President Trump entered office one year ago today with the urgency of a man who was just given a few months to live. Within hours of being sworn in, he had already signed a blizzard of executive orders, both unraveling Joe Biden’s unilateral actions and taking sweeping steps to advance his own agenda.
He has continued the frenzied pace. He is currently running everything from the Kennedy Center to (notionally) Venezuela. Just the last week or so, he has tried to pressure Iran to stop killing protesters and, much less consequentially, urged the New York Giants to hire John Harbaugh. His drive for action, controversy, and attention is so intense and relentless that even the hyperactive TR might have recommended that he slow down a little.
Much good has come from the unbridled ambition. Trump has made tremendous strides in scaling back the transgender insanity and DEI initiatives within the federal government. His aggressive enforcement of immigration laws has led to a historic decrease in border crossings and a significant outflow of illegal immigrants who have either been deported by force or who have decided to leave on their own. He’s rolled back the preposterous campaign to usher gas-powered cars into desuetude. In his only significant legislative achievement, he got Congress to pass an extension of his first-term tax cuts, which was coupled, unfortunately, with various campaign gimmicks such as his “no tax on tips” pledge.
His need for speed, however, has meant that he took many actions haphazardly. Elon Musk’s DOGE effort to rightsize the government ended without making a dent in the federal budget. Much more significantly, his shoot-from-the-hip tariffs, purportedly under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, are bad policy and legally dubious; they are currently hanging by a thread at the Supreme Court. It’s quite possible that their chaotic rollout may be bookended by a chaotic rollback after an unfavorable Court decision.
Trump has also ramped up the pettiness in his second term. Things he only thought about in his first term, he’s acted on in his second term. He has engaged in retributive lawfare against political enemies, issued arbitrary and disgraceful pardons, mocked ex-presidents in plaques hung up on White House grounds, and generally worked to create a sense that he’s not to be crossed by means fair and foul.
He’s often ignored rules and overstepped his constitutional authority, whether by disregarding the TikTok ban, blasting noncombatants out of the water in the Caribbean, or imposing the aforementioned tariffs. Determined to twist itself into knots to justify whatever Trump wants, the Justice Department has suffered a series of self-inflicted embarrassments.
While much of his economic policy has been sound, the protectionism and tendency to regard the federal government as a personal business that should get a cut of private profit-making are unhealthy and unwise. Lately, Trump’s economic populism increasingly has driven him to propose harebrained anti-market ideas while his pressure campaign against the Federal Reserve has been crude and counterproductive.
There’s much to brag about in foreign affairs. His decision to support Israel’s strikes on Iran and ultimately join by dropping ordnance on its Fordow nuclear reactor neutralized a threat of an Islamist nuke that has loomed for decades. Even if the regime survives the current round of protests, last summer’s actions at a minimum severely weakened a government that has killed Americans, sponsored terrorism, and destabilized the world. He has ramped up the tempo of air strikes on Islamist terrorist groups overseas, such as ISIS remnants in Syria and al-Shabaab in Somalia. He also used his clout to negotiate a still-tenuous deal to end the war between Israel and Hamas that returned all living hostages (the body of one deceased hostage has not yet been returned). And he’s made progress in reducing China’s influence in Latin America.
He’s gotten NATO to commit to greater defense spending, and his impulse toward a Golden Dome and Golden Fleet is correct, although it will take shrewdness, staying power, and resources to effect these visions.
On the other side of the ledger, his diplomacy in the Russia–Ukraine war has been ineffectual and sometimes slanted toward the aggressor. He’s repeatedly been needlessly antagonistic toward our allies. His decision to pick a major public fight with Canada torpedoed chances for that country’s Conservatives to retake power and pushed Prime Minister Mark Carney toward a deal with China. Although it’s not clear how serious he is about taking Greenland, his gambit seems geared to creating the maximum angst and humiliation among countries that are longtime allies.
The unilateral nature of most of Trump’s actions — including using threats of denial of government funding against law firms, universities, and defense contractors — calls into question how durable much of this will be if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028. Worse, Trump has opened up new vistas for the exercise of power by a progressive president.
President Trump is not thinking about that distant prospect, though, when every day is a new adventure and an opportunity to shock and astound, depending on the issue and on the hour.
Needless to say, we’d prefer a Trump that is more mindful of the rules, more committed to working through Congress, more consistently pro-market, more considerate of the national feeling of allied countries, and less concerned with trolling and prosecuting his opponents, but he has a long record — including now another year as president — of doing it his way.