Unlike his first term in the Oval Office, when his team of relative political neophytes was caught relatively flat-footed by the stagnation of the Swamp, Donald Trump began his second term as president sprinting at breakneck speed. While the statistics of his first 100 days of his second go at the White House are decidedly a mixed bag when it comes to his economic efforts, the numbers don’t lie: The crisis at the southern border, which election exit polls found that voters considered the second-most pressing problem facing the nation as recently as November 2024, has been vanquished by Trump in historic fashion. Here are Trump’s first 100 days by the numbers, including the good, the bad, the ugly, and the record-shattering victory when it comes to immigration.
Let’s start with those border numbers, because they put the rest of Trump’s efforts into context. While we’re still waiting on the update for April’s total border crossings, border crossings in February and March compared to the same months in 2024 decreased by 99.5%. Even just compared to the last full month of Joe Biden’s presidency, nationwide border encounters were down almost 77% in March.
And despite a deluge of legal actions attempting to hamper the administration’s deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials announced that they have deported 65,682 illegal immigrants in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term and arrested another 66,463. This marks a dramatic diversion from Biden’s 2020 campaign commitment to end deportations. In the 46th president’s first 100 days, he granted temporary protected status to 300,000 Venezuelans who had been in the country illegally before.
“Border czar” Tom Homan also maintains that the current administration has only released nine illegal immigrants since the start of Trump’s second term. That’s compared to 184,000 released into the United States during the first 100 days of Biden’s presidency. Trump’s first 100 days thus marked a 99.99% decrease in illegal immigrants released into the U.S. compared to Biden’s first 100 days.
All of this is to say that Trump’s war on the illegal immigration crisis has been a categorical success based on the statistics alone. His economic performance, however, has proven a mixed bag.
The single most important metric for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been the 10-year Treasury yield, as more than $9 trillion of our national debt is maturing in the next 12 months. The rate at which the federal government can finance that debt is determined largely by bond yields, not by the federal funds rate, which remains unchanged. Despite the rout in the bond market that came after Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Stephen Miran stupidly said that the privilege of the U.S. dollar’s reserve currency status was a “burden,” something that directly contradicts Trump’s personal pride in the greenback’s dominance. Bessent has since stabilized investor panic since he started public negotiations for free and fair trade deals with allied trading partners. The 10-year yield is actually down 9% since the start of Trump’s presidency, a welcome feat considering that bond yields and values move inversely and that this lowered yield corresponds to lower borrowing costs for the $36 trillion national debt.
Federal spending data thus far are somewhat contradictory. While the preliminary Bureau of Economic Analysis report for the first quarter of this year shows that federal spending was down 5% at an annualized rate compared to the last quarter of 2024, federal spending through Monday is more than 5% higher than the federal spending through April 28, 2024.
Inflation data are similarly mixed. Consumer price index inflation for the year ending in March fell from 3% in January to 2.4% in March, and personal consumption expenditures inflation was 2.6% in March, the same as in January. But the big BEA report we’ll return to in a moment found that personal consumption expenditures inflation across the first quarter of this year markedly rose to 3.6% from just 2.4% in the final quarter of 2024. We won’t get April inflation data until next month.
That BEA report also found that our GDP slightly contracted, in large part due to business uncertainty about the trade war and emergency stockpiling of inventories ahead of tariff threats. While the trade war remains a major question in the macroeconomic data, the markets have already cast their verdict that the tariffs are destructive.
GDP CONTRACTION SHOWS TRUMP NEEDS TRADE DEALS
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 are both down nearly 9% since Inauguration Day. The Nasdaq is down 12%, and the Russell 2000 Index of small cap stocks is down a grueling 15%.
Nothing here is unsalvageably negative. Trump can provide investors and businesses with the certainty they crave by securing zero-zero trade deals with allies and making his landmark 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. But his record-shattering immigration statistics serve as evidence that the border crisis was not a natural consequence of insufficient policy, but a crisis manufactured by one Joe Biden’s executive disorder.
