President Donald Trump commemorated the hundredth day of his second term on Tuesday by giving a speech in Macomb County, Michigan, in which he declared his administration the most consequential in a century.
“In 100 days, we have delivered the most profound change in Washington in nearly 100 years,” Trump said. “I ended all of the lawless, so-called ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ bullshit.”
Trump fired off a list of presidential actions he has taken addressing issues ranging from immigration and tariffs to low-flow showerheads.
“I’ve taken more than 1,000 executive actions, and I could recite our accomplishments all night long,” Trump said. “And by the way, did you just see what I did? Straws. I wiped out the paper straws.”
The president vowed an increase in Medicaid spending as Republicans in Congress weigh deep cuts to the program, one of the only major outlays Congress could scale back to meet its cost-cutting goals.
“We will defend Medicaid for those great people that are in need,” Trump said. “House Republicans are working to invest more money in Medicaid than we spend today.”
Trump cast his on-and-off tariff policy as a tremendous success.
“They’re coming from all over the world to see your president, they want to make a deal,” Trump said. “And, you know, we’ll make deals, but we don’t have to. I want to be nice, but if it takes too long I’ll just set a price.”
Trump briefly lauded Elon Musk and his work in the Department of Government Efficiency.
“He’s a great guy, and he’s really helped us, and, you know, they’ve saved $150 billion on waste, fraud and abuse, so we want to thank him,” Trump said.
Musk’s error-ridden accounting of DOGE’s work includes overstatements and cuts that predate this administration, raising questions about the accuracy of the sum the administration has touted. The federal government spent more money in Trump’s first three months than over the same period in the past two years, NOTUS found.
He previewed the future ambitions of his administration.
“American astronauts will plant the flag on the planet Mars,” Trump said. “It’s going to happen very soon.”
Much of the speech devolved into classic Trump grievances that predate his return to office. Trump said his sagging poll numbers are not bad for him, and argued that pollsters are rigging surveys against him to make him look bad.
“They say Trump only has a 44% approval rating,” Trump, speaking in the third person, said. “Well, it’s actually not bad, but when you figure that if it were a legit poll, it would be in the 60s or 70s.”
Trump reflected on his indictments, suggesting that he would have called his supporters to amass if he had been sentenced to prison time.
“Except for the, really, courageousness of a few very good judges, we could have been calling you from the other side of the bars, saying, ‘Hey, fellas, how about a little protest, how about a little protest.”
In praising his “beautiful” White House communications adviser, Margo Martin, and asking her to stand with him, the president also welcomed on stage an ongoing storyline: whether Trump will seek a third term.
Trump has repeatedly made comments that he’s interested in doing so. But it was Martin in her brief remark to rallygoers that brought it up.
“Trump 2028 anybody?”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.