In his first 100 days, President Donald Trump has taken a bludgeon to the government, civil society, civil rights laws, efforts at desegregation, foreign alliances, anti-corruption law and norms, the entire global economy, and the country’s very self-conception as born from the idea that “all men are created equal.”

But for all the questioning of whether Trump knows what he is doing, this is not an accident, or a byproduct of other goals: Destroying America as we know it was always the point of the second Trump administration. That country was born in the 20th century, and Trump’s second term agenda, led by a group of the ideologues and oligarchs who backed his reelection, aims to repeal the 20th century.

The 20th century brought the United States the greatest wealth and success it had ever seen and to its pinnacle of global influence. Following World War II, the country created the best university system in the world which worked in tandem with the government on scientific research and development, positioning it as an academic and intellectual powerhouse. The country also saw a rights revolution, with legislators and judges extending the promise of the Declaration of Independence to more people than ever before and cementing the U.S.’ status as the moral leader of the “free world.”

This story is part of HuffPost’s commitment to fearlessly covering the Trump administration. You can support our work and protect the free press by contributing to our newsroom.

This refounding of the country, that ran from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal through the Civil Rights Movement, made the country richer, more equal, more educated and more successful than ever before. But not everyone accepted progress at the time, and they pushed to turn back the clock.

“We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall repeal the 20th century,” the paleolibertarian scholar Murray Rothbard said at an annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in 1992.

Rothbard, who died in 1995, was a fringe, influential libertarian activist in his time, but has had far more success in his afterlife as a muse for the far right in the Trump era. Trump and his MAGA ideologues are now taking up Rothbard’s call by moving fast and breaking things as they seek to destroy the America created in the 20th century.

The conservative movement of the era was born out of an opposition to FDR’s New Deal, framing it as big government tyranny that broke from the country’s tradition of small government and states rights. Opponents of the New Deal merged with Southern whites after the passage of the Civil Rights Act to form a majority coalition opposed to big government’s dictates on how to run their businesses and who they could exclude from society.

This coalition put Ronald Reagan in office in 1980, but Reagan, who never had full control of Congress, could not fully roll back the achievements of the New Deal or the civil rights movement. Conservatives pursued a path of judicial power to enact these changes, but Democrats’ ability to win presidential elections and social movements, whether it be gay marriage, transgender rights or Black Lives Matter, proved too dangerous of a threat to these conservatives to wait for judges to rule.

The Republican Party must lead “a realignment along nationalist-populist lines that forces the left to moderate,” Trumpist writer Michael Anton wrote in his 2020 book, “The Stakes: America At The Point Of No Return.” “Then real politics – voting, ruling and being ruled in turn, compromise, acceptance of the other side’s legitimacy – can return.”

Conservatives would pursue this “post-constitutional moment,” as Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought put it in 2022, where the ordinary rules of democracy and the rule of law must be swept aside in order to turn back the clock to before the New Deal set America on its path of greater equality.

This is what Trump’s second term represents. His goal is to smash the country built during the 20th century and replace it with a country that is insular, less equal, less wealthy, less educated and anti-democratic. His supporters are quite explicit about this.

“We are living in FDR’s personal monarchy,” the MAGA venture capitalist Marc Andreesen said, quoting Silicon Valley’s favorite philosopher Curtis Yarvin, who believes the country should abolish democracy and be run instead by a CEO monarch. “You need another FDR-like figure, but in reverse.”

Trump wants to be that figure, except this time he wants to bypass Congress and the Constitution ― something FDR did not do. Trump’s bid to remake the country requires dynamiting it first.

The appointment of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Day 1 began the controlled demolition of the federal government that conservatives have longed for. Musk quickly went to work destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development, “feeding [it] into the wood chipper,” as he put it, before turning his sights to the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Center for Disease Control, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and many other agencies.

DOGE further targeted Social Security, hobbling its operations while Musk and Trump lied about benefits going to undocumented immigrants and dead people.

None of this was done legally, and many of these actions are now tied up in courts, where judges have found a lot of DOGE’s actions to likely be illegal. Whatever the outcome in the courts, DOGE has already fired thousands of workers, put more of them on administrative leave, demolished whole agencies, precipitated the deaths of millions by cutting crucial foreign health aid and undermined the funding of basic scientific research across the country for the foreseeable future. None of these things are easy to turn back.

The destruction of scientific research by DOGE is also a part of Trump’s efforts to destroy higher education in favor of an intellectual worldview he can control, which he and his team announced prior to taking office.

“[I]f any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” Vice President JD Vance said in a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism conference.

The U.S. higher education system was effectively born in the wake of World War II. The G.I. Bill vastly increased enrollment, meanwhile the creation of the National Science Foundation initiated a partnership between the government and universities to perform scientific research. The birth of the research university in the 1950s led to countless scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.

But colleges and universities have also been hubs for cultural change and political protest. Trump wants to destroy the existing partnership in order to bully universities and colleges into allowing the Trump administration to eliminate wrong-thought, and choose what can be taught and what research can be performed. To do so, his administration is using false pretexts, like antisemitism, or discrimination in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, and transgender rights, to threaten to withhold the research grants that fund scientific work at the universities in an open assault on the First Amendment right to free speech.

On Day 10, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an Anti-Semitism Task Force to investigate and punish universities and colleges for alleged antisemitism on campus, often focused on the pro-Palestinian student movements that emerged in 2023 amid Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Similarly, on Day 1, Trump issued executive orders banning federal funds from going to organizations that engage in DEI practices or acknowledge the existence of transgender people.

The Anti-Semitism Task Force next announced the cancellation of $400 million in research grants to Columbia University on Day 47. Fourteen days later, Columbia said it would acquiesce to administration demands that amounted to a partial government takeover of the university in exchange for a release of the $400 million in funds.

The administration then froze $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, $175 million to the University of Pennsylvania, $1 billion to Cornell University, $790 million to Northwestern University and more than $2 billion to Harvard University.

Trump’s anti-DEI order is not just being used as a pretext to attack universities, but as an opening salvo to illegitimately repeal the Civil Rights Act and resegregate the country.

Some of Trump’s first acts included firing members of the military leadership who happened to be Black or women. When a military helicopter crashed into a passenger jet just nine days into Trump’s new term, killing everyone on board, Trump and his cabinet members falsely blamed DEI for the crash.

“They actually came out with a directive — ‘too white,’” Trump said about the Obama administration’s policy for the Federal Aviation Administration at a press conference on Jan. 30.

When asked how he could blame the crash on DEI, Trump responded, “Because I have common sense.”

The implication here is that anyone with a government job who is not a white male is to be suspected of being inferior or attaining their position without merit.

This has been seen across the administration as it removed web pages and public displays commemorating the military service or achievements of Black people, women, Native people, Latinos and so on. A web page celebrating Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, was even removed before an uproar from sports media forced its restoration. Military schools have removed pictures of Black historical figures from classrooms. And the U.S. Marine Band was even forced to cancel a performance with high school musicians because the students were Black.

Trump’s attacks on the Civil Rights Act and desegregation law have continued and became more explicit as his term progresses. On Day 2 of his administration, he revoked an executive order issued by Lyndon Johnson that forbade federal government contractors from engaging in employment discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin, and required them to set up programs to ensure they recruited workers from all races.

Three weeks later, on Day 27, the General Services Administration repealed a regulation prohibiting contractors from operating segregated workplaces.

In one of his biggest attacks on civil rights law, Trump issued an executive order on Day 94 directing the government “to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.”

Disparate-impact considers policies that may be indirectly or non-obviously discriminatory, and accounts for the way they can impact particular communities. For example, employers listing height or education requirements for hiring that are not necessary for the position but act as a screen for certain groups of people. The use of disparate-impact is a cornerstone of civil rights law, and its elimination would enable and encourage resegregation across the country.

Trump’s efforts to dismantle civil rights law and destroy the progress toward equality are not limited to the 20th century. He has also turned his sights on one of the greatest achievements to come out of the Civil War: the 14th Amendment.

His Day 1 executive order attempting to rewrite the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship to all people born in the U.S. is perhaps his greatest act of destruction. Birthright citizenship undergirds the meaning of America rooted in the Declaration of Independence, that all men and women are created equal. Birthright citizenship ensures that everyone born here is born equally a citizen under law.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump previewed his effort to rewrite the American story as one of blood and soil rather than an idea, rooted in the Declaration and written into the Constitution, of progress toward equality. America is not a democracy, nor an idea, but a landmass to be ruled by the folk of that land, Trump believes.

This is perhaps the part of Trump’s agenda that runs most directly counter to the professed ideals of the United States: the image of the nation as a “melting pot” of races, nationalities and religions. While the original “melting pot” mythos saw the pot as performing the alchemy of assimilation to turn immigrants into Anglo-Saxons, John F. Kennedy wrote in his 1958 book, “A Nation of Immigrants,” that the “melting pot” “need not mean the end of particular ethnic identities or traditions,” as those new traditions, brought with “each new wave of immigration,” helped create a richer American culture and “rekindled the [American] dream.”

But Trump has taken an axe to these notions with a campaign of mass deportations, which have swept up not just undocumented migrants, but immigrants in the country legally and even U.S. citizens.

This vision seeks the elimination of immigrants and anyone who does not look or think like those Trump believes are of the land. It is an insular vision of a walled state that does not allow entry, power, or even influence to outsiders, and that oppresses difference and retreats from the world.

Such a vision also animates the one area of Trump’s destruction of the country that was not exactly central to the conservative movement that gave birth to his movement: tariffs.

Trump’s tariffs policy provides his most explicit demand to repeal the 20th century. On the campaign trail, he routinely praised President William McKinley, elected in 1896, for the stringent tariffs he implemented as a senator.

“You go back and look at the 1890s, 1880s, McKinley, and you take a look at tariffs,” Trump said. “That was when we were at our, proportionately, the richest.”

This is, of course, wildly false. The United States was much poorer then than it is now, and the average person was much worse off. (Ironically, then-Sen. McKinley’s tariffs contributed heavily to the catastrophic economic downturn in 1893 that paved the way for his election as president.)

In 2025, Trump emulated McKinley and his disastrous tariffs with his own “Liberation Day” tariff blitz. By tagging every country in the world with tariffs built on a faulty premise, Trump upended the entire global economy, and detonated the credibility and stability of the United States. A few weeks later he paused most of these tariffs after the stock market collapsed, but kept a 145% tariff on China, a move that will soon lead to vast shortages of goods around the country.

The chaotic tariff roll-out and roll-back is not only destroying supply chains, markets and, soon, small businesses, but it also destroyed Trump’s political standing.

Trump now ranks as the most unpopular president at Day 100, including his own first term, in the history of polling. His advantage on the economy has turned into a deficit.

If there is any solace in Trump’s 100 days of destruction, it is that he has destroyed himself in the process.