Donald Trump has been president now for one year in his second term. I very hesitatingly voted for Trump in November 2024, even though I vehemently disagreed with Trump on several issues.
I thought Trump had a chance of being the lesser of two evils. The Biden regime needed to be repudiated after 4 years of more war and COVID tyranny, among other things. I was also cautiously optimistic that Trump was being surrounded by some good people near the end of his campaign. He was surrounded by seemingly decent people like Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy. He also chose J.D. Vance as his VP, who is less hawkish than a lot of the alternatives.
For this reason, I reluctantly voted for Trump in the hopes that things might improve a little, and also as a repudiation of the Democrats. I fully expected some bad things like tariffs and possible hawkishness on certain countries like Iran.
The Good
Trump started out in January 2025 on a high note. He enacted a lot of executive orders. There was so much flying at us in the first few days, it is still hard to grasp. Some of the executive orders were simply repealing previous executive orders, which is completely legitimate.
Trump corrected a massive injustice by pardoning most of the January 6th protesters. Most of these people were non-violent, and we still don’t know the extent of federal agents helping to create the situation that day. Most of the protesters could have been charged with trespassing and given a fine. It was a ridiculous notion to send people to jail for years and years for taking a walk through the Capitol building. They didn’t have weapons, and they certainly had no means of orchestrating a coup.
Trump also satisfied his promise to the Libertarian Party by freeing Ross Ulbricht. This was another correction to a massive injustice. Unfortunately, it would turn out to be one of the few things he did that the Libertarian Party or libertarians in general would really like.
We also have to remember that we had Elon Musk taking residence by Trump’s side and initiating DOGE. You can criticize Elon Musk, but he seemed to be genuine in his attempts to cut government spending, and especially corrupt and fraudulent spending. This is why Musk and Trump eventually had a falling out. It is because Musk was really irritated that his work with DOGE wasn’t producing any results. Instead, we got stuck with the One Big Beautiful Bill.
DOGE was far more chaotic than it needed to be. It probably actually increased some spending by forcing government workers back into the office and offering generous severance packages to government employees to leave their job without first researching whether those jobs actually served a function. (It’s not as if we would no longer need passports if all of the workers at the passport office decided to quit and take a severance package.)
Still, on the whole, DOGE seemed encouraging to those who cared about government spending. They were actually uncovering a lot of crazy stuff where our tax money was going. Unfortunately, the DOGE mania didn’t last long, and it is now dead. We were never going to get any DOGE rebate checks because nothing of any significance ever got cut from the budget.
Turning Ugly
Things went downhill quickly about 2 months in. In March 2025, the Trump administration started arresting immigrants, particularly students, who were critical of Israel. These were legal immigrants.
While Trump campaigned on stopping illegal immigration, he certainly never talked about arresting people and deporting people for the words they use or for the things they write. It is still surprising that this got such little coverage. The Trump administration may have linked this to immigration, but it was just a pure violation of free speech. It was also interesting that legal immigrants were more likely to be arrested and deported for criticizing the state of Israel than criticizing the U.S. government.
This sent up major red flags for me in March 2025, and I could already see the drastic turn towards authoritarianism.
Of course, things got much worse from there. Trump bombed Yemen on behalf of Israel. He bombed Iran on behalf of Israel, even when he said he was negotiating with them. Trump has been murdering boaters off the coast of Venezuela in the name of drugs. He then proceeded to kidnap the president and his wife there.
The Trump administration has also bombed Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and Somalia. This is a total of 7 countries being bombed in one year. And let’s not forget that Trump continues to fund Israel to slaughter innocent people in Gaza, and he continues to fund Ukraine to keep the war going there.
If all that weren’t enough, Trump has also been a trainwreck on the domestic front. He has raised and lowered tariffs so many times, I don’t think anybody has been able to keep count. He has hiked tariffs on countries because of their political situation or because they are trading with the wrong countries (according to Trump). While his excuse originally was to bring back manufacturing, he has used tariffs as one of his main weapons (aside from dropping bombs) to bully other countries. Of course, it just serves to hurt American businesses and American consumers by making things more expensive.
The Absurd
There are so many absurd things in one year that it is hard not to leave things out. There is all of the lying about the Epstein files. There is Trump going on a political war against Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. There is Trump weaponizing his “Justice” Department just the same as what was done to him. But instead of going after the people who tried to jail Trump, Trump is going after other people, such as Jerome Powell, probably for not lowering interest rates enough.
Trump has been seizing oil tankers in international waters. Now we are going through a major spat about Greenland just because Trump all of a sudden thinks he can be emperor of the world. The fact that Trump was even thinking about invading Greenland shows how unhinged the man has become.
He wrote a letter to the president of Norway saying that because he didn’t receive the Nobel Peace Prize that he no longer felt the need to be peaceful. So that’s why you talked about peace on the campaign trail? Because you wanted a prize to enhance your ego?
Trump might have dementia like Joe Biden before him. But Biden was so far gone, and he was fully controlled by his puppet masters. Trump is controlled by Netanyahu, but he still calls the shots on other areas. The problem is that the war hawks, who previously hated Trump, just suck up to him and stroke his ego. They tell him how great he is, and then they convince him to bomb the next country. Trump is both evil and stupid.
Trump has the worst combination of narcissism and some kind of early dementia. He has become almost everything that the left has accused him of being. The left no longer needs to make up stories about him in order to accuse him of being a tyrant. Still, I will see leftists make up stories about Trump or exaggerate things, even though they don’t need to do it at this point.
When Things Change
The Republicans mostly live in fear of Trump. If you step out of line one little bit, look at what happened to MTG. She was a major defender of Trump for many years, and look at how she was treated.
When things turn bad for Trump, they will turn bad quickly. Imagine when there is enough public opinion against him on the right that Republicans in positions of power start opposing Trump. Things could spiral against Trump very quickly, especially if we hit a hard recession.
Also, Trump has made most major officials in other countries mad, to say the least. Do you really think Putin or Xi like Trump at this point? Do you think all of these other prime ministers and presidents who have been bullied, made to look weak, and had tariffs slapped on them have an ounce of sympathy for Trump?
Trump is hated almost everywhere now except for a MAGA faction in the United States. But even here, you have to imagine that there are several million people who voted for Trump who now despise him. Trump is making war and not peace. He is not helping the average American. He is making things worse.
Let’s hope the second year goes better than the first. If most everyone turns on Trump, it is hard to say how things will go. He is already a very unpredictable man. Unfortunately, this unpredictable man has a lot of power at his disposal.
And ultimately, that is the problem. The problem isn’t the abuse of power. It is the power to abuse (as Harry Browne liked to say). We don’t just need to get rid of Trump. We need to drastically reduce the power of the president and the federal government. We shouldn’t have to worry about any particular unhinged person getting into office.