of the United States: he loves the pomp, the pageantry, the flattery, and the sense of sheer power that surrounds the office. But even more than that, he loves being a candidate: having feverish crowds before him applauding his every word, being able to make any promise, no matter how improbable, without reality coming along to shatter it.

It’s fitting, therefore, that he will mark his first 100 days in office, the milestone he had set for himself to implement most of his campaign promises—no matter how ambitious or how many slaps in the face he got from reality—with a rally on the outskirts of Detroit, the birthplace of the American auto industry, as if he were in the middle of a presidential campaign. The event has been scheduled for Tuesday.

It’s a way to galvanize his supporters at a delicate moment, when polls are showing a sharp decline in his popularity and he’s begun to receive setbacks after a few initial weeks in which it seemed that nobody dared to stand up to him. Harvard University, which stands to lose billions of dollars in federal funding, has filed a lawsuit against him. Several courts, including the Supreme Court, have ruled against his expectations on some of his proposals. A loving multitude, the president hopes, could be a way to end the bad streak.

“Trump has enormous traction with his people,” notes the political analyst and pollster Frank Luntz. “He can force the Republican Party to change ideas it has held all its life. Not overnight, but not over a long period of time either. Fifteen years ago, the Republicans were the party of foreign intervention, the party of AIDS programs in Africa, the party of free trade. Today, they are none of those things. And it’s because of Donald Trump, his influence, and the traction he generates among his people,” he argues. The expert concludes: “There is not, and never has been, anywhere or at any time a better communicator for his voters than Donald Trump.”

The location is not a random choice. Warren, a suburb of Detroit, is one of the most Republican areas in the entire state of Michigan, and the president is guaranteed to be well-supported at a celebration that comes at a time when polls, including those of his favorite television network, Fox News, are delivering a unanimous blow: his measures, from the tariffs to his drastic immigration policy, are unpopular, and a majority of voters believes he has overstepped his bounds in his desire to accumulate power. His popularity, which hovered around 55% in his first days in office, has taken a tumble, falling as low as 39% in some of the latest polls.

But Warren is also a major center of the American automobile industry, the one that Trump promises will return to the glory days of the 1950s, when it was the spearhead of the country’s economy and, therefore, of the Western world, thanks to the heavy taxes imposed on foreign vehicles, including tariffs.

And Michigan is one of the battleground states that his Democratic rival Joe Biden won in 2020 and which Trump snatched from the Democrats to claim victory in last November’s election.

The very fact that he’s commemorating his 100 days in office with a rally is unusual. Typically, American presidents don’t hold a specific event to mark the date, something that’s usually reserved for media coverage, which uses the 100-day mark to analyze the current administration’s progress.

In 2017, Trump commemorated the first 100 days of his first term in a similar way, with a rally with voters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But this time he wants to really impress upon his followers the message that these first months have been a success. For this, he is using orthodox methods—his rally in Michigan, daily press conferences by his spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt and his Cabinet secretaries, announcements reinforcing his policies, such as the one released this Monday about an increase in raids against illegal immigrants—but also unorthodox ones: on Monday, the north entrance to the West Wing of the White House was plastered with posters depicting illegal immigrants accused of serious crimes who have been deported.

According to Luntz, Trump acts as if he’s still campaigning, speaking solely to his audience. It’s a departure from tradition, whereby once presidents take office, even if only verbally, they assert that they are trying to govern for all Americans, not just their own voters. “He communicates as if he were speaking at a rally. You’ve seen it in his address to both houses of Congress, in his press conferences, at the Rose Garden event on Liberation Day, when he announced the tariffs,” he explains.

In part, the expert points out, this is because the president believes that Republican voters were mistreated by Democratic politicians for decades and now wants to level the playing field. But legislating exclusively for a segment of the population, the analyst warns, risks generating rejection among independent voters, a small percentage of the electorate but one that was key to his victory in November.

“His policies, with the exception of the tariffs, are still popular, but the way he’s implementing them is attracting increasing opposition and is generating discontent among independents. Republicans adore him, and that’s always going to be the case. But to understand American public opinion, you have to look at independents, at the center. It’s not that large—it’s 25% of the country—but that center is moving away from him. You can see that in the polls evaluating his administration. They don’t necessarily oppose what he’s doing, but they do oppose how he’s doing it,” he explains.

In the pollster’s opinion, Trump needs to be careful: “If he keeps up the communication as it is now, he’ll end up eroding that initial support for what he’s trying to do. People were fed up with Joe Biden, his predecessor, with his inaction, the silence, with nothing happening. So when Trump arrived, he had an approval rating 11 points higher than the disapproval he received. Something he never had in his first term. All of that is gone now,” Luntz warns.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition