Six months into the second Trump administration, not only is the president’s agenda failing on its own terms—we have already witnessed a series of policy fiascos that would have completely upended any pre-Trump presidency. President Donald Trump’s careless personnel decisions, slapdash executive orders, whiplash-inducing policy pivots, and general malevolence have combined to make this among the most disruptive yet least successful first six months of any presidency in American history.
So far, the president’s two signature policy initiatives have been disasters. His “Liberation Day” tariffs triggered a financial and bond market meltdown so catastrophic that the White House was forced to reverse course within days. All of his antics, threats, promises, and claims have produced a handful of nebulous trade “agreements” with the United Kingdom, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The tariffs have already led to a fresh round of inflation that will only get worse if the U.S. doesn’t back down, and have damaged America’s reputation so thoroughly that other countries are working together to build a new trade regime without us. The 90-day “pause” is up and we’re left with an effective tariff rate that is higher than it was when markets panicked during the first two weeks of April.
Trump’s mass deportation fixation just led Congress to pass one of the most regressive budget packages in American history, funneling hundreds of billions of dollars away from food pantries, rural hospitals, and working Americans to erect an un-American internal detention gulag filled by masked ICE agents terrorizing hard-working people at farms, Home Depots, and schools. The ugliness of this wasteful, inane operation has instantly turned the American public against the president and his party on his signature issue of immigration.
Even if you believe this insanity is necessary (to be clear: I do not), it would take decades to remove all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States at our current pace. We are spending enormous stacks of money on a toy shovel to scoop water out of the Titanic. But because it satisfies the far right’s bottomless lust for inflicting human suffering, it goes on.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP/Getty Images
If only the disasters ended there. But Trump’s liquidation of the federal government has also led to unimaginable catastrophe. His decision to begin shuttering the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had already resulted in an understaffed, demoralized organization that would be incapable of properly responding to disasters. The chaos at FEMA left Texans to fend for themselves amid catastrophic floods on July 4 that left at least 134 people dead. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waited an unconscionable 72 hours to authorize the deployment of FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams to help flood victims, in large part because of an arbitrary rule that requires her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000.
Let’s not forget the seemingly daily parade of MAGA-driven calamities like the biggest measles outbreak in three decades, exacerbated by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the brain-wormed anti-vaxxer that the Senate inexplicably confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services. Rather than encouraging his credulous followers to take the miraculous vaccine that had virtually eliminated the disease, Kennedy announced in May that he would look for new treatments and encouraged people to try cod liver oil. His reign of error is just beginning, with thousands likely to die this fall because the administration has dramatically limited access to Covid boosters, interfered with the once-routine rollout of annual flu shots, and halted work on a bird flu vaccine.
Documenting the mistakes this administration has already made could fill entire volumes—condemning millions to death by withholding international food aid, demoralizing federal workers, presiding over the worst domestic air travel catastrophe in 16 years, collapsing the consumer sentiment index with erratic economic leadership, generating negative real GDP growth, launching an unprovoked war against Iran and then forgetting about it 48 hours later, striking out humiliatingly in diplomatic mediation efforts between Russia and Ukraine, and on and on and on.
The worst is very much yet to come. A hollowed-out government will be incapable of responding to the next real crisis (as opposed to the ones Trump generates himself) or delivering the services that Americans apparently took so thoroughly for granted that they elected people explicitly promising to destroy them.
In six short months, President Trump has made Americans poorer, less secure, less healthy, and more isolated while carrying out morally depraved policies and further degrading the rule of law.
The scariest part might be that he has 41 more months to make this mess even worse. Neither a complacent, neutered Congress nor a Supreme Court controlled by lifelong GOP partisan operatives appear willing or able to stop it.
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris and Bluesky @davidfaris.bsky.social.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
