Today is the 101st day of the second Trump administration, and I find myself with nothing to add to the series of pieces already written by my colleagues here at National Review other than an abiding sigh of grim sadness. (Mark Wright may have captured my mood the best with the framing of his piece: No matter what you think about the first hundred days, there yet remains 93 percent left of this term to follow.)

Our house editorial correctly described this utterly hectic administration’s moves since January 20 as a “mixed bag,” but the proper question is the mix. As all instinctively understand, it takes only one drop of dung in the punchbowl to scare the guests off of drinking. Do you trade the sharp decline in border crossings for the administration’s edging toward open defiance of the rule of law? Do you trade commonsense policies on race and gender for the potential wreckage of the American economy?

What I’ve come to realize over my time writing here for NR is that no matter how obvious the answers to those questions might seem to me, others will answer differently with equal vehemence and conviction. In any event, whether we like it or not, we’re all strapped in for a long ride — so only time will tell whether my gloomy impulses about the trajectory of the second Trump administration prove true or not.

But I suspect that, one way or another, the die was truly cast for Trump 2.0 in April of 2025. This month — beginning as it did with “Liberation Day” — marks the moment when the president cashed in all of his chits and decided to imperially reorganize the global economy to favor his own personal obsessions. It is, as they say, a bold strategy. Let’s see if it pays off for him. The world holds its breath. Whenever it exhales, I fear we will remember April as the cruelest month of them all for the Trump administration — a self-inflicted defeat, no less.