Donald Trump has always had a superstitious streak and so he will return to Michigan, scene of his closing presidential rally in November, on Tuesday to mark 100 days in office with a speech. Expect it to be long. Public sentiment towards the president has fallen to “historically low numbers” with an approval rating of 41 per cent, the lowest after 100 days since Dwight Eisenhower settled into the Oval office in 1953. The tide of public opinion has, according to the CNN poll (which will be rubbished by Trump) even turned on immigration: yes, the once-teeming southern border is reportedly deserted now but the methods involved in bringing this about have caused deep unease. On Monday morning Tom Homan, the granite-jawed “border tsar”, made a rare appearance in the White House press room to underscore the success of the policy, echoing an administration press release headlined: “In the First 100 Days, the Trump Administration Has Taken Killers, Rapists, Off Our Streets.” This is, unquestionably, true and it has been a source of ongoing vexation to both the president and his staffers that the “legacy media” has chosen to focus on individual cases rather than the impact of the overall policy. The problem is that Homan’s way frightens people. Even as he spoke to journalists, reports were circulating that among those recently deported were three American children, from two families, placed on a flight bound for Honduras with their mothers on April 25th. One, aged four, has stage-four cancer. Secretary of state Marco Rubio claimed the situation had been misreported: the children were “not deported”, he said. “Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers.” If the children concerned are US citizens, they can come back into the United States if their father or someone here wants to assume them", he told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning. There may be cold, legal truth to Rubio’s summary. But the brutality and mercilessness is not winning hearts. Other stories, such as that of the Turkish student Rumesya Ozturk, whose detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials was filmed, reveal the new administration’s sweeping powers of detention. The footage of Ozturk’s arrest in Somerville, Massachusetts last month is eerie and sinister. It frightens the new immigrant communities, many of whom voted in large numbers for Trump last November. And it adds fuel to the Democrat and progressive argument that the United States has begun a slow, stunning slide into some form of autocracy. Few really listened to Joe Biden a year ago when he warned, in his faltering voice, that the country was facing an existential battle to preserve its democracy. And it remains unclear if the masses are listening now. Instead consumer-sentiment, frustrated by historically high prices during the Biden administration, has turned gloomy. Not only has the cost of living remained stubbornly high, but the global storm of unease and uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariff policy has led to immediate on-the-ground impacts and widespread forecasts of an imminent recession. For all of the glorious thunder of Trump’s opening days in office, when he hypnotised the world with a flurry of executive orders and grand proclamations aimed at rearranging the world order to his liking, not much has happened as intended. There was the ruinous mass-dismantling of USAid programmes that cancelled vital humanitarian aid programmes along with the undeniable exercises in daftness and waste. There was the threat to take Greenland, the ritual insults to Canada, the furious claims to the Panama Canal, the cosying-up to Vladimir Putin, the open hostility towards the European Union, and the attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelenskiy during his visit to the Washington when he was in effect thrown out of the White House. But nothing definitive has come of any of that. All of those projects remain vague objectives of an administration that has also become embroiled in a game of tariff-chicken with China, which could yet lead to scenes that would be unimaginable to many Americans: empty shelves in the supermarkets, the toy shops closing, the Nike shoe a symbol of a vanished era. So on Monday, the administration doubled down on its border success and its crackdown on immigrant terrorist gangs. Homan told people that illegal border crossings had dropped from highs of 15,000 a day in the Biden era to just 178 people in the previous 24 hours. And he had a theory about why the Democrats were so compassionate to undocumented arrivals. “No one ever talks about it. I’ll talk about it. They did it on purpose, If you put them in an Ice detention bed you will get a hearing in 35 days. But if you put them in a hotel at 500 bucks a night, their hearing will be five, seven, nine years from now. What are they hoping for then? That another Democratic administration is in power. They can award an amnesty to millions. This is about selling this country off for future political power.” On Monday, the Atlantice, whose, editor Jeffrey Goldberg, Trump had ridiculed in the wake of the recent Signal-gate mess, published a new story. Typical of Trump’s contrariness, he acceded to the magazine’s request for an in-depth interview and received Goldberg and two reporters in the Oval Office. “Donald Trump believes he is invincible,” read the resulting article’s subhead. “But the cracks are beginning to show.” This is true. However, Trump’s potential to reshape the domestic and international agenda remains. His dream of resurrecting the moribund US manufacturing tradition, of achieving peace in Ukraine and Gaza, of restoring parity to trade deals: all are live propositions in his mind. During the moving spectacle of Pope Francis’s funeral last weekend, one image loomed above the extraordinary funeral rites: Trump and Zelenskiy, sitting on simple metal-framed chairs amid the marbled splendour of St Peter’s Basilica. Both were crouched forward, as though one man was hearing the other’s Confession. It was an unforgettable image. The moment captured a remarkable shift in body language and tone and was another example of Trump’s capricious nature. That is why, after 100 days, nobody has a clue as to what comes next.