Human beings have very short attention spans. Many conservatives were impressed by the shock-and-awe campaign of President Donald Trump’s first hundred days in office in 2025, but that now seems like ages ago. With Trump having engaged in conflict in Iran, and gas prices increasing as a result, it has become common to hear former supporters (as well as those who never supported Trump in the first place) say that the president’s second administration has accomplished nothing. I recently had a conversation with a libertarian who followed this line of thinking. To him, the only policy priorities were government spending and foreign wars, and therefore Trump has been a failure.
It got me thinking about what the president has actually accomplished in the first year and a half of his second term. It’s certainly not nothing, and things are clearly better than they would have been had Kamala Harris won the election. But what does that mean in practical terms? What has Donald Trump really accomplished since January 2025?
If your measure of success is limited to one or two issues, such as foreign policy and government spending, then it’s easy to dismiss him as a failure. But the coalition that carried Trump back to the White House in 2024 was much broader than that, and so are the goals and priorities that brought many Americans to his side.
Unlike libertarians, my number one priority is immigration, and President Trump has delivered on that issue. The southern border, which was effectively wide open during Joe Biden’s tenure, has been sealed, and construction of the border wall has resumed. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been continuously engaged in deportation operations, not only prioritizing criminals but also those who are “simply” in our country illegally. The mobile app that the Biden administration used to allow illegal aliens to enter the country by claiming refugee or asylum status was repurposed to make it easy for those here illegally to voluntarily leave.
Numbers vary, but I’ve read that at least two million illegal aliens have left the country, whether by enforcement action or voluntary departure. Net migration to the United States was negative last year for the first time in recent memory, and new job gains since 2025 have gone primarily to American workers rather than illegal or foreign labor.
Beyond illegal immigration, the Trump administration has also been restructuring the immigration system as a whole, from the handling of asylum and refugee claims to raising the bar for companies seeking to hire foreign workers through H-1B and other visa programs.
Of course, it’s not enough, but it’s a start. Anyone who sets expectations impossibly high for the sole purpose of criticizing those who are fighting in the arena is not acting in good faith.
The Trump administration has also been working to eliminate DEI at all levels of government. Ever since the 1960s, a doctrine has emerged within government that requires discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, and even sexuality, supposedly to counter alleged white supremacy and privilege in our society. Businesses engaging in federal contracts were required to meet certain diversity benchmarks, colleges and universities gave extra weight to women and minorities, and even the military was pushing DEI and transgender ideology.
President Trump has reversed much of that through executive orders and a restructuring of government offices. The Justice Department issued a memo this week overturning half a century of the disparate impact doctrine, which allowed the government to penalize businesses, schools, and nearly any other organization in which people of different races, ethnicities, or sexes had different outcomes. The Biden administration sued gas station company Sheetz under this doctrine because its employee background checks rejected disproportionately more black applicants than white applicants. Trump ended that nonsense.
Indeed, the entire Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department had become focused on over-correcting for pre-1960s racism by using every lever of the law to target what America’s traditional majority culture. President Trump appointed Harmeet Dhillon to run this division, and she has spent her tenure cleaning it from top to bottom.
President Trump also gutted the USAID program, which was responsible for spreading a radical left-wing ideology throughout the world. There was also a little-known group within the Justice Department called the Community Relations Service (CRS), which was originally meant to calm racial and ethnic tensions but had become responsible for shaping public narratives following high-profile racial incidents. Did you ever notice how many times the family of a white victim of violent crime issued statements urging people not to see a racial angle to the incident? That was CRS at work, even as incidents involving black victims such as George Floyd were used to amplify racial strife. President Trump shut this nonsense down last year.
The Trump administration has also reversed the tide of transgender ideology. Some of the nation’s largest hospital systems have declared their intention to stop providing drugs and surgeries for minors who claim gender dysphoria—something that almost certainly would not have happened under a Harris administration. Idaho’s own Alex Adams, appointed by President Trump to lead the Administration for Children and Families, has been working to stop states from discriminating against Christian families who wish to adopt or foster orphaned children but do not believe that boys can become girls and vice versa.
President Trump told the Libertarian Party in 2024 that they should endorse him and win for once. He made one promise to the Libertarians, that he would pardon Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted under Barack Obama for operating a dark web marketplace, and he followed through. Ross is home. Trump has also reduced the federal workforce to its lowest level since the days of Lyndon Johnson. You’d think they’d give him some credit.
The federal government has grown exponentially over the past century, but President Trump is doing more to reform it than any Republican since Calvin Coolidge. He and his team are changing the rules to make it easier to remove or reassign career bureaucrats, including those who used their positions to resist Trump’s priorities during his first term.
While many of Trump’s initiatives have come through executive orders—and could therefore be reversed if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028—he has also advanced a large number of legislative priorities through the One Big Beautiful Bill. Working within a narrowly divided Congress, and with Senate Democrats threatening filibusters on much of the agenda, the administration still secured passage of key elements of its program, including the permanent extension of tax cuts, increased funding for ICE, work requirements for Medicaid, provisions supporting school choice, and more.
This is still just scratching the surface. President Trump is working to bring manufacturing back to America, make our country energy independent by prioritizing nuclear research and expanding domestic energy production, revitalizing big cities that have been torn apart by crime, homelessness, and Democratic mismanagement, and reorienting the federal government away from persecuting Americans and toward protecting them instead. That last point might be the most important achievement of all. Everything the president and his administration are doing takes time and energy, and they are being continuously harassed and stymied by left-wing judges and activists. But by taking the thumb of government off our backs, they are giving states and local communities room to do what they need to do.
Instead of the Biden Department of Education telling Idaho public schools that they must accommodate a child’s “gender identity,” the Trump Department of Education is winding down and returning control to the states. Instead of the Biden Department of Justice arresting peaceful anti-abortion activists, the Trump Department of Justice is using the same law to arrest those who angrily invaded a church service in Minnesota. Instead of the Biden IRS auditing your Venmo account, the Trump IRS is helping identify those who are in our country illegally and reporting them for deportation.
Donald Trump is not perfect—no man is. I disagree with plenty that he does—he needs to end this war in Iran yesterday, for example. Yet where my libertarian friends err is in comparing his presidency to the ideal that lives perfectly in their imaginations, something that no administration could possibly come close to matching. The choices facing the American people in 2024 were Donald Trump and a chance at American renewal, or Kamala Harris and a continuation of our national decline.
Our country wasn’t broken overnight, so we won’t make America great again overnight either. But with Donald Trump in the White House, and a strong team around him, we have a fighting chance to save our civilization.
That’s all we can hope for right now. The rest is up to us.
Feature image by ABC News/Samuel Corum/Pool/EPA/Shutterstock
About Brian Almon
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
