President Donald Trump’s last campaign ended nearly six months ago, but that isn’t stopping him from finding solace in the raucous crowds and predictable routines of his old campaign trail.
One hundred days into his second term as America’s chief executive, and 176 days since he closed out his days as a candidate with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump returned to the Wolverine State to mark the end of the traditional period historians have often used to judge how well a president handles the challenges presented him at the outset of his time in the White House.
Speaking from a lectern adorned with the presidential seal and surrounded by grandstands and large signs proclaiming a “golden age,” Trump proclaimed the start of his term the “most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country.”
In fact, it has been a period that has seen Americans’ consumer confidence crater and the stock market decline precipitously in response to an unprovoked trade war Trump launched started against the rest of the developed world.
The president touted his crackdown on asylum seekers and harsh new border policies as “ending illegal immigration,” and characterized the massive tariffs he has imposed on vehicles built by American automobile manufacturers under the terms of a trade agreement he negotiated during his first term as “protecting our great American auto workers.”
He also boasted of having pardoned thousands of rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol at his urging in an effort to nullify his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, offering that act as an example of how he is “restoring the rule of law” in his return to the White House.
“We’re ending the inflation nightmare, the worst that we’ve had probably in the history of our country, getting woke, lunacy and transgender insanity the hell out of our government. We’re stopping the indoctrination of our children, slashing billions and billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse, and above all, we’re saving the American dream. We’re making America great again, and it’s happening fast,” said Trump, who added that his whirlwind first 100 days back in office have brought a “revolution of common sense” to the United States.
But what seemed to animate Trump most in his return to the rallies that have defined his political career was seeing his friends.
At multiple points during his stem-winding, rambling 89-minute address, the president stopped to acknowledge people in the crowd who he recognized as part of the traveling circus that characterized his three presidential campaigns, which collectively spawned a class of super-fans who followed him from town to town like some people followed The Grateful Dead in that iconic ensemble’s heyday.
“Look at you ‘Front Row Joes,’ he said to one group who gave themselves that nickname because they spent collective years waiting in lines so they could be in the front row for his campaign speeches.
“I’ve missed you guys — I miss the campaign,” the president continued, adding that some of the aforementioned “joes” had “lost a couple of pounds.”
“Perhaps you’re getting one of those jabbers,” he added as he mimed the act of injecting himself with one of the auto injector pens used to administer GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.
He also called out Blake Marnell, a mainstay at Trump rallies dating back to 2019 when the president invited him to the stage after spotting him wearing a bespoke novelty suit patterned to look like a brick wall.
“I have Mr. Wall here, this guy — how many rallies have you gone to?”
Marnell replied that he’d been to hundreds by now, at which point Trump suggested he would one day acquire a suit like Marnell’s to wear on stage.
Continuing, Trump went on to boast of the record low border crossing numbers that have been reported since he instituted a crackdown on the right to claim asylum in the United States and reimposed harsh anti-migration policies from his first term, before reliving how the Democratic Party candidate in 2024 changed from then-president Joe Biden to then-vice president Kamala Harris after Biden’s somnolent, confused performance in his sole debate against Trump last June.
Returning to the subject of illegal immigration and his crackdown against it, Trump praise the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and bragged about having designated a pair of South American street gangs — Tren de Aragua and MS-13 — as “foreign terrorist organizations,” a category the administration claims as giving them the right to bypass due process protections for anyone they deem to be a member of either group.
“We are delivering mass deportation, and it’s happening very fast,” he said, adding later that the “worst of the worst” migrants are being sent to what he called a “no-nonsense prison in El Salvador” — the infamous CECOT constructed by self-described Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele.
At that point, the giant video screens erected at the rally venue played a wordless sizzle reel accompanied by dark mood music, showing detainees arriving on American military planes before being processed and huddled into the hellish prison by Salvadoran military police.
Trump called the scenes depicted in the video “lovely” and went on to repeat a series of oft-told but unverified claims he debuted during the 2024 campaign regarding foreign countries emptying prisons and “sending” violent criminals to the U.S. to seek asylum.
“They come in from Africa. The Congo, they emptied out their prisons into our country, but they come from Africa, Asia, South America. They come from all over bad parts of Europe. That’s why we’ve invoked the Alien Enemies Act to expel every foreign terrorist from our soil as quickly as possible,” he said.
The president’s focus on immigration-related accomplishments not only harkened back to his previous presidential campaign rhetoric, but it allowed him to keep most of his remarks on a subject that remains a relative strength for him amid dismal polling numbers showing him with the lowest approval ratings of any president in the modern era after the first 100 days of an administration.
One Reuters/Ipsos survey released this week shows just 42 percent of respondents approve and 53 percent disapprove of his performance thus far, a number he said was “actually not bad” while positing that a “legit poll” would give him at least 60 percent approval.
The Reuters poll also showed that the percentage of respondents who approve of his economic stewardship had declined a point to 36 percent – the lowest level in his current term or in his 2017-2021 presidency, while disapproval rose 5 points to 56 percent.
