Trump 2.0: A Year in Review

 It has been 386 days since Donald Trump commenced his second term with a promise of a new golden age. The last year has been anything but uneventful. Our political focus has already shifted to this year’s upcoming midterm election. Polls are giving Democrats much to be optimistic about, but the question lies in whether they should. It was only fifteen months ago that Democrats were resoundingly defeated at the ballot box due to failures in governing the economy, the border, and foreign affairs. Whether or not it is fair to discredit this rejection, the 2026 midterms will be squarely focused on the performance of Donald Trump and the Republican Congress.

This leads us to ask a simple question. How have they performed? We’ll examine this first on the consequence of policy as it relates to the economy, crime and immigration, and foreign affairs. Then we’ll examine how the public views the Trump Administration broadly and why that is important to the 2026 elections.

Let’s start with the economy. Inflation is the leading issue on the minds of American voters, with 33% expressing that it’s their foremost priority, according to the most recent Harvard-Harris poll. The economy was one of the primary reasons that Donald Trump triumphed over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. We’ll examine a series of macroeconomic data ranging from employment, to cost of living, productivity, and private investment to produce a holistic view of the state of the American economy. First, let’s breakdown how the Trump Administration’s policy has differed from its predecessor.

President Donald Trump’s economic program can be reduced to five major policies. First, like many republicans before him, President Trump has pushed for supply-side tax cuts. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed on July 4, 2025, made the Qualified Business Interest deduction, which is a 20% deduction on the earnings of sole proprietors and self-employed individuals, permanent. It also permanently restored the bonus depreciation and capital expensing deduction. This deduction enables a business to fully write off the cost of purchasing or building new capital, like a factory or a machine, in the first year, effectively discounting the cost of that investment. The focus was to reduce the upfront cost of domestic investment to induce more of it.

The second element of Trumponomics is his push for domestic tariffs. President Donald Trump immediately assessed tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China upon entering office, and quickly broadened them to virtually all countries on “Liberation Day”. He has since proceeded to use these tariffs to broker trade agreements with the United Kingdom, China, the European Union, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and now India that softens the tariffs in exchange for reciprocity and foreign direct investment. The goal of these tariffs has been to incentivize domestic substitution and to bolster revenue to the Treasury.

The third plank of the president’s economic agenda is aggressive deregulation. On January 31, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14192, titled “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation”, which required federal agencies to rescind ten existing rules for every one new one they issued. This policy was aggressively pursued resulting in 646 finalized deregulatory actions, compared to only five new rules, for a 129-1 ratio. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that these actions will result in $211.8 billion in realized cost savings.

Fourth, the White House has attempted to reduce the demand for major necessities like housing, food, and healthcare by launching a mass deportation strategy. The goal is that by reducing the number of consumers in the market, you reduce the total demand for goods and services and alleviate the upward pressure on prices, particularly in specific localities where illegal aliens were concentrated. This is less of a national policy, as one that is geared for the major metropolitan areas, ironically where President Trump has weaker support.

Finally, President Trump has pushed for lower interest rates, to reduce the cost of major staples like housing, automobiles, physical capital, and revolving consumer debt. While his public approach has been to pressure Chairman Jerome Powell to ease the Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening, his appointment of Kevin Warsh signals that quantitative easing is not his preferred method of lowering interest rates. The actual public policy angle that the President has pushed is lowering interest rates through higher productivity and less federal borrowing. He has sought to accomplish the former through Executive Order 14365 that he signed in December 2025, which restricts the capacity of States to regulate artificial intelligence to produce a unified national framework; and the latter by using tariff revenues to reduce the federal budget deficit, thus reducing the demand for loanable funds.  

These five policy initiatives collectively form the heart of Trumponomics and is a clear departure from both the taxation, subsidization, and regulation of the Democratic Party of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and the “compassionate conservativism” of President George W. Bush. The political million-dollar question is whether it is working? For comparison purposes, we’ll compare 2025, the first year of the Trump Administration, to 2024, the final year of the Biden Administration. If President Trump hopes to boast, we should at very least see year-over-year improvement.

We’ll start with the labor market. Total non-farm employment rose by 584,000 in 2025, with the final six months seeing near perfect stagnation (+15,000 jobs). This is a far cry from the 2,012,000 created during the last year of the Biden Administration. This would lead us to believe that we are suffering under a static labor market, but further data tells a different story. Native employment (the total number of native-born Americans that are actively employed) grew by 2,043,000 in 2025, compared to a growth of only 198,000 in 2024. Similarly, the number of full-time workers rose 1,713,000 in 2025, substantially higher than the 431,000 increase in 2024. The labor force participation rate for prime aged workers (aged 25 to 54) rose from 83.4% to 83.8%, signifying an increase in the number of people engaging in the labor market.

While President Biden was bolstered by foreign-born, part-time, and government employment, the job market in 2025 remarkably shifted towards full-time, native-born private employment, signs of a strengthening economy. To be fair, employment data is collected through professional surveys, so there always exists an opportunity of error. However, the error would have to be so monumental (so many standard deviations from reality) to account for the sheer magnitude of the change in the data. We can have high confidence that the labor market has improved over the last twelve months. However, it is true that job offerings are cooling and layoffs rising, though this is largely dragged by the tech sector which is navigating a massive change with artificial intelligence.

Economists don’t rely solely on labor markets to gauge the overall health of the economy. They look at gross domestic product, gross private domestic investment, and labor productivity. Here we also find evidence of a reviving economy. Real Gross Domestic Product (total output adjusted for changes in the average price level) rose 2.4% during the four quarters of 2024. Real GPD has already climbed 1.87% in the first three quarters of 2025. We don’t have the fourth quarter data yet, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is currently forecasting 4.2% annualized growth in Q4. Should that be the result, real GDP would have climbed 2.94% in 2025, a 22.5% improvement over 2024.

A related indicator, labor productivity, which serves as the basis for future demand for labor, has also improved year-over-year. Labor productivity rose nearly as strong (1.70%) in the first three quarters of 2025 than all of 2024 (1.88%). However, if the trend for the first three quarters continues, then full-year growth will end up at around 2.26%, or 20.2% better than the previous year. This is likely a pessimistic outlook on what will come from the Q4 data, so the end result will likely be even higher growth.

Gross Private Domestic Investment, which reflects how much capital is being built/purchased here at home, saw substantial improvement in 2025. Through the first nine months of 2025, private investment grew by $157.2 billion, or 2.99%. This is already higher than the increase of only $100.7 billion, 1.95%, throughout all of 2024. This is a primary indicator of the trajectory of the economy. More investment means more capital; more capital means higher productivity; and higher productivity means higher output and prosperity.

Even the President’s own personal standard of success, the balance of trade, has shifted in his favor. The media will be quick to broadcast that through November (we’re still waiting on final December numbers), the trade deficit rose by $32.9 billion over the same period in 2024. However, the bulk of the Trump Administration’s trade policy was not enacted until April, so it’s important that we analyze what has happened since that time. The trade deficit between April and November of this last year was $153 billion less than the trade deficit for the same period in 2024 ($454 billion for April-November 2025 v. $607 billion for April-November 2024). More importantly, the rate of change is increasing the longer the tariff system remains in place. The trade deficit for Q2 2025 (April to June) was 14.3% lower than Q2 2024, while Q3 2025 (July to September) clocked in at 23.0% lower than the preceding year. The trade deficit for the first two months of Q4 2025 was a whopping 44.1% lower than the close of 2024.

These macroeconomic indicators all demonstrate that the American economy is at worst improving over the era of Biden, and at best rearing up for our strongest expansion of the twenty-first century. However, for most Americans, these macro numbers are too abstract to have real value to their daily lives. They are more concerned about the cost of living and their own material wealth. How has Trumponomics performed on affordability? Surprisingly well given the predictions.

Average prices rose during 2025 by 2.65%, 22 basis points lower than the 2.87% inflation rate recorded during 2024. More critically, the Federal Reserve’s core inflation rate (average prices minus the volatile energy & food categories) fell from 3.21% in December 2024 to 2.64% the following year. The inflation crisis that ravaged the United States during the preceding Administration is over and the rate is nearing the Federal Reserve’s target rate.

The inflation rate just measures the average prices and doesn’t account for the severity that certain items have on a family’s budget. Several key staples like housing and transportation have been the drivers of the financial stress millions of households have endured during the Biden Administration. The median mortgage monthly payment (calculated using the median sales price and the median mortgage rate for a thirty-year amortization period) climbed 102% during the Biden Administration. We don’t have data for the second half of 2025, but through June, median mortgage costs had already declined 4.4%, due to both a drop in housing prices and mortgages rates. If housing prices remained steady during the rest of the year, then the drop-in mortgage rates alone (an 80-basis point drop over 2025) would result in a more significant 9.8% decline year-over-year in mortgage costs.

Median rent also saw a 1.7% price decline through October of 2025, as lower-cost metros saw larger savings. Not only is the housing situation not getting worse, but it’s also actually moving in the right direction. We’re seeing this industry begin to heal from the damage of the preceding four years.

It’s not just housing that is seeing price deflation. Gasoline prices fell from January 2025 to January 2026 by 8.24%, saving the median family $182 a year (if filling a 14-gallon tank once a week). Oil prices per barrel (major source of future electricity and transportation expenses) also saw a dramatic 23.24% reduction in price during 2025.

The success wasn’t just in the cost of living stabilizing, household wealth saw stronger year-over-year growth. The net worth of the bottom 50% of American households saw annual growth of 8.70% during 2025, nearly a full percentage point higher than the previous year.

The data is clear. The American economy is doing better under Donald Trump than it did in the last year of the Biden Administration. Prices are stabilizing, and in certain cases deflating, easing the financial burden of families. More capital is being created, productivity is rising, and the native labor market is heating up. There’s obviously volatility with the inculcation of artificial intelligence, but the underlying trajectory is upward.

The economy wasn’t the only frustration the American people had going into 2024. Increasing rates of violence in our major metropolitan areas left people feeling unsafe in their own communities. Between 2019 and 2023, homicides rose 12%, gun assaults rose 24%, and carjackings rose an astronomical 83%. These rates slowly fell back to earth amidst the 2024 presidential campaign, as heightened scrutiny forced these jurisdictions to clean up their streets. Nevertheless, crime remained elevated relative to the pre-Covid/BLM era, with aggravated assaults 4% higher, carjackings 25% higher, and gun assaults 5% higher. The rate of violent victimization was 11% higher in 2024 than it was in 2019. That elevation is held for all major types of assaults, from sexual crimes, to robberies, to batteries.

President Trump has exercised the old-school policy of aggressive enforcement of the law. He signed Executive Order 14333 declaring a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital, deploying National Guardsmen to safeguard law enforcement officers as they enforced the law. He signed an EO directing the Department of Justice to scrutinize jurisdictions that facilitate cashless bail, withholding grant funding to these municipalities. He also signed an executive order pushing the DOJ to use financial, prosecutorial, and administrative authority to combat vagrancy in major metropolitan communities. These measures sought to circumvent the inaction of local governments and ensure that the laws were faithfully executed.

The primary law enforcement policy of this Administration is it’s widescale campaign to locate, detain, and remove violent illegal aliens from the United States. Upon entering office, President Trump issued four executive actions reversing several Biden era policies and directing stricter enforcement of immigration law. These orders prohibited illegal crossings and suspended every method of entry and release that had been implemented during the Biden Administration, including the exploitation of the asylum process. This process would have an illegal alien claim asylum, be processed for adjudication, and then released into the interior (often without a scheduled hearing). This policy is called “catch-and-release” and facilitates illegal migration as once the migrant is released into the interior, it becomes more costly and challenging to identify, detain, and remove them for non-compliance. The result is that the illegal alien becomes a permanent reality. This then incentivizes more illegal aliens to make the venture to cross the border and exploit this provision. President Trump terminated this process by requiring that all illegal aliens remain detained until they receive due process, ensuring accountability across the whole process.

The result of these policies is a stunning drop in both illegal apprehensions and encounters. Total encounters at the Southern Border fell by 89% during President Trump’s first year. By securing the southern border, the Administration has enabled U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to prioritize other, more critical missions, like interdicting drug smuggling and combatting human trafficking. There was an 8%, 46,200 pound, increase in the number of drugs seized at the southern border last year.

The Biden Administration’s policy of “catch-and-release” proved most morally problematic with its handling of unaccompanied minors. Often the Administration would release these minors into the guardianship of an unidentified adult. Controversially, the Biden Administration lost accountability for more than 450,000 unaccompanied minors. The combined operations of the DHS and HHS has located 132,720 of these children in 2025. In March 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identified that the previous Administration had left a backlog of more than 65,000 of these cases. The Trump Administration set up a triage center, modernized the software, and through July 25, 2025, had already processed 59,000 of these reports, resulting in more than 4,000 leads for fraud, human trafficking, among other potential crimes.

The Trump Administration coupled this border enforcement with targeted deportation operations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agencies were deployed to the interior of the country to begin mass removal of these illegal aliens. President Trump signed the Laken Riley Act in January 2025, requiring that illegal aliens accused of a violent crime be subject to arrest and deportation proceedings, creating a fast-track for expedited removal of these violent persons. Additionally, the Trump Administration has brokered more than 1,255 signed partnerships with municipal governments to facilitate heightened removal operations.

The result of these measures has been a record breaking 675,000 illegal aliens removed from the United States through deportation proceedings. Coinciding with these formal measures, an estimated 2.2 million illegal aliens have self-deported from the United States, marking the single largest reduction in the illegal alien population in American history. More than 70% of the illegal aliens arrested by ICE were convicted or facing criminal prosecution, with arrests including 43,305 potential national security risks, 1,416 known or suspected terrorists, and 7,000 gang members.

The result of these enforcement measures has been a noticeable reduction in crime across the United States, particularly in our major metropolitan areas. The rate of migrant crime (the number of illegal aliens convicted for various offenses) enjoyed the largest reduction since President Trump’s first term. During the Biden Administration, these migrant crimes skyrocketed. Assaults rose 421%. Property related crimes (burglary, robbery, larceny, theft, fraud) rose 387%. The number of DUIs skyrocketed by a whopping 681%, while the number of homicides climbed by 867%. During the first year of Trump 2.0, we saw a 35%, 41%, 40%, and 20% reduction in each of these offenses respectfully.

We saw the single largest year-over-year reduction in homicides in U.S. history in 2025. Homicides are down 17.7%, rapes down 6.5%, robberies down 17.2%, and aggravated assaults down 7.6% compared to 2024 according to FBI crime statistics. After years of rising crime in the major metros, the U.S. now has less violent and property crime than in 2019, officially reversing the BLM era. We have 25% less homicides, 6% less aggravated assaults, 13% less gun assaults, 4% less sexual assaults, 19% less instances of domestic violence, 36% less cases of robbery, and 29% less carjacking. Even non-violent crime rates declined. We now have 45% fewer residential burglaries, 20% less larceny, and 19% lower drug offenses compared to 2019. The United States is safer today than it was a year ago when President Trump entered office.

Finally, the Trump Administration has been incredibly successful on the foreign front, contrary to the mainstream media’s portrayal. The common caricature of Donald Trump is that of a bumbling buffoon whose ignorance and recklessness will lead to a global war. This was the image painted by the media during the 2016 election and has been nurtured every year since. You would think that after his first term, which saw the brokering of the Abraham Accords, the first real normalization of Arab-Israeli relations since the Camp David Accords would shift that dynamic. Or maybe his aggressive sanctions on Iran that bankrupted the terror state’s capacity to finance its jihadi crescent, particularly Hezbollah, reducing the terror activity of these various cells. Or maybe the fact that the Trump Administration was the only American government since the fall of the Soviet Union to not witness a new military intervention by the Russian government of one of its neighbors. None of these shifted the narrative, because the narrative wasn’t descriptive but persuasive by design.

President Donald Trump has always embraced a realpolitik peace through strength doctrine. He doesn’t approach foreign policy through the lenses of idealism. Rather, he views everything as a possible transaction and every country as a possible partner. However, that doesn’t mean he that is soft. He embodies John F. Kennedy’s guiding principle expressed in his inauguration, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” This peace through strength doctrine has been expressed under a different slogan, “F*** Around and Find Out” (FAMO) by the current Administration. President Trump pursues peace through carrots but will always keep the stick visibly on the table and will use it if promised and provoked. When pursuing his aims, he will always commence the affairs with the most outlandish and aggressive demand, rearing up the media sensationalism, and building heightened drama, only then to “concede” back to what his actual strategic objective was. In doing so, he has advanced American interests more, and secured more peace, than any Administration since the Cold War.

President Trump entered office with the Middle East embroiled in a multi-theater conflict. Israel was fighting Hamas to the west, Yemen to the south, and Iran to the east. Within weeks, the Pentagon launched a massive wave of airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, culminating in capitulation by the insurgents and a reopening of the Red Sea. He ordered Operation Midnight Hammer which dealt a devasting strike to Iran’s nuclear facility, prompting an end to the “Twelve Day War” between Tehran and Jerusalem, and severely crippling the adversary’s nuclear operation. He also worked back channels to apply a good cop/bad cop strategy with Israel with Qatar, resulting in the brokering of the October 2025 Ceasefire Agreement with Hamas, wherein all the surviving hostages were finally released after two years of captivity. This agreement is still in effect five months later. The Middle East is inarguably safer today than it was a year ago.

It's not just the Middle East that President Trump has demonstrated his willingness to defend his proverbial “redline”. In January 2026, he launched one of the most successful covert military operations with the extradition of Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro. Since the operation, surviving Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodriguez has acquiesced with freeing political prisoners, easing state control over its oil industry, and softening control over its domestic market.

Another key deviation from the idealism of the Biden Administration is that President Trump, because he embraces realpolitik, has been willing to be pragmatic in global disputes, which has enabled him to be a successful broker of peace around the world. He brokered a peace framework between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the decadal Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, that ties economic incentives and potential financial penalties with and by the U.S. with compliance to that framework. He leveraged relations with Malaysia, and the ASEAN, to facilitate the Kuala Lumpur Accord ending border hostilities between Thailand and Cambodia. On June 27, 2025, he gained a verbal affirmation, later signed on December 4^th, of the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity, that ended years of conflict between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. President Trump also played a role in smaller resolutions between India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia. In effect, President Trump has combined the policy of “Dollar Diplomacy” of William Howard Taft with the “Peace Through Strength” of Ronald Reagan to unprecedented success.

President Trump isn’t just playing peacemaker either. His “America First” ethos has led him to use these same carrot/stick tools to advance the interests of the United States. He secured an historic commitment by thirty-one NATO members to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP, with 3.5% being for “core defensive” capabilities and 1.5% for critical infrastructure by 2035. If done today, it would amount to $1.87 trillion in core defensive spending and $800 billion in critical infrastructure by the alliance. Contrary to the notion that President Trump is crippling NATO, his influence across both terms has been to strengthen the alliance relative to our global adversaries.

He's also leveraged tariffs as a tool for reciprocal economic frameworks with our main trading partners. On August 21, 2025, President Trump brokered the U.S. – E.U. Framework on an Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade. This agreement committed the European Union countries to providing preferential access for U.S. agricultural goods, such as seafood, nuts, dairy, processed foods, soybeans, and pork, remove all tariffs on American industrial goods, import $750 billion of U.S. oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy products, $40 billion of U.S. AI computer chip, and commit to $600 billion in additional foreign direct investment into American markets by 2028, in exchange for the U.S. assessing a 15% tariff on European goods.

After a back-and-forth between the global powers, President Trump concluded a strategic trade deal with the Chinese. China will commit to easing it’s one form of leverage, i.e. export controls on rare earth minerals; enact general licenses for exporting of rare earth minerals, effectively ending its 2023 restrictions; purchase 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans during the last two months of 2025, and 25 million metric tons through 2028; and pledge to curb its support for exporting fentanyl components overseas. In exchange, the U.S. would curb its higher Section 301 tariffs assessed earlier in the year. Effectively, this agreement brokered a quasi-status quo where the U.S. can continue assessing heightened tariffs without reciprocal actions by Beijing.

The President embarked on a regional tour of the Arabian Peninsula in May 2025, brokering agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, resulting in commitments to increase direct investment and imports by $2 trillion by 2028, as well as an acceleration of previous commitments totaling $1.4 trillion. Saudi Arabia, who originally committed to $600 billion in investments, since increased that to $1 trillion later in the year.  

This month the President brokered a framework with India in which India would liberalize its markets for American farmers and commit to purchase $500 billion in American energy, aircraft, and technology over the next five years, in exchange for the U.S. reducing the heightened tariffs on Indian imports from 43% to 18%, and to lift its requirement that India divest itself from Russian oil and natural gas.

These are just the agreements that have been concluded with the world’s major players. The United States has also produced deals with the United Kingdom, El Salvador, Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Just off our major trading partners, the agreements amount to more than $4.3 trillion in newly pledged FDI and exports. While it is true that reality will always differ from a preliminary framework, if even a fraction of these commitments is fulfilled, it would be the single largest increase in American trade in U.S. history. The world is definitively safer today, and the United States has an objectively stronger trajectory than it did one year ago, and it is all due to the policies of the Trump Administration.

Given all these accomplishments, a reviving economy, safer streets, and more orderly world, why is it that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are so unpopular? The RCP average has Donald Trump’s approval rating 12.6 points underwater, with 54.9% of the public disapproving of his performance. The 2026 Generic Congressional Vote has Democrats leading by a wide 5.2 margin in the average of polls. How is that Democrats screwed up the economy, the border, public safety, and foreign affairs (not to mention going off the rails on social policy) so much over four years, and despite the objective data showing a stronger economy, safer cities, and a general trend of world peace, they are set to trounce the GOP in November?

I have five theories for why this is the case. First, to play with James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid”, the American people are feeling a general sense of malaise and have been incentivized to embrace short-termism. The American public were put through the ringer by the terrible policies of the Democratic Party for four long years. Average prices rose by 21.2% from December 2020 to December 2024, but this doesn’t paint the full picture. Referring to earlier data, the median cost of a new thirty-year mortgage doubled from 2020 to 2024. Electricity prices per kilowatt hour rose 29% during that time, gasoline rose 45%, average rent rose 24%, and average food rose 25%. When you permanently add $2 trillion to the budget (like the Democrats did), driving the deficit to over $2 trillion per year (7% of GDP), you force the Federal Reserve to liquidate that debt by printing more money, debasing the dollar, and inflating prices.

How does this relate to Trump’s popularity? The only way to correct massive inflation in the short run is to cripple the supply of money, which induces a cratering in demand, causing depression. Prices fall because nobody is buying anything. This isn’t a strategy that any sane politician (or person) would support. Outside of this dramatic solution, the only path towards resolution is by increasing supply faster than demand. This is what the Trump Administration has been doing by promoting supply-side tax policy, deregulation, onshoring, AI development, and deportations. However, productivity is never going to skyrocket by 20%, 50%, 100% in a given year. Every improvement will be marginal. Unfortunately, that isn’t conducive to a population that is on edge and thinks with a two-year political perspective.

Imagine that in 2020, you were earning $5,000 in after-tax income each month as a household. Your total cost of living was $4,000. You had a $1,000 surplus each month. That’s noticeable, even with the occasional emergency, so you feel well off and secure. We can see this was true by looking at the Gallup survey. In 2020, after four years of Donald Trump 1.0, 55% of Americans said they felt better off than they were four years prior, the highest ever recorded. Now imagine that your cost of living rises 25%, but your wage remains stagnant. You’re still making $5,000 in net income each month, but because your costs rose $1,000 (25%), you now spend $5,000 each month on the same lifestyle. What once felt secure, is now paycheck to paycheck. You probably experienced an occasional emergency that drained your savings and put you in credit card debt. You’re obviously going to be stressed.

It's been twelve months since Trump took office, and your cost of living is still rising, but by historical norms. Maybe it rose 2% ($100) to $5,100 per month. But your income is actually rising too. You’re now bringing home $5,200 per month. You are better off to the tune of $100 per month. However, nobody feels that $100 in the short run. That’s a rounding error. A higher-than-expected electric bill, an unexpected expense, payments on your credit card, will reach up to where you don’t even notice. You are improving, but you don’t see it. You feel like nothing has changed and so you are losing the optimism and hope that led you to vote for Donald Trump in the first place.

However, the reality is that if you keep that trajectory, you will see that gap continue to grow and grow until you fully recover and then proceed to new heights. It just takes time. If the economy grows at 2% each year, it will be four times larger after seventy-two years. If it grows by only 1% each year (3% total), it will be a colossal eight times larger. Thus, a 1% change can make a 100% difference over the long run, but in the short run, that 1% is immeasurable to the common eye. James Carville coined his line, so let me share this idiom. It takes a redwood tree centuries to grow into full maturity, but it only takes minutes to cut one down. Sound economic policy will manifest itself over time as the marginal gains compound. But bad economic policy can wreck an economy in months. President Trump and the Republicans are doing the right thing, but it isn’t going to improve your lives as fast as you expect in the short run because your expectations are not grounded in reality. That’s because you’re stressed, but it’s also because the Democratic Party has grounded the conversion with the false notion that we can wave the magical government wand, and everything becomes better. There is no short-term solution for a problem of this magnitude, and anyone who sells one to you is lying. Herein lies the danger of a resurgent Democratic Party.

The best strategy to counter this problem is honesty. The President, and Republican leaders, need to be straightforward with the public on how to mold their expectations. If you don’t get ahead of the manufactured narrative, then you are going to be buried by it.

This leads me to my second theory of why the Republicans are in such a weakened position, despite a year of triumphs, opposition by a weaponized media. The mainstream media lives in the world of framing to manufacture narratives around a leftwing agenda. You can see it most obviously with the headlines they use to capture attention.

Consider CNN’s October 2024 headline reporting the monthly inflation statistic five days before the presidential election. “The Fed’s favorite inflation index just cooled again.” The article’s body paints a rosy picture of an economy on the upward swing. “The latest inflation reading provided further confirmation that these atypically high price hikes have been tamed, fueling expectations for the Federal Reserve, which has a meeting next week, to continue cutting interest rates.” Compare that to how CNN reported a similar cooling a year later during the Trump Administration. “Inflation cooled in November to 2.7%, but economists say to take it with ‘the entire saltshaker’”. In both cases, CNN is reporting a similar fact, inflation is falling. But in the latter case, they frame that information with pessimism so as to maintain the existing narrative that Trump is to blame for the high costs.

When the dissemination of most non-social media-based information is captured by leftwing activists, the reporting of facts can be weaponized through framing and omission, leading to a narrative that is then cycled through the country until it is believed as fact. “A lie can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Mark Twain was not wrong. The lie doesn’t have to be an overt lie. It can be cloaked in half-truths, intentional framing, or straight omission. This then is recycled over and over until it becomes the general consensus, and the actual truth is buried by this dishonesty. Republicans have been dealing with this problem for years, but never with the stakes as high as right now. The GOP needs to get more aggressive with its public relations and find ways to counter the media or it will not succeed until sufficient time passes for the public to feel the improvement.

The third reason for why Republicans are struggling is because of self-destructive PR actions. There have been too many instances by this Administration of botched public engagement that then facilitates the activism by the media. Pam Bondi blew the PR for the Epstein investigation. Kristi Noem made mistakes in providing preliminary judgment after the shootings in Minneapolis. These instances feed the media’s machine and grant it a degree of authenticity to its machinations. The Trump Administration needs to become more disciplined in how it engages with the public if it ever wants to truly corner the Democratic Party.

Fourth, the Trump Administration is actively facing headwinds by State and local governments. Washington may be doing the right things to control the cost of living and promote economic growth, but those positive actions may be buried by the negative policies of major municipal governments, like New York City, or by States like Minnesota. Average prices rose in New York City across 2025 by 3.36%, 27% higher than the national average. This is due to restrictive zoning policies, higher taxes on production, overregulation, and saturated population levels worsened by illegal migration. None of these are the direct result of federal policy but nevertheless impact the lives of the residents of NYC. If New Yorks, or other metro residents, are feeling financial stress from high costs, they are likely attributing to Washington what is actually the fault of their local leadership. This is simply due to the fact that we nationalize every issue and all responsibility.

Similarly, if the Trump Administration is actively enforcing federal law, and cities and states are actively harboring illegal aliens and refusing law enforcement cooperation, then any chance of a peaceful conduct of the operations are gone. Unlike in partnering jurisdictions, “sanctuary” jurisdictions prevent the ability of ICE to apprehend illegal aliens that have been convicted or facing prosecution while they are already apprehended. Instead, ICE must go directly into the communities to detain these criminals, increasing the temperature between law enforcement officers and these migrant communities. This then enables professional agitators the liberty of exploiting the scenario for emotional zeal. They will actively impair law enforcement operations to try and induce the perception, real or manifested, of authoritarian tyranny by the federal government. The media then runs with this perception and disseminates endlessly until it becomes gospel. This is perverse and a clear obstruction of our constitutional order.

Finally, my last theory for why the Republican Party is facing weakened support going into 2026 is that the Party has thus far been ineffective outside of Donald Trump. President Trump has achieved most of these accomplishments listed here through executive action. His accomplishments in foreign affairs are exclusively due to his role as chief diplomat and commander in chief. His handling of the border and deportations were supported by the One Big Beautiful Bill’s allocation of funding for more CBP and ICE agents, as well as the Laken Riley Act’s statutory authority, but the bulk of the policy change came from executive orders from the president himself. Even on the economy, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s tax reform is just now being felt in tax return season. All changes up to this point have been due to the deregulatory and protectionist actions of the executive.

The Republican Congress has largely been stagnant for the last thirteen months. It has consolidated the agenda to almost exclusively the appropriations process. While it had early successes with the Laken Riley Act, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the small appropriations rescission, since the summer of 2025 it has produced little additional achievement. This is in stark comparison to the Democratic Party’s capacity to pump out the CARES Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in two years, all while still maintaining the appropriations process.

It is true that Democrats tend to have zero ideological diversity in its caucus, whereas the GOP faces a much wider divergence of views and interest, making coalition building more strained. But it is also true that there are unifying policies that could be advanced that would receive at least majority support in both chambers by the GOP caucus. It’s also true that Democrats have been obstructive to all parts of the legislative calendar, shutting the government down in October for no strategic objective, and likely again this month over ICE operations with ridiculous demands being forwarded, but yet the Democrats leveraged the tools of the majority to circumvent Republican opposition to achieve much of their agenda. This is a growing frustration among Republican voters is that when Democrats are in power, they advance their agenda; when Republicans are in power, virtually nothing is accomplished. It weakens enthusiasm and makes your base cynical.

The Republican Party has thrived from 2010 to 2024 almost exclusively off of opposition to the radical left. The Tea Party Revolution won in 2010 and 2014 because of the broader public’s disenfranchisement with many of the radical actions of the Obama Administration. President Trump won a surprise victory in 2016 due to the compounding of that opposition. We won a decisive victory in 2024 due to consternation with the radicalism of the Biden Administration and the Congressional Democrats. However, fear of the opposition isn’t a sufficient bedrock for political success. The reason the Reagan movement was so successful is that President Reagan provided, not just a critique of the status quo, but a positive agenda for people to believe in. The Republican Party needs to get back to that mindset. Yes, we need to clarify the dangers that the Left presents to the country and highlight the damage it has dealt with in recent years. But we also need to present an alternative vision. That’s how we’ll move the long-term needle. President Trump appears to be doing that by advancing specific policies, but it needs to be done wholesale across all major issues.

The last thirteen months have been successful. Our economy has improved, our communities are safer, and our global interests advanced. The Trump Administration and the Republican Congress have succeeded in action, but now it’s time to lead the public and counter the engineered narrative of the Democrats. Honest communication, strategic management, and additional action will help tip the scales back towards the Republican Party before the 2026 midterms. There is too much riding on these next two elections (2026 and 2028) for the Republicans to squander the public trust.