This is a consequential presidency.
I f you had to sum up President Trump’s second term so far in one word, you could do worse than “epic.”
Trump may be on the path to the most consequential presidency since Ronald Reagan’s.
We don’t know how it will end — there may be some terrible crack-up, or an unforeseen crisis could upend everything — but the emphasis has been on governing ambition from Day One. Even if Trump’s second term ended tomorrow, he would have left a significant mark.
Consider his signature issues of trade and immigration.
For all the talk about how he doesn’t have core convictions, Trump has favored tariffs for decades and has instituted a tariff regime that — absent discrediting economic turmoil — is likely to endure whether he is succeeded by a Republican or a Democrat.
This alone is a momentous achievement, and one that would have seemed almost unthinkable when Trump descended the elevator in 2015 and a relatively free-trade consensus prevailed in U.S. policy.
He’s brought border crossings to a historic low, and it could be that the U.S. experiences negative net migration for the first time in 50 years. Again, this is a big change, and one that it’s hard to imagine anyone besides Donald Trump effecting.
He’s dealt a blow to DEI programs in the federal government and is making it harder for colleges and universities to pursue race-conscious policies. His election coincided with the beginning of a pullback from DEI in the private sector, one that his administration has encouraged and accelerated.
DEI was the culmination of a half-century campaign by the left for quotas in hiring and admissions and other racialized policies. Trump’s counteroffensive could represent an inflection point, marking a turn toward race-neutral practices. That said, there is much work still to be done that will require focus and staying power.
He’s signed a tax and spending bill that makes permanent the tax cuts from his first term, makes a substantial investment in immigration enforcement, and includes a meaningful reform of Medicaid.
He bombed the Iranian nuclear program, at the very least setting it back for years.
He cajoled commitments for greater defense spending out of NATO countries.
Almost any one of these items would be a notable first-six-months accomplishment, but he’s done them all, with lots of other activity besides. His EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, and his energy officials are rolling back the left’s climate agenda. Trump defunded public broadcasting and kneecapped the Department of Education (for now). The administration has taken important steps to protect female sports and to keep minors from being subjected to “gender-affirming care.” With brute-force threats, he’s pushed universities into agreements to adopt reforms and probably upended forever the assumption that billions of federal dollars would flow to top universities as a matter of course.
His election coincided with a major cultural change. Trump was both a symbol of, and catalyst for, the woke tide’s receding. The left isn’t giving up its cultural priorities, but it’s hard to see, say, the University of Pennsylvania going back to allowing men to compete in women’s swimming, or corporations embracing DEI trainings with their former fervor.
Trump has, in recent memory, an unprecedented grip on his party and has remade it in his image over the course of the last decade. He has a very good chance of handing the 2028 nomination race to his favored candidate (likely, of course, Vice President JD Vance). If a Trump-endorsed nominee won the general election, he would be the George H. W. Bush to Trump’s Reagan.
In sum, the rise of Trump in 2016 represented a break with what had been the post–Cold War consensus, although it was incompletely realized and seemingly a political fizzle when voters ousted him in the Covid election of 2020. Biden was a partial return to a more conventional politics. Now, with his second term, Trump is more fully effecting a transition to a new era, which, alone, makes him a highly consequential figure.
The usual caveats apply: Again, a catastrophe could scramble all of this, and to say Trump is important is not to endorse everything he’s doing, whether big (e.g., the tariffs) or small (e.g., firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner).
Since he’s done so much unilaterally, it’s subject to relatively easy reversal if a Democrat is elected in 2028. After Trump has demonstrated how far the chief executive can push the envelope in exercising his power, a Democratic president would surely feel even more emboldened to pursue pen-and-phone governance, blow through or work around inconvenient rules, and bully institutions to adopt his or her priorities. If there’s much about this story that remains to be written, there’s little doubt we are witnessing something historic.
Steve Hayward called his volumes on the Republican giant of the 1980s The Age of Reagan (and Arthur Schlesinger wrote both The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt). The equivalent of Hayward or Schlesinger decades from now will probably be justified in continuing the trope.
All indications are that we are living in The Age of Trump.