Albany-Area Political Science Professors Analyze President Trump’s First 100 Days

By Thomas Fink | May 5, 2025

Pictured above: Dr. Ronald Seyb (left), Associate Professor of Political Science at Skidmore College, and Connor Moran (right), adjunct professor of Political Science at the University at Albany.

Photo Credit for Seyb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_H_0qO7M8A

Photo Credit for Moran: Thomas Fink / The ASP

Two political science professors from the Capital Region gave their analyses of the historical significance of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office: Connor Moran, an adjunct professor and doctoral student from the University at Albany, and Dr. Ronald Seyb, an associate professor from Skidmore College. They discussed what they believe to be the main takeaways and the big ideas pertaining to the first three months of the Trump administration’s second term. 

“What strikes you as the historical highlights (regardless of if you find them to be good or bad) of Trump’s first 100 days?”

Professor Moran views that Trump’s second term, thus far, should be broken down into three categories: isolationism in foreign policy and economics; domestic policy on economics; and how Trump’s administration interacts with democratic norms.

“The thing I am most confident that the Trump administration will be remembered for is its severing of ties—not completely, but more dramatically than we’ve seen in a very long time—with the international order,” Professor Moran said. “So, this is both in terms of foreign policy, in terms of tariffs, and with Ukraine. Trump seems to have alienated himself from the foreign policy establishment of Europe.”

“So, some of this is intentional, there are isolationists in Trump’s inner orbit—JD Vance is probably the most important—but a lot of it seems unintentional and is tied to the sort of damage to the United States’s credibility at large,” Moran said. “I think we’ve seen this a lot with tariffs. You see all these stories with diplomats, coming in, talking to Trump, and they’re like, ‘Hey, what do you want from us?’ and Trump’s team is like, ‘Well, what are you offering?’ and they’re like, ‘We don’t know what you want in the first place.’”

Moran then shifted to his second category which he calls “economic mismanagement and incompetence.” 

On incompetence, Moran referenced Trump’s recently released tariff chart which he said “seems to have been made with ChatGPT” and that it “seems to have mistaken our general trade deficits with many of these countries for actual tariffs that they’ve placed on us.”

“The thing everyone’s talking about are these tariffs we’re putting on Lesotho—we import the diamonds from them,” Moran said. “This is just kind of insane to be putting on a country like this. There are cases where Trump is demanding that the Japanese start importing our cars and our rice. That’s insane; the Japanese make much better automobiles than us, and they are almost totally self-sufficient on things like rice.”

Moran continued with other examples of what he believes to be incompetence such as the administration's group chat leak (known as “Signalgate”) which happened on March 24. Moran also mentioned the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and said that its goal to “cut back on excessive bloat and bureaucracy…is a legitimate aim,” but he takes issue with all the cases of people getting fired and unfired.

“This [incompetence] can be…misprofiling of supposedly illegal immigrants and looking at their tattoos as evidence of them being in gangs, including a couple of people who have had soccer-team-tattoos on them that have somehow been mistaken for Tren de Araguas,” Moran said.

Moran is perplexed as to why the administration is not using the FBI’s Tattoo Recognition Database for this situation.

“Generally speaking, the reason I think this incompetence and economic mismanagement will be remembered is because it seems like there’s a decent chance we’re going to see a recession,” Moran said. “I mean, at the very least, in the next couple of weeks, prices on consumer goods go up or some sort of economic crash—I mean, the markets are going down, because a lot of investors don’t think that the United States economy is going to be doing well in the next couple of months or so.”

Moran then shifted to his third category in what he calls “an attack on democratic norms.”

“I think, generally speaking, [Trump is] not super friendly towards free speech,” Moran said. “We’re seeing this with people who are getting flagged by the so-called ‘antisemitism-task-force’ and literally getting arrested, taken away, by unmarked ICE members—a flagrant disregard of due process.”

Moran said that the people who are getting taken away by ICE for protesting against Israel are college students who are in the U.S. legally, often via student visas.

Professor Seyb agrees with Moran on this conundrum of free speech.

“There is this sort of paradox of Trump being very full-throated about free speech,” Seyb said. “On the other hand, it’s that old ‘free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee.’ Certain types of speech he sees as subversive or anti-American or ‘being expressed by bad people,’ as he said.”

According to Seyb, Trump has been “questioning the boundaries of free speech and who actually is covered by the First Amendment.”

“[Trump is] questioning the status of people who are here on student visas or travel visas, or Green Cards, and saying that they can be deported at any time if they exercise what Trump sees as engagements in illegal activities where other people would say ‘exercises of their First Amendment rights,’” Seyb said.

“We know the First Amendment does not say, ‘Only citizens have free speech,’” Seyb said “...But Trump is making an argument that certain individuals in this country under some sort of legal status who are not citizens may not have the same sort of free speech rights as you and I may have.”

“The final area where I think democratic norms are under attack is the sort of ‘independent-civil-service,’” Moran said. “I’m talking about this sort of loyalty test Trump seems to be making people go through to get into bureaucracy. There’s still a lot of journalism that needs to be done on this, but apparently, in some places, they’re asking people applying for positions in the Executive Branch, ‘Whether or not you think Trump won the 2020 election.’ He seems to be trying to ensure loyalty across high levels of executive departments and also low levels. I think this also could backfire on conservative interests.”

In the vein of this idea of governmental loyalty to the White House, Professor Seyb compared and contrasted how Trump has governed in his two terms. 

“[In Trump’s first term] He had a lot of establishment Republicans in his cabinet and in his White House who did say that they were the ‘adults in the room’ oftentimes,” Seyb said. “They were able to curb some of his impulses to really be more ambitious or act on his instincts or impulses.”

“He has learned that he has [in his second term] now a lot of that loyalty that is really, I think, prized in the Trump administration,” Seyb said. “So, I think that’s the big difference [between the two terms] I see is that he’s trying to do so much through executive order unilaterally that there really isn’t a legislative program.”

“What policies (such as legislation, executive orders, etc.) has Trump enacted thus far that are landmarks of his administration’s second term and of the American conservative movement as a whole?”

“Trump has talked about his ‘big beautiful’ reconciliation bill, because he does want those tax cuts to be made permanent,” Seyb said. “Also, he wants substantial spending cuts as well, which is why people are saying that Medicaid may be under the knife.” 

Seyb said that Trump’s administration “has said it’s not going to tamper with Medicaid or cut it,” but if they’re looking for “$2 trillion is spending cuts,” Medicaid is likely to be at risk.

Seyb said that “in terms of landmarks,” he believes Trump’s efforts to purge what he finds to be left-wing “gender ideology” and DEI to be the biggest moves.

“I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this,” Seyb said. 

Moran said that despite a Republican-controlled Congress, “pretty much all of Trump’s policies are through direct executive action.”

“The Republicans have not even drafted legislation,” Moran said.

Moran has said that he thinks Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional, as they are supposed to be in the form of legislation, not executive order.

“Tariffs must pass Congress, unless there is emergency action that must be taken in defense of national security,” Moran said. “Trump originally used fentanyl as a pretense to put tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, but for the recent chart putting tariffs on everyone, he cited the ‘national debt’ as the national security threat.”

“Right now, generally speaking, I think each of the four main areas where the Trump administration has been pushing new policies all, generally, look poised to hurt the conservative movement as a whole—and in particular here: the New Right,” Moran said. “So, on tariffs, foreign policy, immigration, and DOGE—I think these would appear to be the four largest policy initiatives by the Trump administration. All of these seem to have the risk of backfiring.”

Moran said that even the “pro-tariff New Right” are “not super happy with how chaotic Trump’s tariff policies have been.”

“I mean, he has just gone back-and-forth all over the place to the point now that even if we have coherent policymaking, it’s just created so much uncertainty in the markets and the global economy and with our potential trading partners that this looks poised to damage the United States in the long run,” Moran said. “The Trump administration's incoherent trade policy looks poised to turn the American public against tariffs.”

“I’m also, as someone on the left, sympathetic to tariffs,” Moran said. “I mean, with the Biden administration, I was supportive of his tariffs. If we had a President [Bernie] Sanders, I’m pretty sure we would’ve had some tariffs as well. But these tariffs make very little sense; they are just all across the board. They are on products that we have no desire at all to kind of build up here. It’s not like we’re gonna start exporting diamonds or something like that and take Lesotho’s spot. That’s just absurd.”

“I think this tariff policy has left a bad taste in many voters’ mouths,” Moran said. “This is one of the lowest I’ve ever seen a Republican president polling on the economy, for example. So, again, his mismanagement with tariff policy goes against the objectives of this sort of New Right.”

“On foreign policy, much of the New Right…are avowedly anti-war,” Moran said. “...A lot of people in Trump’s inner circle and the sort of new-right-podcast-sphere also support ending the war against the Palestinians.”

Moran also noted that Trump’s Pentagon is undergoing a “major power struggle” between neoconservatives and an emerging “isolationist New Right coalition.”

“JD Vance strikes me as a genuine isolationist on some level, I’ll give him credit for that and also Witkoff, but I think the neocons are gonna win.” Moran said. “So, I think this is another huge policy loss for the New Right here. Again, war is never popular, so I think it’s generally good for your political movement to be going against this.”

“You might notice one of the things I haven’t mentioned as something that the Trump administration is going to be remembered by, and that is mass deportation,” Moran said. “And that’s because, right now, with the mass deportation, I think they’ve deported about 32,000 people a month or something at this point in time, which is not really much different than the late Biden administration and nowhere near Obama’s two terms in office. 

“People are gonna remember the El Salvadoran prison more than they’re gonna remember Trump’s deportations,” he said. “And that’s quite symbolic.”

“[People on the right] want to see immigrants getting deported, but instead of seeing criminals getting deported, we’re seeing graduate students who went to pro-Palestine protests,” he said. “This is not helping Trump either on immigration. It’s still the issue he’s polling the highest on, so he has a lot more political capital on immigration, but he needs to be careful with it or he might end up losing out on his most popular issue.”

“Mass deportation is not happening,” Seyb said. That was a promise that has not really actually been realized.”

“And then finally DOGE. Again, I’m on the left - I’m totally supportive of cutting the bureaucracy,” Moran said. “I would have liked to have seen them go after the Pentagon more - which they didn’t. I support them going after USAID on some level even.”

“But generally speaking, with the bureaucracy, you see Elon Musk just constantly moving the goalpost, fudging all these numbers,” Moran said. “I mean, it went from cutting a trillion dollars to $150 billion. It doesn’t even look like they’re gonna reach that—and for what? …If you combine the people [former government employees] who have kind of been bought out of their contracts and people who have been unceremoniously fired, we’ve lost about 115,000 bureaucrats or something like that at this point. People’s lives have been kind of pulled in and out of limbo.”

Moran also said that while the potential negative effects of DOGE’s cuts on government bureaucracy may not be seen for a while, Musk still remains a generally unpopular figure among Americans.