At the start of President Trump’s first term I was told by the Left and elements of the Right that the following was going to happen:
- More war, possibly even nuclear war.
- Global trade wars, crashed US economy, the stock market tanking, massive unemployment.
- The arrival, after decades of predictions that it would happen, of Fascism on American soil, starting with the closure of the US-Mexican border via Police State actions against immigrants, but soon spreading to everybody in America.
None of that came about. Trump’s biggest failure was Covid-19, which trashed a roaring economy, pissed people off with lockdowns and enabled the Democrat Party to run a basement campaign with an already senile Joe Biden. Yet even in that case the fault lay less with Trump’s instincts than his trust of healthcare experts like Dr’s Fauci and Birx.
Given those predictive failures his critics pulled their horns in a little this second time around, especially on the war aspect. But they couldn’t help themselves on repeating points 2 and 3.
And they’re just as wrong now as they were then.
In fact Trump’s wins are really starting to add up, and this in just the first six months. In fact I can’t think of another Presidential start like it, especially for a 2nd term when Presidential Administrations tire. Trump’s 2nd term is of course, more like a 1st term, but this time it’s been much better than his 1st because he learned his lessons in terms of staff and where he needs to hit the Left – meaning the bureaucracy. That last is going to be a long fight and it will be down to the last unbroken bone because they have everything to lose and nowhere else to go.
- Domestic Policy
- Economy
- Foreign Policy
- Iran, Fordow – Boom. After 46 years it was about time
- Even so, he negotiated a ceasefire between Iran and Israel
- Negotiated another one between India and Pakistan
- Negotiated a peace treaty between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo
- NATO members agree to 5% defense spending increase
- Pulls the USA Out of the Paris Accords – and the WHO
- Polling
- His Opposition
Domestic Policy
Illegal Immigration drops to near zero
- USBP released 0 (not a single one) illegal aliens into the USA in May, down from more than 62,000 in May of last year.
- The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying, ‘We needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out – all we really needed was a new president.
Getting men out of women’s sports
Cracking down on extremist universities for their Jew-Hatred
Big wins in the Supreme Court
Something deserving of an entire post, with the latest being SCOTUS slapping down lower courts nationwide injunctions on the Trump Administration.
Nukes LBJ’s 60 year old Affirmative Action Order
An absolutely necessary first step in attacking the DEI monster that has grown up as the radical left conducted an ideological capture of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. But it’s going to be a long slog to turn this around.
Implementing the DOGE unit
Knowing what the Blob is like I never thought Musk’s goal of saving $1 trillion this year was going to happen: fairly typical of Musk in always setting overly ambitious targets. But it has already saved hundreds of billions of dollars and, more importantly, started the Federal government solidly down the path of becoming more efficient, especially by highlighting the incredible amounts of waste in government departments, setting in place systems that will prevent much of that happening again, and in some cases leading to the elimination of the department itself, such as USAID, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, (FMCS) and US Institute of Peace (USIP).
If they can keep grinding away on all this small, simple stuff, like fake social security numbers and putting simple audit markers on Treasury payments, we might get that trillion-dollar-a-year saving before Trump leaves office.
Of course many of DOGE’s findings can have no effect if they’re not enacted by Congress in a budget. Which leads to….
Passing The Big Ugly Bill
Shorter story: the perfect is the enemy of the good, something David Stockman has never understood, which is why Reagan eventually fired him.
Stockman’s criticisms are correct, as are other critics. It doesn’t solve the rapidly growing debt problem or fix the monsters now driving that – Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid – so remains a huge spendup. And it’s not helped by Senators, both GOP and Democrat, preserving pork like Green Energy subsidies that the House had stripped out. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, even with spending cuts included, and they’re almost always bullshit.
But the politics that drives such rubbish is hard-wired into the compromising nature of the US Constitution, the slim GOP majority in the House and Senate was not something Trump was going to be able to overcome, and the GOP has been pulling these stunts for decades before Trump appeared. This was a “reconciliation bill” which allows changes to revenue and spending outside the normal budget, which they’ll have to start working on immediately – but which will lead to much the same nonsense, although we can hope that Congress might follow proper procedure for the first time since the 1990’s (no more “Omnibus Bills”).
But, if this hadn’t passed, voters would have been hit with one of the largest tax increases in history as Trump 2017 tax cuts were set to expire. It’s estimated that 62% of tax payers would have been hit, a tax hike of $1,700 for the average American, 26 million small businesses facing a 43.4% top tax rate. Instead the bill:
- Permanently extends the 2017 Trump tax cuts.
- Adds new provisions like no tax on tips, overtime pay, and car loan interest for American-made vehicles.
- Expands the small business deduction to 23 percent and makes it permanent.
- Puts a massive increase to $175 billion for immigration and border enforcement.
- Increases the military budget by $150 billion.
None of those things should be dismissed lightly. One thing Stockman never accepted about Reagan’s tax cuts was the politics around them; yes, they would increase deficits and debt. He never accepted the Supply Side arguments, which is fair enough, but also never accepted that avoiding tax cuts would leave a base from which the Democrat Party would have extended further (look at GST in NZ, from 10% to 15%, and the 39% rate on incomes of $180,000+)
Finally, the Democrats wanted it to fail simply to damage Trump and the GOP; they couldn’t care less about tax and spending increases on voters, both of which they support anyway.
So it had to pass.
Economy
You may recall endless amounts of screaming a few months ago, about how cutting down the size of the Federal government, plus starting a global trade war, would trash the US economy. While not a fan of tariffs I also saw that Trump was using them as negotiating tool rather than implementing the 21st century of the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act. And so…
Jobs up, unemployment down
The Department of Labor reported Thursday that 147,000 jobs were added in June, exceeding economists’ forecasts of 110,000. Unemployment fell to 4.1%, defying predictions of a rise to 4.3%. Revisions to prior months also boosted job totals. April’s job creation was revised upward by 11,000 to 158,000, and May gained an additional 5,000, bringing that month’s total to 144,000.
Quite a change to the regular, and often massive downgrade revisions to the Biden-era job numbers.
Also, federal job numbers fell by 7,000 in June alone.
Jobs went to Americans not illegal aliens
Since January 2025 the figures are:
- foreign-born employment down by 543,000.
- Federal employment down by 69,000.
- Native-born employment up by 2,079,000.
This…. is CNN:
Inflation down (not up)
As just a couple of components of the CPI demonstrate; remember the screaming about the price of eggs and gasoline after Trump had been President?
- Egg prices have now declined 62% since President Trump’s inauguration day. They were $6.55 per dozen. They are now $2.52.
- Gasoline prices at their lowest since 2021, due to a resurgence in US oil production as Trump lifted Biden-era bans and regulations on everything in the industry from fracking to pipelines.
Also this about those tariffs. It would appear that the foreign companies – especially China – are swallowing the increased costs rather than passing them on to American consumers. In the long run that may change to fit the theory that tariffs are a tax on consumers, but it’s not happening yet.
Leading to…Real wages increased:
Stockmarket at a record high
The S&P 500 hit an all-time record high on Friday, clocking in for the first time ever at 6,156. The S&P 500 has soared more than 20% since April.
Foreign Policy
Iran, Fordow – Boom. After 46 years it was about time
Even so, he negotiated a ceasefire between Iran and Israel
Negotiated another one between India and Pakistan
For which the latter has actually nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize!!! In the unlikely event that he wins it (bone in the throat of the Nobel committee I’d bet), I hope he refuses it (but being Trump he likely wouldn’t).
Negotiated a peace treaty between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo
NATO members agree to 5% defense spending increase
I was informed by serious people that Trump would wreck NATO! (Trump has been bad for the Western Alliance nations. He has fundamentally weakened the Alliances. Biden will get them working again.“)
Pulls the USA Out of the Paris Accords – and the WHO
Polling
The following should thus also not be a surprise.
His Opposition
The Democrat Party Is In Trouble
Just because a politician or party is doing well doesn’t mean the opposition is melting down, but in this case the Democrat Party has never been in worse shape, and as a result they’re starting to fall down rabbit holes.
They’re digging deeper into multiple holes….
The MSM is in trouble
MSNBC and CNN suffered staggering losses in viewership over the past year….The left-leaning networks — which will both be spun off by their respective parent companies — suffered year-over-year declines in all major metrics for the second quarter compared to the same period last year, according to the latest Nielsen data.
Well, the Left-leaning side that is. Fox News has not only crushed its cable rivals but is starting to beat the old broadcast networks individual nightly viewing figures.
And that’s before looking at the legacy MSM’s massive losses to Trump in lawsuits.
No Minister 
Watch him with foreign policy. He won’t be finished yet. I don’t think he’s quite the “isolationist” that people seem to think that he is.
I’d have thought that having put this in the Oval Office twice now would have been a hint.
If not that then the fact that he smoked Iranian General Qassem Soleimani five years ago should have been the big clue.
It’s a Jacksonian foreign policy
I’d never heard that term before. That was an interesting read, especially seeing the foreign policy of Reagan put in that frame work. Having read it, just can certainly see where Trump fits.
Yep. And he fits even more when you consider that Jackson is regarded as the co-founder of …. the Democrat Party, which Trump was a part of for 2-3 decades.
As that article points out, the fights between the neo-conservatives and the Jacksonians was hidden by the former’s claim that the latter were “isolationists”, in the hope of crowding them back into the emotive box of “you enabled WWII”.
Reminds me of a joke I saw recently on Twitter: “I voted for Hitler and all I got was a 1990’s Democrat”.
And of course it doesn’t get more neo-conservative than Obama attacking Libya in 2011.
Remind us again, how many undocumented did the Black fella deport in his 8 years, I have seen 5 000 000 suggested somewhere, of course it remains different when “They” do it, aye.