From immigration enforcement to higher education, it has been a historically productive two years.
From immigration enforcement to higher education, it has been a historically productive two years.
A s Republicans fear a looming midterm shellacking in tomorrow’s elections, and polls show President Trump’s approval rating dangerously low, it’s worth recalling where America was two years ago — and how much has changed for the better in the interim.
While the country obviously remains deeply divided and Trump has hardly mended those rifts, the domestic policy record of the first two years of his second term should be described, from a conservative perspective, as a major achievement worth celebrating. There are exceptions, of course. But on the whole, these two years have been among the most productive of any administration in my lifetime.
Let’s review the record.
Immigration
Trump has effectively sealed what was a highly trafficked, lawless border over which both people and drugs flowed with little impediment. Illegal border crossings have declined by 88 percent, with Border Patrol setting the two lowest records for apprehensions during the past two years, reflecting the vast decrease in attempted crossings. The administration has reported zero releases of aliens into the U.S. interior since Trump came into office. At least partially as a result of interrupted trafficking, American deaths from fentanyl overdose have been falling sharply, reaching a decade-long low.
The administration has deported nearly 1 million illegal aliens, many of them carrying additional criminal convictions of various kinds, over lower-court resistance determined to make the process as slow as possible. Many more have taken the administration’s offer to self-deport, totaling 2.5 million individuals here illegally who have left the country.
Less noted in headlines is the substantial restriction of legal immigration systems and lower visa approval numbers. The controversial H-1B program, for example, which has been criticized by the right for abuse related to undercutting American wages, has gone from approving 130,000 visas annually to about a quarter of its previous size at 35,000. Asylum claims accepted by the administration have likewise dropped by half, from 60,000 to 30,000. Student visas issued have dropped to 40,000 from a previous high of 155,000.
Legal immigration from Muslim-majority nations, in particular, has taken a whopping 96 percent cut under the Trump administration when compared to levels under the previous one. And the new, more skeptical posture toward visa review is likely to ramp up with the addition of a new tool: The administration recently announced its intention to enforce the Immigration Act of 1882, which prohibits entry to “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself.”
All of this taken together has resulted in a nearly 3 million-person decline in the foreign-born population of the United States in less than two years, according to data from the Census Bureau Survey, without a doubt the strongest enforcement of American immigration laws we’ve seen in at least half a century.
Economy
The American middle class is suffering from long-term structural pressures, such as the growing disconnect between median wage and housing prices, that will continue to bedevil both parties and punish the party in power until they’re alleviated. Nevertheless, the Trump economic record for the past two years has shown a lot of green shoots and signs of turnaround.
Overall economic growth has been steady throughout the first two quarters of the year, and Biden-era inflation numbers appear long behind us. Although Americans are still facing high grocery prices in absolute terms, things are going in the right direction.
The One Big Beautiful Bill extended the substantial tax cuts from Trump’s first term, as well as putting into place administration economic priorities like “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime.” Fifty-three million taxpayers this past April took advantage of at least one of these tax cuts on their returns, with 6 million claiming back income they made through tips, and 25 million on overtime. And small businesses have benefited from a substantial regulatory reduction in claiming the tax assistance to which they’re entitled.
In addition, the legislation created the new Trump Accounts for families with young children, which 70 million kids have now taken advantage of, promoting saving, financial literacy, and investment among the next generation.
Real Equality Under the Law, No Woke Exceptions
Among the greatest victories of the second Trump presidency thus far is the administration’s revolutionary interpretation of the Civil Rights Act (CRA), a huge beast of American law that has tentacles across the private sector, universities and schools, and just about everywhere else. In short, under the Trump administration, the CRA has been applied not only to protect the left’s favored ethnic groups, but also to protect the disfavored ones: whites, males, Asians, and anyone else deemed too “overrepresented” in American institutions. The seemingly obvious assertion that the CRA protects white people from racial discrimination, too, has sent shockwaves out in every direction, into institutions that had grown complacent and public in their declared goals to discriminate against white men for admission, hiring, and promotion.
This enforcement and rulemaking have tagged in a long list of government agencies, but under the Trump administration, the government itself no longer puts any thumbs on the scale with regard to race or sex in its own hiring and forbids its many contractors from doing the same. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that oversees workplace discrimination claims, has issued regulations reversing decades of forced bean-counting data collection requirements for American companies. No more will employers have to categorize their employees by race and sex and fear a government lawsuit if their offices fail to reach tacit racial quotas. And the Office of Legal Counsel has not only declared the entire branch of law that sees differences in mass-level outcomes as inherently legally suspicious — disparate impact analysis — DOA during this administration’s tenure, but has also teed up the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional once and for all.
This is an administration that has taken to heart the chief justice’s rousing line in a 2007 majority opinion, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Under Trump and the capable hands of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, one of the brightest conservative stars of this administration, this “radical” conception of equality under the law is becoming a reality one investigation, lawsuit, and regulation at a time, without woke exceptions.
Higher Education
This critical perspective has been especially fruitful in the higher education sector. Universities have been some of the most flagrant and public violators of the CRA with regard to admissions, hiring, and protecting the left’s disfavored groups like white and Jewish students on campus. And now, for the first time, they’re losing cases and a lot of funding over it.
The Trump administration has successfully sued universities under Title VI (allowing left-wing “protests” to prevent Jewish students’ access to the classroom), under Title IX (requiring female students to share teams and facilities with males as a condition of participating in sports), and under the 2023 Students for Fair Admission decision, for discriminating heavily against white and Asian applicants in the admissions process. To select just one juicy example, Columbia University is now essentially under a consent decree that requires it, among many stipulations, to report all its admissions statistics to the federal government, laying easy groundwork for future enforcement when the institution inevitably tries to illegally discriminate again.
The administration has brought universities to heel in other ways as well. The One Big Beautiful Bill contained two critical provisions with regard to the higher education sector. First, a notable increase in the tax rate for the largest university endowments (places like Yale and Harvard could accurately be described as hedge funds with universities attached) and, second, the first hard cap on overall taxpayer-backed student loans since they were first introduced during the Great Society. We are already starting to see those caps start to bend the cost curve on tuition in some places, whereas the trend for the past 30 years or more has been straight up, vastly outpacing inflation, creating the student debt crisis, and putting strain on middle-class pocketbooks.
The administration also recently introduced restrictions on taxpayer-backed student loans going to degree programs whose graduates are unlikely to be able to pay back those loans, because these programs’ graduates cannot even clear the bar of making a higher salary, on average, than someone with a high-school diploma. Quietly, some of the most useless and politically provoking ideological departments are going away. UT Austin, for example, has cut ethnic and gender studies from next year’s application process; Harvard has cut Ph.D. seats by half across two years of admissions.
The administration has also taken a hard look at the broken and ideological university accreditation process, starting the procedure to strip bad actors like the American Bar Association of their cartel-like grip on law school accreditation, and encouraging new and innovative alternatives.
Finally, the administration has reversed the appalling gutting of Title IX due process safeguards — the right to face and cross-examine your accuser, the right to representation, the right to an impartial adjudicator — that occurred under the Biden administration, a move that should be especially applauded in light of the Cornell 7 case making headlines. That same recession of the Biden-era guidelines includes rolling back the insane redefinition of “sex” in Title IX that transformed a landmark of women’s rights into a club with which to beat female-only spaces and teams into accepting males, regulatory moves that affected, in addition to universities, bathrooms in America’s public elementary schools.
K–12 Education
The school choice revolution that has swept many states after Covid closures and increased parental awareness of the ideological content in many public schools has received a major boost from the Trump administration and the OBBB. The first federal school choice program is set to launch January 1, offering tax credits for donations to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) that then provide vouchers or flexible education savings account checks to families wishing to send their children elsewhere than the public system. Over 30 states have opted into the school choice program, including blue states like New York and Colorado, providing critical educational opportunities in states unlikely to grant them otherwise. The tax credit program will likely turbocharge what has already been an enormous enlargement of school choice programs the states that will enable millions of families to opt out of public-school failures and indoctrination.
In addition, in another regulatory repeal, the administration has revoked rules around school discipline that forced schools to equalize punishments at the mass race level, based on the assumption that different racial groups break school rules at equal rates. But because this assumption conflicts with reality, schools were instead encouraged to ignore behavior that was disruptive to learning, or even dangerous or criminal, instead of holding the same disciplinary standards for everyone.
Finally, the Department of Education, which does not teach a single student and consists mostly of well-paid, six-figure bureaucrats enforcing the kind of ideological dictates above, is well on its way to being administratively shuttered. Its congressionally mandated functions, like loan administration and data collection, are in the process of being assigned to more appropriate agencies, and its staff has been reduced by more than half. Closing the Department of Education has been a conservative ambition since it was created in 1979, but under Trump, it’s effectively in progress.
Law and Order
Perhaps no story has been more under-told in the lead-up to this election than the substantial drop in violent crime partly attributable to Trump’s border and immigration policies. If the crime rates under President Biden in 2024 had continued through this present day, approximately 5,000 more Americans would have lost their lives to homicide. Along those trendlines, there would have been 8,500 more rapes, 1,000 more carjackings, and 100,000 more burglaries.
It’s true that in urban centers, progressive policies continue to tolerate and encourage the mentally ill, addicted, and criminal to stick around on our streets, public transit, and elsewhere. The Trump administration has done what it can federally on that score, even reversing overzealous interpretation of the Olmstead decision, which was supposed to guarantee that disabled people wouldn’t be treated unfairly but instead has functionally prevented states and municipalities from removing the criminally insane from life on the streets.
Nationally, though, violent crime is down, and it’s down a lot, and the most likely explanation is that a huge number of people who were in the country to commit these crimes simply aren’t there anymore. That isn’t a replacement for local and state enforcement, which still govern much of the picture, but at least we aren’t the clearing ground for the world’s criminal classes anymore, and it has made an enormous difference for thousands of would-be crime victims.
The First Serious Rollback of the Administrative State in a Century
Other than immigration, I suspect no area of Trump policy will leave a more critical or lasting impact than what this administration has done with regard to federal personnel, curtailing the power of unelected bureaucracies and restoring the constitutional integrity of the executive branch under the guidance of the elected president.
Federal workers, as a share of the total workforce, are at their lowest point since 1939. The financial savings for the taxpayer are large, but far more important are changes reasserting political — that is, elected — authority over what are effectively America’s policymaking bodies, federal agencies. Powerful positions have been reclassified and made subject to normal, at-will employment rather than a web of boards and protections that made them virtually impossible to fire and thus not accountable to anyone, least of all the voter. In moving toward a vision of a unitary executive who actually controls the executive branch, Trump may be serving his own personal war with the Deep State that wronged him, but the outcome is constitutionally salutary in the extreme: something long-lamented in conservative legal symposia but which seemed pragmatically out of reach until this term.
That shift alone — restoring control over the executive branch to the elected executive — makes this administration perhaps the most constitutionally restorative term, thus far, in a century.
The money, too, is finally seeing some much-needed oversight. Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, has introduced new regulations ensuring that someone accountable to the president actually oversees grants and where taxpayer money is going. DOGE may have been a superficial failure in terms of cutting excess spending, but it was a manifest success in identifying a large number of the absurdly ideological grants functionally funding the institutional left and its army of NGOs. I’ve called this critical overhaul “the Great DEI Defunding,” and it’s putting a huge financial strain on the leftist network that previously felt entitled to enormous taxpayer funding streams.
Enforcement Actions Against Leftist Fraud and Activism Networks
To this long list of conservative victories under the first two years of this administration must be added the enforcement actions against fraud, and prosecutions against leftist agitation networks operating outside the bounds of the law. Nearly every week, the Department of Justice announces another prosecution of the kind of fraud rings that created headlines about “Quality Learing Centers” that didn’t have any children, Medicaid payments going to patients that don’t exist, and other schemes that turn out to be far more common than many of us imagined. The latest busts include 18 defendants in Pennsylvania charged with more than $4 million in fraudulent Medicaid billings from the government.
Antifa, CAIR, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are all embroiled in federal charges stemming from alleged criminal behavior, finally bringing to justice leftist networks that operated as though they were above the law. And finally, there’s “World War 11,” the investigation into Representative Ilhan Omar (née Elmi), finally looking into the stories of immigration misrepresentation, marriage fraud, and financial malfeasance that have surrounded Omar for a decade or more.
The domestic conservative victories notched by the second Trump administration in just the past two years would be a remarkable record for two full consecutive presidential terms. More, they amount to laying the groundwork for a full-scale counterrevolution against what has been, until now, a one-way ratchet favoring the institutional left. This is not the uniparty politics of the ’90s and 2000s that left many Americans feeling like it didn’t much matter which party was in power, but two very distinct visions for the future of the United States.
In the ever-evolving melee of politics and frustrations of the electorate, the achievements of this president, many of which were unimaginable just two years ago, should not go forgotten.