President Donald Trump reflected on the first 100 days of his second administration and provided a preview of the rest of his term during a televised town hall on NewsNation.
Trump fielded questions on tariffs, Medicaid, and other political flashpoints from the town hall’s hosts — Chris Cuomo, Bill O’Reilly, and Stephen A. Smith — with a curveball thrown by one audience member.
Here are four takeaways from Trump’s 30-minute appearance during a town hall that also featured Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former White House chief political strategist Steve Bannon.
Trump ‘doesn’t really believe’ he’s made second-term mistakes
As the stock market recovers from Trump’s tariff announcements and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remains in his post after multiple Signal controversies, Trump told Lee Shapiro, the only town hall audience member who asked the president a question, he “doesn’t really believe” that he made any mistakes during the first 100 days of his administration.
“We’re in a transition period. I think you’re going to see tremendous economic victories over the next period of a year, like far greater than ever imagined,” Trump said. “Right now, as I said, we’re losing billions and billions of dollars on trade. We’re going to make millions to billions of dollars, but it takes a little while. That doesn’t happen overnight, but it will happen much faster than people understand.”
Trump concedes tariff policy has ‘perception’ problem
To that end, Trump did concede his temporarily paused tariffs, which prompted a stock selloff and bond market volatility, have a “perception” problem and could present a political risk for Republicans during next year’s midterm elections.
“Yeah. But I’m an honest guy, and we have to save the country,” he said. “We were losing $5 billion a day with this man that we had as a president, the autopen president. … I took $5 billion a day and cut it way, way down, way, way back, and I did that within a very short period of time.”
Of the political risk, Trump did project confidence that he will “be able to convince people how good this is” before November 2026.
“This is what other countries have done to us,” he said. “We’ve been the laughing stock and the whipping post. We’ve been ripped off by every country, practically in the world, just ripped off on trade and, by the way, ripped off with NATO and the military too.”
The president similarly expressed confidence he and his administration will soon sign trade deals with India, Japan, and South Korea, but told O’Reilly he was “in less of a hurry than you are.”
“They want us. We don’t need them,” he said, adding of the stock market, “It can wait two weeks.”
Trump repeats he will do ‘nothing’ to harm Medicaid
Trump has signposted that his next priority is passing his legislative agenda through Congress as Republicans craft a megabill that renews expiring tax cuts alongside as much as $2 trillion in spending offsets.
But the president took the opportunity during the town hall to underscore that he does not want congressional Republicans to cut benefits from programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid through the streamlined budget process.
“We’re not doing anything with entitlements,” he said. “I’m better to say this than anybody because I did nothing with entitlements that would hurt people for four years. I could have done that. If I was going to do that, I would have done it five years ago, six years ago, or seven years ago. I’m not doing anything.”
But Trump is interested in reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse” in welfare programs, arguing “nobody objects to taking people off Medicaid that aren’t allowed to be there.”
“But we are doing absolutely nothing to hurt Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. Nothing at all,” he said.
Trump defends his DEI overhaul
Trump stood by his administration’s attempts to rid the federal government of diversity programs as Smith asked him to “justify” the actions and the message “they send to the marginalized communities in this country.”
“We have a country that’s based solely on merit now, and that’s the way it is,” Trump said. “If somebody’s out there doing a great job, and this includes getting into colleges, if you’ve worked really hard, we don’t look at race, we don’t look at color, we don’t look at height, or shortness, or weight.”
Smith also pressed Trump on concerns his fight with Ivy League universities is suppressing “academic freedom” after he revoked federal funding from Harvard over its antisemitism policies.
“Harvard [University] gets $4 [billion] or $5 billion a year from the United States government in the form of grants, and they have $53 billion, and yet they don’t treat the people right,” Trump said. “If we’re going to give grant money, we want people in that school that are going to love our country, not people that are going to hate our country. They run a bad operation up there, and we have to get to the bottom of it.”
