By Ben Johnson

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal in 1933 in just three months, historians have measured a president’s success or failure by its first 100 days. As we reach President Trump’s 100th day in office, the 47th president’s second administration has taken a whirlwind of decisive actions to protect life, end artificial support for extreme transgender ideology, uphold religious liberty, secure America’s southern border, restore national sovereignty, and return to a traditional America First foreign policy fostering peace and prosperity.

President Trump’s second first-100-days in office have been “all about one thing: promises made and promises kept. And we have pages and pages and pages of those promises being kept already in just 100 days,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “This Week on Capitol Hill” host Tony Perkins ahead of this week’s milestone.

Here are some of the president’s most significant accomplishments since his recent return to the Oval Office.

Abortion: Protecting Pro-Life Rights

President Trump began protecting pro-life advocates’ unalienable right to freedom of speech, reversing his predecessor’s weaponization of government against pro-life Christians, and stopping pro-life taxpayers from financing abortion on day one. By the afternoon of January 20 — inauguration day — a Biden-era government website promoting abortion, ReproductiveRights.gov, had gone offline.

On January 23, Trump kept a campaign promise he had made at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit by signing the pardon of 23 pro-life advocates jailed by the Biden-Harris administration. “This is a great honor to sign this,” said the president as he held the pardon aloft in the Oval Office.

The Biden-Harris Justice Department imprisoned many of those nearly two dozen pro-life advocates under a novel legal theory that accused them of violating both the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. From this time forward, the Justice Department will only press charges under the FACE Act if the allegation results in “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage,” announced the Trump administration in a January 24 memo. “Cases not presenting significant aggravating factors can adequately be addressed under state or local law.”

Trump also protected U.S. taxpayers from funding foreign abortions and many abortions in the United States. A January 24 presidential memorandum reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA), which assures U.S. taxpayers shall not be forced to pay any foreign organization that commits, refers, or advocates for abortion. The action also aims “to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

The same day, Trump signed an executive order “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” which assures the nearly five-decade-old policy embraced by President Jimmy Carter will be respected for the next four years. Although a younger Joe Biden voted for the Hyde Amendment — which safeguards taxpayer funds from footing the bill for most abortions through Medicaid — the White House detailed how the Biden-Harris administration subsequently undermined this longstanding norm by compelling taxpayers to underwrite “abortion-related travel expenses,” while “the Department of Veterans Affairs allowed hospitals to provide abortions, and the Department of Health and Human Services paid for abortions for illegal immigrants.”

Additionally, in March the Trump administration held up tens of millions of dollars in Planned Parenthood funding over allegations the nation’s largest abortion business adopted so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that violated federal civil rights laws. Leakers have said this may presage a larger administration initiative to defund Planned Parenthood, which received $699.3 million in taxpayer funding and carried out 392,712 abortions in its 2022-2023 fiscal year.

The Trump administration’s pro-life actions should prove popular. Three out of four Americans (73%) oppose taxpayer-funded abortions overseas, and nearly six out of 10 of Americans (57%) oppose using federal funds for abortions at home, according to a Marist poll released in January.

Symbolically, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a speech in person at the 2025 March for Life, and Trump sent a recorded message to the annual pro-life gathering. In his first administration, Trump became the first sitting president to speak to the March for Life in the flesh.

Extreme Transgender Ideology

President Trump has opposed extreme gender ideology from day one, protecting children from transgender hormone injections or surgeries, sheltering battered women and female prisoners from men who say they identify as female, and maintaining fairness in women’s sports.

On his first day in office, Trump signed the executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which said the federal government recognizes only two sexes, based in observable biological reality, from the moment of fertilization. “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” says the order. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

Eight days later, the president’s executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” ended taxpayer funding for transgender procedures involving minors, allows those subjected to such experimental medical interventions to sue, and may lead to the prosecution of those who carry out transgender surgeries. The predatory transgender industry’s “maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex … will be a stain on our [n]ation’s history, and it must end,” the order declared. 

Trump underscored this in a March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, when he told American youth directly, “Our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”

Trump made it official policy that the military’s emphasis on winning wars and lethality is “inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex” in his January 27 executive order “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” on January 27. The order reverses President Biden’s order opening the military to those who openly identify as transgender but grandfathers in those who have been “stable” for at least 36 months. The executive order stated that identifying as transgender prevents people from living an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

On February 5, Trump announced his administration would prosecute Title IX violations by schools or universities that force female students or athletes “to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.” Allowing males to compete in women’s sports is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls,” stated the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” He also cut off student loan forgiveness for LGBTQ activists in a March 7 executive order, “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness.”

The Trump administration has steadfastly implemented these orders against intransigent blue states such as Maine, led by Governor Janet Mills (D). On April 7, the Trump administration notified Maine officials that it would withhold all non-essential funding from the state Department of Corrections after it placed a 6'1" man who confessed to murdering both his parents (and his dog) in a women’s correctional facility. The Biden administration, by contrast, forced women to share prison cells with trans-identified male offenders and filed lawsuits against states that refused to go along with his orders. By January, 15% of all inmates in female correctional facilities were men.

On April 11, the Education Department announced it was moving to cut off all K-12 funding to the state of Maine for flouting federal law, cutting off prison funding. Similarly, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held up USDA funding for “administrative and technological functions” in Maine schools that forced girls to change in front of, or compete against, boys.

Th White House released a theologically rich and inspiring statement celebrating Holy Week. One year earlier, then-President Joe Biden placed the weight of his bully pulpit behind a campaign needling Americans to celebrate the “Transgender Day of Visibility,” which also fell on Easter Sunday. Biden’s transgender proclamation ran nearly seven times as long as his Easter statement.

Trump press aides have said they do not respond to questions from reporters who put their personal pronouns in their biographies or social media profiles.

Restoring Religious Liberty

President Trump has established religious liberty departments within Cabinet agencies and recently hosted a conference on the violation of Christians’ rights. The administration has pointedly denounced violations of religious liberty and free speech rights by U.S. allies in Europe. Vice President J.D. Vance told the Munich Security Conference in February that the continent’s “backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious [believers], in particular, in the crosshairs.” Days later, police handcuffed a 74-year-old grandmother for silently offering to talk to mothers outside an abortion facility. They charged her with violating Scotland’s Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, which carries a potential fine ranging from £10,000 ($12,600 U.S.) to an unlimited amount.

Securing the Border

On the president’s signature issue, Trump swiftly returned order to the U.S. border by reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, ending the policy of catch-and-release, designating criminal syndicates such as Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations or criminal enterprises, and using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal immigrants. He also signed the Laken Riley Act into law and turned the CBP One app from importing to exporting illegal immigrants. He has deported 135,000 illegal immigrants to date.

His policies have proven effective. “Illegal border crossings dropped precipitously. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement said 7,181 people were apprehended nationwide between border crossings — a 14% decrease from February and a 95% drop from March 2024,” reported the Associated Press. As Trump told Congress, “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. ‘We must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”

National Sovereignty

President Trump has restored national sovereignty by withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO), effectively scuttling any chance the global body had of seeing significant progress on the WHO Pandemic Agreement. “WHO proved itself to be a corrupt organization run by the Chinese Communist Party and global leftists,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told “Washington Watch” earlier this month. “President Trump is acting boldly, swiftly, and decisively.” WHO reported a $2.5 billion budget shortfall shortly after Trump’s announcement. 

The 47th president also promptly withheld U.S. taxpayer funds from the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The February 4 directive also ordered the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to “conduct a review of [Ameria’s] membership in UNESCO,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. President Ronald Reagan exited the organization in 1984, but George W. Bush rejoined in 2003. Trump then withdrew again in 2018, but the Biden administration reversed that decision in 2023.

On February 6, Trump issued an executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” rebuffing the ICC for investigating U.S. personnel “without a legitimate basis” and for “issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant” for committing war crimes in Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas.

Moving to Abolish the Department of Education and Hold the Federal Bureaucracy Accountable

In what may prove to be President Trump’s most consequential action, he has taken the first steps to abolish the Department of Education. On March 11, the Trump administration fired half of the Department of Education’s staffers. Although the DOE has spent more than $3 trillion since its formation by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, U.S. reading scores in 2023 were “not significantly different from the average score in 1971,” according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The action fulfills a campaign promise made in a July 2023 online video and repeated at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit to “move everything back to the states.” 

The same order directs the secretary of Education to assure all public schools abide by the “requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.” 

Trump’s executive orders and actions have also rooted out racially discriminatory policies branded under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — which often include LGBTQ indoctrination — from federal agencies and sought to thwart bureaucrats who simply maintained DEI policies and offices under different names. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has exposed federal waste, fraud, and abuse, and sought to make the vast federal workforce responsive to the will of the American people.

In less than 100 days, President Donald J. Trump has “accomplished more than most politicians and presidents accomplish in an entire lifetime,” Speaker Johnson told Perkins.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.