His first six months delivered much of what I wanted for the USA, with a few exceptions like the failure to kill most of the Iranian political and military leadership, continuing to be played by Putin, and his refusal to accept he snookered himself on all the Epstein stuff.

But you can’t have everything, and it would seem that he’s not stopping any time soon; the guy really is playing less like a typical second-term lame duck President than someone fighting as if his life depended on it. Let’s look at the latest events

  1. Trade Agreements
  2. The Economy
  3. Ending Climate Change Bullshit
  4. Universities Caving on DEI
  5. Breaking his Opponent’s Will
Trade Agreements

Remember all the MSM headlines in the early part of 2025 about how Trump would, at a minimum, fail with all his bluff and bluster to get trade deals with the rest of the world, and at worst would start a trade war?

Yeah…. Nah!

Trump reached a deal last week with Japan, setting a 15 percent tariff on Japanese goods — lower than the 25 percent tariff Trump had threatened to impose. Also in that deal, Trump said Japan would invest $550 billion in projects in the U.S. and would open its markets to U.S. automobiles, rice and other agricultural products.

There have also been ones with the Philippines, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom.

But the EU is the biggie to date…

  • The EU is removing tariffs on U.S. products while accepting a 15% tariff on most EU goods.
  • The EU committed to buying $750 billion in U.S. energy products over the next three years.
  • The EU promised $600 billion in direct investment in the U.S.

It was so good for the US and Trump that “leaders” in Europe who have deliberately lowered themselves and their nations below the mighty, mighty EU, were now whinging about its condition:

François Bayrou, France’s prime minister, said on social media that it was a “dark day” for Europe. Another French minister called the agreement “unbalanced.” A left-leaning European Parliamentarian from Belgium posted a dismayed, “What happened, Europe?”
…
French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou commented: “It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, brought together to affirm their common values and to defend their common interests, resigns itself to submission.”

Ooo… Submission! Where’s the whip?

I’ll paste Bertrand’s comment here in case he deletes it – and also so you can enjoy reading a Frenchmen complaining about surrendering:

A reporter rightly asks Von Der Leyen “What are the US concessions? What is the US giving up in the deal”  VDL’s reply is that there was none because “the starting point was an imbalance, a surplus on our side, and a deficit on the US side [so] we wanted to rebalance the trade relation.” 

This is who we have negotiating on the EU’s behalf: someone so thoroughly captured she’s repeating almost word for word Trump’s insane rhetoric that trade deficits are somehow proof America is a victim that deserves compensation.

MSM headlines grudgingly confirmed Trump’s big win…

… including the US MSM, who you would think would cheer the good news – but don’t if it’s Trump…

Wah! Waaaahhhhh! You can read the details of the deal here, where I see that Digital Regulation is not part of the deal, which means another fight is coming on that front. And I wouldn’t bet against the TACO King – it stands for Trump Always Chickens Out and was pushed by desperate Democrats before the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites and this – and yes, that link is to the same Financial Times that produced the headline above.

Yes it does, and The Telegraph has already answered one: the EU is no superpower.

Also, now that Japan and the EU have come to terms, the countries who have so far refused to buckle are in worse shape. Those coming late will get worse deals. The US can afford to lose access to the markets of a handful of countries. But they absolutely can’t afford to lose access to the US market.

I’m well aware of the economic theories on tariffs; they’re not just bad for free trade, they don’t help the countries who wield them – at least in the long term. But the fact that so many nations have caved to Trump (almost all of whom have used tariffs forever, with nary a protest) suggests that theory may have to adjust for reality. Something has been amiss in global trade for decades and the only reason it’s held up is that the US supported all this by offering up its people for sacrifice. And then there’s this other piece of contradictory evidence

The Economy

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said, “The tariff revenues are amazing—$700 billion a year. That’s just net new money the government never had before. You take that for ten years, that’s $7 trillion.”

Given that and other things Trump has done, such as freeing up the American economy from regulations, and unleashing cheap energy production, the following should not be a surprise..

I see the usual suspects – the ones who’ve been wrong before, many times – are currently screaming about the latest downward revisions in the latest job numbers and Trump firing the head of the Stats section of the Labour Department. I must admit that I’m agnostic on whether this was Trump avenging himself on those who deliver bad news, for two reasons:

  1. On the one hand we’ve had demonstrated to us for eight years that there are “public servants” in the US who are nothing more than Democrat partisans – plus a few GOPrs who also hate his guts and enjoy screwing him with quiet behind-the-scenes Sir Humphrey games.
  2. On the other hand this team have already shown they’ve got problems, as when they kept revising down previously announced job numbers through 2023-2024, culminating in a massive revision in early 2024 for the previous year of 818,000 fewer jobs than they’d previously said were created. I don’t recall any Dems screaming about how this meant Biden’s economy sucked.

    Sounds like rank incompetence that should have seen this person fired on Jan 20, 2025.
Ending Climate Change Bullshit

Here’s a specific example of unleashing the economy: Car Lovers Rejoice! After 50 Miserable Years, CAFE Standards Are Dead:

Passed in 1975 as a way to deal with an energy crisis (that was caused by government price controls), “corporate average fuel economy” (CAFE) standards – required the fleet of cars sold by an automaker to achieve an arbitrary miles-per-gallon goal. If they missed the goal, they paid hefty annual fines.

The usual story of passing regulations that will do good, save the planet, and humans:

A 2002 National Academy of Sciences found that these fuel economy standards not only boosted the cost of cars, but may have caused as many as 2,600 more traffic fatalities just in 1993.

Meh! Tradeoffs. How many lives did they save from polluted air? You can read the details at the link, but the real point here is that CAFE was eventually fully weaponised:

Obama imposed a fuel economy mandate that was supposed to hit 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by 2025, which, as we pointed out in the pages of Investor’s Business Daily at the time, was designed to force EVs onto the market, because even compact hybrid cars can’t get that kind of mileage.

Trump, as was typical of his 1st term, did what other GOP Presidents had done and merely dialed back the standards, only for Biden to dial them back up again, another lesson for all Right-Wing governments that it is not enough to “manage” the shite handed to you by the Left but to FUCKING DESTROY IT:

Rather than wait for regulators to rewrite the rule, which can take years and be subject be endless lobbying and litigation from various interest groups – lawmakers simply zeroed out the penalty as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Sure, the Left could bring it back, but that’s going to require total control of Congress and the Presidency and will be a lot harder than it was in the 1970’s now that all the downsides have been seen, plus them demonstrating where they would have ultimately taken it.

But the next move is even bigger: EPA Moves to Eliminate the Basis for a Trillion Dollars of Climate Change Regulations:

Lee Zeldin announced Tuesday that the EPA would propose rescinding the 2009 so-called “Endangerment” finding by the Obama administration. This finding underpins every “climate change” and most automobile regulations issued since 2009 and, if successful, would effectively eradicate “climate change” regulation as a federal policy consideration. 

That’s a trillion dollars per year.

It’s a repeat of the CAFE standards story. Back on 2009 the Supreme Court said that the EPA could use the old Clean Air Act to regulate GHG emissions – if they could demonstrate that it harmed people. The EPA found a way, declaring an “Endangerment Finding” that CO2 was pollutant. This was a clever ploy by Obama that would avoid having to pass massive new laws on GHG emissions, something they’d already failed at with the Waxman-Markey bill, but still enable them to cudgel manufacturers of everything from cars to household appliances, including the factories themselves.

All without having to fight this out on the political stage in front of voters. Just like CAFE standards, and once again, Trump has forced the Democrats into sunlight. It will take a couple of months but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t happen. In Lee Zeldin Trump has a man who knows these scams, having fought them for years.

Universities Caving on DEI

Way back in March 2025 the Trump Administration cancelled $400 million of grants to Columbia University because they had breached various laws on racial discrimination – particularly but not only towards Jews by allowing pro-Hamas mobs to do whatever they wanted – but also as an incentive to clean themselves up.

It worked:

The Trump administration has won unprecedented concessions from Columbia University in a sweeping settlement — with the Ivy League school paying more than $220 million and pledging to reverse racially discriminatory practices and resolve civil rights violations against Jewish students and workers, The Post can exclusively reveal.

The settlement, under which Columbia will agree to submit to independent monitoring to ensure it is complying with merit-based hiring and admissions requirements, is likely to put pressure on other schools — like Harvard University— that have crossed the White House over tolerance of extreme Jew-hatred on campus since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas against Israel.

Ah yes, Harvard, who have been under the pump ever since the Supreme Court ruled that they had racially discriminated against Asian students for years in the application process. Since then Harvard has been trying to fool the Court by holding on to the discrimination while calling it other things. Nobody has been fooled, including Trump:

HHS Finds Harvard in Violation of Title V

After a thorough investigation, HHS OCR finds that Harvard University is in violent violation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin.

Rubio Opens New Probe Into Harvard Over Foreign Students:

Secretary of State State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday that the State Department is opening an investigation into Harvard University’s compliance with the government-run visa program for international students.

It is thus no surprise to read of this…

Harvard Open to Spending Up To $500 Million to Resolve Trump Dispute:

Harvard and other Ivy League institutions, as well as other colleges and universities, like UCLA, allowed their foreign students to conduct intimidation campaigns aimed at Jewish students and faculty, to the point of assault and battery. That specifically took place at Harvard, and rather than punish those identified as the perpetrators in those incidents, the bastards rewarded them.

Rubio is going to kill that also – and I don’t think the $500 million will enter that argument.

Every university in America, no matter how rich and prestigious, is watching this.

What was it that Mao said: Kill one, educate one hundred?

Breaking his Opponent’s Will

The synopsis of which is seen in the following cringe interview.