What Is the Defining Image of Trump’s First 100 Days?

“The piece of media that best captures Trump’s first 100 days is, for me ——“ “A video clip — it is not of Trump speaking, but it’s of Elon Musk speaking. You have Trump at the resolute desk, but in the corner. He’s not really the center of the frame. He’s off to the side. And Musk is in the center of the frame. It was just so striking to me. I’ve never seen an image from the Oval Office where the president is in the lower-third corner. To me, it’s just a dramatization of maybe the fundamental fact of the second Trump administration, which is that the president isn’t doing that much presidenting.” “It’s a Truth Social post by Trump that he issued a few hours before he announced the partial rollback of tariffs, where he essentially says, now is the time to buy. He was literally giving his followers and allies an opportunity to make money. The graft there, the corruption there is extraordinary. Extraordinary. If you are very close to Trump, these years, in many ways, could almost be like a law-free zone for you.” “The image of him addressing the Supreme Court during his first joint address to Congress — there was a sense of chumminess between him and the court that continued as Trump was later leaving the chamber, when he turns to Chief Justice Roberts and shakes his hand and says ——” “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it.” “The courts are on my side and they can be on your side, too, if you get on the Donald Trump train.” “It would have to be that emoji trio that the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, added to the infamous Signal chat group: the sort of tough guy, macho posturing of the fist, the knee-jerk nationalism of the American flag next to the fist, and the kind of burn-it-all-down disruption of the flames. I feel like he kind of nailed it. I feel like those three images are a good distillation of part of the spirit animating the Trump administration.” “I mean, I think the most important thing in the last 100 days is the tariff and trade policy. I would pick the immediately immortal social media post where Trump said, ‘Be cool.’ When I first saw that post, the first thing I did was laugh. The president is speaking to me. He’s telling me, Ross Douthat, be cool. Even in a crisis of his own making, Trump is funny. He will always be funny, even unto the apocalypse. The combination of the dramatic and the absurd that I think is essential to the Trump era.” “The one that’s disturbed me the most is one of Kristi Noem posing in front of men who have been deported to what can only be called a concentration camp in El Salvador. The Trump administration is deporting people as a population, not individuals, for actions that they have committed or may have committed, but an entire group that has been designated a threat to the state. They immediately call up images of 20th-century concentration camps and says: This is us. We are doing this. And Kristi Noem says: We’re going to keep doing this.” “So this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use.” “The brazenness of it, the openness, is something that even I didn’t expect.” “Back in February, the official White House account tweeted out this video, and it called it an A.S.M.R. video — basically, a video that’s sort of filled with strange and slightly soothing sounds. And this video was incredibly chilling. I mean, it showed faceless ICE agents putting shackles on migrants who were being put on a deportation plane. And so this was basically an autocratic government inviting citizens to be soothed by the sound of people who I think we now know are being removed with essentially no due process. This is a snuff film, but the thing that’s dying is not a person, but it’s us.”