IMHO his first year hasn't exactly been a triumph. He has been unable to tame the inflation caused under Brandon's administration. People are still feeling those economic affects.
Tame inflation? Inflation is a rate of change in the value of your money, expressed in terms of how fast prices are rising.
Biden's rate was as high as 8% for 2022.
it takes $1.25 in 2024 to buy what $1.00 did in 2020.
By contrast, $1.02 in 2025 to buy what $1.00 did in 2024.
Yes, Trump has slowed that rate considerably. down to 2.7% for 2025.
Inflation doesn't mean that prices will drop, that's deflation.
The effects of past inflation are cumulative, and compounded.
Issues that are a matter of supply and demand will be straightened out as government permits. Oil is in ready supply; prices are down for fuels. That's a plus. That effect will work its way through the economy in time. What you buy today was grown or manufactured with higher prices for fuel, fertilizer, and energy. As those prices come down and beef herds are replenished, if policy can be kept off producers' backs, so will the price of some foodstuffs as well.
Prices generally will be slow to drop, and then, not all of them will.
The border invasion is under control and this he has been triumphant at, but the rioting remains; city by city.
The rioting is a Leftist (Communists/Socialists, Democrats, even some foreign interests) operation to try to give the impression that America is going to hell in a hand basket. Note that it is predominantly in "blue" states, in "sanctuary" cities. It is very well organized (remember the "community organizer"?) well funded, and is covering for (by creating chaos--'never let a crisis go to waste') massive fraudulent theft of our tax dollars through a plethora of NGOs, Grants, and other scams, and is also funded by some even some Soros and Chinese money. It is not 'organic', but mostly astroturf.
If ICE operations (which were not a problem for the past four other presidents, only Trump) can be curtailed, then the fraud can continue, both at the public coffers and the ballot box. This is why the Left is going all-in to stop deportations and throw every monkey wrench they can muster into the works. Note, too, their propaganda arm (the MSM) is pulling out the stops to distort events, inflame those inclined to be inflamed, and to present the impression that this 'uprising' by paid agitators making up to six figures is widespread and just 'people who care about their neighbors'.
It's nonsense, but those already afflicted with TDS are ready and willing to lap it up.
Look around you, and chances are that you either won't see any 'rioting', or very small protests unless you live in a sanctuary city, and then it is concentrated through dispatch networks and quick response teams where ICE is conducting arrests, with tons of people taking video for optics to make it look larger. Of course they seem like they are everywhere, it's like a reporter or personal injury lawyer chasing ambulances. They intercept transmissions and have spotter networks to report sightings so their people can be dispatched and get there quickly. A database of facial images and IDs would expose who keeps showing up at the latest op to cause a scene, and there would be numerous people who just happened to show up to defend their neighborhood--all over the town.
Note, too, the looting and burning (hallmarks of almost every string of riots in the past) just aren't happening.
These people are well enough paid they don't need to resort to larceny to make their time spent worthwhile.
And notice how 'people of color' tend to be absent. Don't they have 'neighbors', too?
Iran is a mess, Ukraine and Russia are still at war, and the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria still remains. These are all issues that Trump proclaimed he would resolve.
Give it some time. Rome wasn't burned in a day.
Ukraine isn't going to be easy, and will persist until Russia has a change of management. Iran has been going on since Carter was POTUS. Muslims killing Christians, sadly, is nothing new either, they've been at it for 1400 years.
Then we have his fixation with acquiring Greenland.
He has pointed out that Greenland is a hole in our defense of not only the Western Hemisphere in the Arctic, but Europe as well. Europeans concerned about Greenland's security sent a whole three dozen troops, total. We can fit more on just one plane, and the Russians or Chinese could do the same.
He is shaking a lot of cages at the same time, but that one needed to be shook.
If we are going to have a decent defensive line, Greenland needs to be part of it.
After all the ballyhoo, in typical fashion, they are getting an agreement hammered out.
There is a pattern there.
He's concentrated on building a grand ballroom, closing down the Kennedy center for renovation and building one of the tallest arches in the U.S. I think the issues mentioned above are much, much more important.
Just my opinion.
I would guess that the amount of time spent on the Grand Ballroom (something we've needed for secure large State Events) is actually pretty little. A decent manager will delegate duties, and then after the team has come up with possible courses of action, choose which will get the job done and leave that to the subordinates to act upon, with reports of progress, problems, etc.
Consider the money for these projects is not coming out of the budget, and it's a win. As a matter of security, having events on the lawn is a non-starter in a time when a good sniper can hit a human with a high powered large caliber (> .30 caliber) rifle from a mile away.
As for the Arch, it's perhaps a bit over the top, but then St. Louis has something much taller (630') to commemorate being the jumping off point to the West. Only, in this case, funding is not from the public coffers.
There is something intangible missing in America today, the sense of being American, the national pride we all felt when we were in grade school has been degraded, starting in earnest in the 1960s and continuing to this day.
The Arch could be a rallying point to start the return to the sense of national pride we felt back when, when even with our differences we still saw the United States of America as the greatest nation on Earth.
The PSYOPs have been relentless, the vitriol from the MSM endless, yet we prevail, if only by the skin of our teeth, in the face of fraud, of the greed of the Communists and others who want to tear down what we have and divert what they can to their own pockets.
Investigations into fiscal and voter fraud are going on, and while we are all anxious for perp walks that seem like they will never come, it has only been one year, there are a lot of layers to those onions, and we want those cases to be bulletproof.
Any time I get a little discouraged, I remind myself that 4 more years of Obama/Biden in the person of Harris would have been a complete disaster. No, Trump hasn't waved a magic wand and cured all of America's ills. Some of those will take a decade or more to fix, under the right management and assuming the GOP in Congress got behind it.
