A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
Kirsten Hillman, Ambassador of Canada to the United States, joins The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a discussion about the past, present, and future of the relationship between the United States and Canada. Speakers include:
April 29, 2025
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration’s direction. As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9 to address the emergency of the Great Depression. Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills and 77 other measures first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it. On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
In a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.
FDR was speaking on July 24 to urge Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about,” he said. “If I am asked whether the American people will pull themselves out of this depression, I answer, ‘They will if they want to.’”
Today is the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He marked it by delivering what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people…. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”
In fact, Trump has signed just five measures into law: the Laken Riley Act, which Congress passed before he took office; a stopgap funding measure; and three resolutions overturning rules set by the Biden administration.
But Trump’s administration does parallel FDR’s in an odd way. Trump set out in his first hundred days to undo the government FDR established in HIS first hundred days. Trump has turned the nation away from 92 years of a government that sought to serve ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and stabilizing global security and trade. Instead, he is trying to recreate the nation of more than 100 years ago, in which the role of government was to protect the wealthy and enable them to make money from the country’s resources and its people.
Trump set out to destroy the modern American state, gutting the civil service and illegally shuttering federal agencies, as well as slashing through government programs. His team has withdrawn the U.S. from its global leadership and rejected democratic allies in favor of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At home he has imitated those autocrats, ignoring the rule of law and rendering migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process, and using the power of the state to threaten those he perceives as his enemies.
As is typical with autocratic governments, corruption appears to be running deep in this White House. The president and his family are openly profiting from his office. And it would be hard to find a better example of a government letting cronies profit off public resources than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s relinquishing of control over the department to a DOGE operative, or of a government permitting businesses to profit from ordinary Americans than billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent creation of a master database of Americans’ information.
Trump’s dismantling of the modern American state has been a disaster. Trump spoke tonight in Michigan to tout his hope that his new tariffs will center auto manufacturing back in the U.S., but the economic chaos his tariff policies have unleashed has turned what was a booming economy 100 days ago sharply downward. That economic slump, along with Trump’s illegal renditions of men to El Salvador and the gutting of services Americans depend on, has given Trump the lowest job approval rating after 100 days of any president in 80 years.
And that suggests another way to look at the first 100 days of a presidential term. For all that the 100-days trope focuses on presidents, the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have shown Americans, sometimes encouraged by their allies abroad, pushing back against Trump to restore American democracy.
Democratic attorneys general began to plan for a possible Trump second term in February 2024, preparing for cases they might have to file if Trump followed through with his campaign promises or implemented Project 2025. California, with 5,600 staffers in its department of justice, and New York, with 2,400, carried much of the weight. They were able to file their first challenges to Trump’s January 20 executive orders on January 21. Their lawsuits, and those of others, have been so successful that they have sparked both Trump and MAGA Republicans to attack judges and even the judiciary.
Early observers of the movement to stop Trump’s destruction of the modern state argued that the opposition was too burned out to mount any meaningful pushback against a newly emboldened Trump. But, in fact, people were not in the streets because they were organizing over computer apps and at the local level, a reality that burst into the open at Republican town halls in late February as angry voters protested government cuts at the hands of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
On March 4, Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC), the head of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, told Republicans to stop holding town halls to stop the protests from gaining attention. So Democrats began holding their own packed town halls in the absent Republicans’ districts.
On March 20, 2025, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Las Vegas. Unexpectedly huge crowds flocked to their rallies across the West, revealing a deep well of unhappiness at the current government even in areas that had voted for Trump.
At 7:00 on the evening of March 31, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) launched a marathon speech attacking the Trump administration and imploring Republicans to defend democracy because, he said, he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.” Before he finished twenty-five hours later on April 1, his speech—the longest in congressional history—had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.
The quiet organizing of the early months of the administration showed when the first call for a public “Hands Off!” protest on April 5 produced more than 1,400 rallies in all 50 states and turned out millions of people. Organizers called for “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”
On April 11, Harvard University rejected the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract.
Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
Last Sunday, April 27, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire, telling them to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” he said.
“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact— because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”’
And so, even as Trump tries to erase the government FDR pioneered, Americans are demonstrating their support for a government that defends ordinary people, and proving the truth of FDR’s words from 1933, that when people act together they “can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”
April 27, 2025
Last night a new club opened in the wealthy Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It’s called “Executive Branch,” and it’s an invitation-only club backed by Donald Trump Jr. and megadonor Omeed Malik. Dasha Burns of Politico reported that it costs more than half a million dollars to join. The exclusive club is designed to allow top business executives to talk privately with Trump advisors and cabinet members. Burns reports that the club already has a waiting list.
When then-candidate Donald Trump celebrated the administration of President William McKinley, it was always clear he saw it as the triumphant marriage of the very rich to the U.S. government. It was the era of so-called robber barons, industrialists and financiers who flooded political campaigns with money to convince voters that those trying to rein them in were socialists or anarchists, then called upon the politicians they put into power to pass laws that benefited their businesses.
“Behind every one of half the portly well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1884, “or of some syndicate that has invaluable contracts or patents to defend or push.” Last Sunday a new filing with the Federal Election Commission revealed that donors delivered an astounding $239 million for Trump’s inauguration. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times notes that Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee raised $107 million. The $346 million raised by Trump’s two inaugural committees is more than the monies raised by all other inaugural committees since Richard Nixon’s committee raised $4 million in 1973. While Trump’s allies have said the money that wasn’t spent on festivities will go to other projects Trump is behind, including his presidential library, there is no oversight on how Trump uses that money.
Spending on the election was even more dramatic. Earlier this month, Americans for Tax Fairness analyzed spending in 2024 and discovered that just 100 billionaire families donated a record-breaking $2.6 billion to federal campaigns, up by 160 times from billionaire spending in elections before the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Seventy percent of that money went to Republican candidates or causes. In the three races that determined control of the Senate—Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—outside money from billionaires made up 58.1%, 56.8%, and 44.5% of the outside money coming in. Elon Musk donated about $290 million, giving four times as much money to political campaigns in 2024 as he paid in income taxes between 2013 and 2018.
Those investments in a Trump administration are paying off. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is withdrawing a Biden-era rule requiring poultry companies to keep the levels of salmonella bacteria below a certain level in their meats to prevent illnesses commonly known as food poisoning. When the Biden administration proposed the rule, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained that salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year and kills 420 people. The USDA said that about 125,000 of those infections came from chicken and another 43,000 from turkey. Officials estimated that the new rule would reduce salmonella illnesses by 25%.
The National Chicken Council celebrated the Trump administration’s reversal of the rule, saying it would have had “no meaningful impact on public health.” On Friday, Charisma Madarang of Rolling Stone pointed out that the poultry company Pilgrim’s Pride gave $5 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, making it the largest donor to that effort. Two of the company’s executives, chief executive officer Fabio Sandri and head of the company’s food safety and quality assurance Kendra Waldbusser, serve on the board of the National Chicken Council.
Last month, Rick Claypool of the consumer rights organization Public Citizen noted that the Trump administration has dropped federal investigations and lawsuits against 89 corporations, many of whose leaders donated heavily to Trump’s inaugural fund. Another of those who has benefited significantly from the new policies is Elon Musk. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, told Laurence Darmiento of the Los Angeles Times: “I think the overall goals of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are to slash regulations, to slash budgets and to cut positions all with this claim they are going to increase efficiency and fight fraud.”
But corporate ties to the government are not just about avoiding oversight; they are also about snagging lucrative federal contracts. Gilbert noted: “I would say it’s a smoke screen and cover for personal profit and corporate power—and that’s where Musk’s personal conflicts of interest come into play, as well as the other corporate actors across this government.”
On Friday, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported that staffers for billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been working on a multimillion-dollar communications project called “Project Lift” at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The plan appears to be to insert Musk’s Starlink into the $2.4 billion contract Verizon currently holds to upgrade the FAA’s systems, but DOGE staff have made FAA employees sign nondisclosure agreements, so details are scarce. An FAA spokesperson told Perez and Suebsaeng: “The federal employees running Project Lift are exploring a variety of solutions to modernize the FAA’s telecommunications network. Current contractors are part of the discussion.”
In the Trump administration, the connections between the government and business include the president’s family members.
Zach Everson of Forbes has been following the story of the Trump family’s involvement in artificial intelligence company Dominari Holdings, Inc. In February, Everson reported that just weeks after Trump announced the administration’s push to loosen regulations and expand infrastructure for AI, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric invested in Dominari and joined its brand new advisory board, for which they received 750,000 shares each in the company although they had no official duties. The company then launched another company, American Data Center, Inc., in which the Trumps also invested. That company focused on the “high-performance computing infrastructure” to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency.
According to Amber Jackson of the U.K.’s Data Centre Magazine, Dominari stock leaped more than 1,000% after the Trump sons joined the advisory board. On Friday, Everson reported on a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealing that Dominari has applied for conditions that would enable the shareholders, including Don and Eric Trump, to sell their stocks earlier than a normal timeline would allow. Each Trump brother now controls 1.2 million shares of Dominari, each holding now worth $5.8 million.
On Wednesday, Trump made the pay-to-play nature of his administration explicit when he announced that the top 220 holders of his $TRUMP cryptocurrency token would be invited to a dinner with Trump at his private club and that they would be offered a “VIP White House Tour” the next day. MacKenzie Sigalos and Kevin Collier of CNBC reported the meme coin jumped more than 50% on the news, netting Trump and his allies nearly $900,000 in trading fees.
Just before sunrise this morning, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) began a live-streamed sit-in protest and discussion on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to call attention to the Republicans’ budget bill. On Friday, Alan Rappeport and Tony Romm of the New York Times reported that the Republicans’ proposed 2026 budget would slash federal support for “child care, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly,” and for foreign aid. Attacking “woke” programs, it appears to implement much of Project 2025. Russell Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term and has returned to that position in his second, was a key author of that playbook.
Cuts to programs that protect ordinary Americans will help to fund the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Extending those tax cuts will cost at least $4 trillion over the next decade. Congress returns to session tomorrow, and it will take up the budget. In a statement, Jeffries and Booker said: “Republican leaders have made clear their intention to use the coming weeks to advance a reckless budget scheme to President Trump’s desk that seeks to gut Medicaid, food assistance and basic needs programs that help people, all to give tax breaks to billionaires.”
Throughout the day, Democratic lawmakers, activists, and passersby joined Jeffries and Booker’s twelve-hour sit-in.
An AP/NORC poll released yesterday showed that Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 39%. Today a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll confirmed that number. Trump’s approval rating at almost 100 days in office is the lowest of any president in 80 years.
For his part, Trump announced today that he “is bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes!”
April 26, 2025
Early yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent three U.S. citizens aged 2, 4, and 7 from Louisiana, including one with Stage 4 cancer, to Honduras when they deported their mothers. The three are children of two different mothers who were arrested while checking in with the government as part of their routine process for immigration proceedings. The women and their children were not permitted to speak to family or lawyers before being flown to Honduras. The cancer patient was sent out of the country without medication or consultation with doctors although, according to Charisma Madarang and Lorena O’Neil of Rolling Stone, ICE agents were told of the child’s medical needs.
The government says the mothers opted to take their U.S. citizen children to Honduras with them. But as Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post noted, because ICE refused to let the women talk to their lawyers, there is only the agents’ word for how events transpired.
ICE also deported Heidy Sánchez, a Cuban-born mother of a one-year-old who is still breastfeeding, leaving the U.S.-born child in the U.S. with her father, who is a U.S. citizen. Like the women flown to Honduras, Sánchez was detained when she showed up at a scheduled check-in with ICE.
In March, ICE agents sent four U.S. citizens, including a 10-year-old with brain cancer, to Mexico when they deported their undocumented parents.
In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
Reelected in 2024, on his first day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It announced a new U.S. policy, saying that the government would not issue documents recognizing U.S. citizenship to persons whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or…when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
The order specified that it would not take effect for 30 days. If it had been in effect when Trump’s rival for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, was born, she would have fallen under it.
But an executive order is simply a directive to federal employees. It cannot override the Constitution. Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history.
In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of rights in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, Americans have increasingly expanded those included in it.
The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
After the Civil War, in 1866, as former Confederates denied their Black neighbors basic rights, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. He objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress.
When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.
But the question of whether the amendment really did recognize the citizenship of the U.S.-born children of immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where prejudice against Chinese immigrants ran hot. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act declaring that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people.
On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”