Trump Promised Radical Change in His Second Term. Here’s What He’s Done So Far.

President Trump has driven illegal crossings at the border to record lows, helped bring about an uneasy cease-fire in Gaza and upended the global trading system.

Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

Trump Promised Radical Change in His Second Term. Here’s What He’s Done So Far.

President Trump has driven illegal crossings at the border to record lows, helped bring about an uneasy cease-fire in Gaza and upended the global trading system.

• Dec. 27, 2025

Donald J. Trump promised to drive America in a different direction. One year into his second term, he is doing so, enacting or seeking fundamental changes to policy, politics and society.

He has driven illegal crossings at the border to record lows and has made clear that the United States has shut the door to most nonwhite refugees. He has eliminated diversity programs in the government and has pushed corporate America to do the same.

He helped bring about an uneasy cease-fire in Gaza, threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine and sent the military to kill suspected drug smugglers at sea while deploying troops under federal control into the streets of U.S. cities. He has put immense strain on relations with traditional allies and has pursued policies, including on cryptocurrencies, that have enriched his family and some of his top aides.

He has upended the global trading system by raising taxes on imports, arguing that doing so would eventually bring back jobs. At the same time, he has extended big corporate and income tax cuts from his first term. He has reversed Biden administration policies intended to address climate change, dismantled government agencies without getting congressional approval and slashed the federal work force.

Mr. Trump’s dizzying first year back in office has been polarizing, to say the least. The handful of other presidents who had comparatively momentous first years were responding to a true national crisis: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Depression. The United States faced no such emergency in January, but Mr. Trump has routinely governed through emergency powers.

Politics in a democracy can sometimes follow a pendulum, as presidents and shifting party majorities course correct from the perceived excesses of predecessors, only to be replaced in turn.

But presidents can also leave behind permanent change. As Mr. Trump nears the end of the first year of his second term, how much of what he has done can be considered irreversible, and will Washington ever be the same?

**What He Said **Mr. Trump made immigration a pillar of his re-election campaign, asserting that he would impose a broad crackdown on illegal migration the moment he took office again.

What He Did: Mr. Trump escalated his crackdown, limiting not just illegal migration but also legal immigration. He has driven illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border to record lows. While he has begun immigration raids in cities, the administration is still short of its mass deportation goal.

After attacking former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. over the record number of illegal crossings during his time in office, Mr. Trump, in an executive order, effectively blocked asylum access for those entering the United States without authorization.

He also pressured Mexico to do more to deter migrants before they make it to the U.S. border. The measures have proved effective. Since January, Border Patrol agents have recorded under 10,000 illegal crossings at the southwest border each month, numbers not seen in decades.

Even as Mr. Trump has ramped up his deportation campaign, he is falling short on his goal for the most severe one in U.S. history. The administration has deported roughly 500,000 immigrants so far this year, according to a New York Times analysis of government data — well shy of the one million his administration has sought.

Despite the administration’s pledge to target the “worst of the worst,” most of the immigrants arrested in high-profile deportation operations in cities have not had criminal records, according to data through Oct. 15.

The administration has also deported migrants to war-torn and faraway nations they are not from, to encourage immigrants still in the United States to voluntarily return to their home countries.

Two bills signed by Mr. Trump will significantly bolster his efforts: a law that would require the detention of migrants who enter the country without authorization and are arrested or charged with certain crimes; and another that tripled the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mr. Trump has also turned his attention to legal immigration. He has drastically cut the number of refugees the United States admits, to the lowest level in the history of the program. He has reserved a limited number of slots for mostly white Afrikaner South Africans. He has also made it harder for immigrants to get green cards if they are from nations subjected to his travel ban.

Federal Work Force

What He Said Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to “demolish the deep state,” using that term not just as pejorative shorthand for national security and law enforcement officials but for the larger civil service.

What He Did Back in office, he has significantly downsized the federal work force.

Mr. Trump and his team purged the Justice Department and the F.B.I., dismissing en masse senior leaders and prosecutors who were involved in the criminal cases against him. His F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has redirected large swaths of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to arrest undocumented migrants, while curtailing work on matters like public corruption.

Working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration also made sweeping cuts to federal agencies, froze billions in grants and unilaterally gutted government entities created by Congress, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Education Department.

More broadly, the administration has curtailed civil service protections enacted to prevent the federal work force from becoming a spoils system. It has also fired vast swaths of recently hired workers and offered large-scale buyouts backed by threats of mass layoffs.

The Office of Personnel Management in November estimated that 317,000 federal workers had left government employment this year. Around 68,000 people had been hired.

The government’s ability to enforce immigration law has expanded, but a range of public services have eroded, including controlling and preventing diseases, responding to disasters and researching treatments for cancer.

The Trump administration has suggested that unelected bureaucrats have abused their power. But Mr. Trump undermined a primary mechanism created by Congress to police agencies for waste, fraud and abuse, purging independent inspectors general.

Trade

What He Said Mr. Trump promised to use sweeping tariffs to rebalance global trade to benefit the United States after years of other nations “ripping off” the country.

What He Did Mr. Trump enacted wide-ranging tariffs on trading partners. His whipsaw-like approach has also caused widespread uncertainty in the markets and put upward pressure on prices.

Mr. Trump wasted no time in adding a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, and a 20 percent tariff on China. In April, Mr. Trump introduced tariffs against dozens of trading partners, upending the global trade system, before suddenly pausing them to carry out negotiations. In August, he reinstated punishing tariffs globally. The levies have brought the effective tariff rate for the United States to more than 18 percent, the highest level since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale.

His trade spat with China has had devastating consequences for some industries. China also imposed crippling restrictions on the flow of minerals to the United States and halted purchases of American soybeans. Mr. Trump eventually scaled tariffs back and reached a trade truce with China, while offering farmers a bailout to try to cover their losses.

Although Mr. Trump promised that his tariffs would encourage companies to move production back to the United States, there have been few signs of a factory boom. The manufacturing sector, which has been shedding jobs for the last two years, has lost more than 50,000 workers since Mr. Trump came into office.

Businesses rushed imports this year to build their stockpiles before the tariffs went into effect, allowing them to buy less after the levies were imposed. Overall, the 2025 trade deficit is still significantly higher than the previous year. Companies have been reluctant to pass on price increases from tariffs to consumers, but as these stockpiles dwindle, they are starting to do so.

Many of these tariffs could disappear or be replaced. The Supreme Court in November appeared skeptical of Mr. Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose the tariffs.

Affordability

What He Said During the campaign, Mr. Trump said that his administration would “rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again.”

What He Did Mr. Trump has yet to provide the relief many Americans were hoping for. Elevated inflation persists, and most prices are higher than they were a year ago, according to government data.

White House officials contend that their policies have driven down gas prices, which hover around $3 a gallon. But experts are mixed on whether Mr. Trump’s policies have been the primary factor.

Prices for many household items, including groceries, remain higher than they were a year ago. Mr. Trump has started to relax tariffs on some imports like coffee, bananas, beef and tomatoes, to help bring prices down.

The economy did grow vigorously through the end of September, the Commerce Department reported recently, showing that Mr. Trump’s tariffs have not had the depressive effect that many economists once feared.

Tariffs have still undoubtedly raised the costs of some goods. With prices high, voters increasingly say that they are unhappy with Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, recent polls show.

Mr. Trump has pressured the Federal Reserve to sharply lower interest rates, despite inflation moving in the wrong direction. The central bank has started to do so gradually, but officials are wary about lowering borrowing costs by too much.

As a result, mortgage rates remain high, and both Democrats and Republicans have widely panned Mr. Trump’s proposal for a 50-year mortgage. They say it does not address the root issue with housing costs: a nationwide housing shortage.

Under pressure from his party, Mr. Trump has proposed other policies to address affordability, including direct checks of $2,000 to many Americans. The details of that plan remain unclear.

Combating Illegal Drugs

What He Said During the campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to take on drug cartels. But he did so in the context of threatening to bomb Mexico, where labs create fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has caused a surge in American overdose deaths over the past decade.

What He Did Mr. Trump has trained military fire on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that he has said are carrying cocaine.

Mr. Trump’s drug policy in his second term has been a mix of extraordinary aggression and extraordinary contradictions.

Mr. Trump ordered his administration to begin designating drug cartels and criminal gangs as terrorists. The move was unprecedented. By definition, terrorists are groups that are motivated by ideology or religion; drug cartels are unscrupulous businesses seeking illicit profits.

In July, Mr. Trump secretly ordered the military to start attacking boats in international waters suspected of smuggling drugs linked to cartels his administration had labeled terrorists. The Coast Guard had long dealt with maritime drug runners by intercepting boats and arresting people. But since Sept. 2, the U.S. military has attacked 29 such boats, killing 105 people.

The administration declared that the extrajudicial killings were lawful because Mr. Trump had “determined” that the United States was in a formal armed conflict with publicly unspecified drug cartels, and that the people on the boats being killed were “combatants.”

A broad range of legal specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have rejected the logic that drugs can be legitimately recast as a weapon, and that trafficking them can be described as an armed attack.

The Trump administration’s core justification is a surge in overdose deaths by American drug users over the past decade. But that surge was caused largely by fentanyl, which is manufactured in Mexican labs using chemicals from China. The attacks have targeted boats suspected of carrying cocaine from South America.

Despite the messaging about drugs, there have been signs that the attacks may be a precursor to a leadership-change operation in oil-rich Venezuela. Mr. Trump has sent an extensive amount of naval firepower into the Caribbean, and his aides have urged him to use force to remove President Nicolás Maduro from power.

The administration’s talk about ousting Mr. Maduro has centered on his indictment on charges of conspiring to export cocaine to the United States. But in December, Mr. Trump pardoned a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in federal court last year of conspiring to export cocaine to the United States.

This month, Mr. Trump also signed an executive order that would ease some limits on marijuana.

Wars

What He Said Mr. Trump ran on a promise to get and keep the United States out of wars. He pledged to use his personal relationship with foreign leaders to swiftly end overseas conflicts.

What He Did He played a key role in bringing about a cease-fire in Gaza, but failed in his pledge to get a quick peace deal in Ukraine. He has exaggerated his success in settling other conflicts, and has departed from his vow to not start wars, by confronting Venezuela with military force.

Mr. Trump failed to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine within 24 hours of his inauguration, as he vowed to do on the campaign trail. His special envoys are working with Ukrainian and Russian counterparts. But despite concessions from Kyiv, Moscow has been unwilling to agree to a deal.

Still, Mr. Trump secured a peace deal intended to end a two-year war between Israel and Hamas. Violence has continued to flare in Gaza, but the United Nations Security Council approved the plan last month.

Mr. Trump has also frequently overstated his efforts at ending wars, once insisting he had solved eight wars in eight months.

But that claim lacks context.

Mr. Trump used the threat of halting trade to help broker a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia in July. Fighting still broke out between them in December.

And while Mr. Trump often brags about brokering a peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, deadly fighting has persisted.

In the case of India and Pakistan, New Delhi said the Trump administration did help mediate a potentially larger conflict. But India has noted that it directly negotiated with Pakistan to reach an end to fighting.

And Mr. Trump angered many of his supporters when he greenlit a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, raising concerns of a broader regional war. Days later, Mr. Trump announced that the United States had mediated a cease-fire.

Troops on Domestic Soil

What He Said During the campaign, Mr. Trump made clear that he intended to use military troops on American soil. He listed three purposes: hunting for undocumented migrants, fighting crime in Democratic-controlled cities and suppressing protests he deemed to be riots.

What He Did In his second term, the president quickly found ways to push at, and through, laws and democratic norms that generally bar the use of federal troops for law enforcement purposes.

In April, Mr. Trump deployed troops to the Mexican border and used a novel legal maneuver to empower them as if they were Border Patrol agents. By treating a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land along the U.S. side of the border as a narrow military base, the troops could arrest anyone trying to cross ports of entry.

In Los Angeles in June, when protests erupted against his immigration crackdown, Mr. Trump imposed federal control over the California National Guard over the objections of the state’s governor, sending 4,000 such troops, along with 700 active-duty Marines, into city streets. It was the first time since the civil rights movement that the federal government had taken over a state’s Guard without a governor’s consent.

Later in the summer, Mr. Trump sent National Guard troops to the District of Columbia, making a huge show of force. Because the capital is a federal enclave, he had broader powers to use the Guard there. Mr. Trump has also deployed troops in Memphis.

The Los Angeles deployment led to a tangle of litigation over whether Mr. Trump had the power to take control of the National Guard and over whether he had used the troops improperly for policing functions. In December, a judge ruled that the deployment had lasted too long and ordered it to end. An appeals court has upheld that decision.

The Supreme Court has stymied, for now, Mr. Trump’s attempts to send troops into Chicago, casting doubt on the viability of deployments elsewhere, including in Portland, Ore. But the upshot is that he has normalized the use of federal troops in city streets.

Weaponization of the Justice Dept.

What He Said Mr. Trump vowed to turn the Justice Department upon his political adversaries if he returned to office.

What He Did Mr. Trump has openly and unabashedly used the federal criminal justice system as an instrument of intimidation against his perceived enemies.

Mr. Trump has directly ordered the Justice Department to investigate and charge people he has singled out. Attorney General Pam Bondi has sought to comply, abandoning the post-Watergate norm that department officials should make prosecutorial decisions independently.

In his first term, Mr. Trump repeatedly tried to do so, but his efforts were informal, sometimes furtive and, to his frustration, met with only limited success. But out of office, after he was twice indicted in federal court, Mr. Trump claimed that those charges had stemmed not from law enforcement officials evaluating his actions, but from political weaponization by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He vowed to get revenge by doing the same if re-elected.

In his second term, after filling the upper ranks of the Justice Department with his former lawyers, Mr. Trump began carrying out that threat. In April, he signed executive orders requiring the department to scrutinize two people from his first administration he viewed as disloyal.

In September, Mr. Trump pushed out the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia after the prosecutor decided there was no legitimate basis to indict James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. He told Ms. Bondi to move “now” to indict them.

Ms. Bondi then installed a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump who had no prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan. Days later, she obtained grand jury indictments of both. A judge later dismissed the cases on the grounds that Ms. Halligan had been improperly appointed. The Justice Department is still trying to prosecute them.

And in Miami, a Trump appointee has opened an investigation into what Trump loyalists deem a grand conspiracy conducted by the officials who led the Russia inquiry and the two criminal cases against Mr. Trump.

D.E.I. Purge

What He Said Mr. Trump promised to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the government. He said he would defund universities that supported diversity programs, and cut federal funding to schools that taught “critical race theory” or transgender content.

What He Did Mr. Trump has tried to make the mere mention of diversity taboo, taking steps to remove references to slavery and historical figures of color.

Mr. Trump has moved to cut off billions of dollars from schools and colleges with diversity and equity programs. The administration has said that colleges could not run “racially charged” orientation programs or reserve scholarships for minorities.

It has prioritized eliminating research that involves diversity, reducing the number of grants whose titles mention “equity” or “racial minority.” The Pentagon has ordered military leaders to review all books in their libraries that address racism and sexism. The administration threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they failed to report on colleagues who defied the effort to purge diversity programs from the federal government.

Mr. Trump has ordered Confederate statues honoring those who fought to preserve slavery to be restored and celebrated. He has accused the Smithsonian Institution of incorporating “divisive, race-centered ideology” in its exhibits on race, and of focusing too much on “how bad slavery was.”

Mr. Trump has also targeted private corporations and law firms that embrace diversity practices. He signed executive orders restricting how racism can be taught in classrooms and imposing limits on the teaching of transgender issues.

Mr. Trump has gutted Biden-era policies intended to prevent sex discrimination and protect transgender students. The administration has ordered government-issued documents, like passports and visas, to reflect a person’s biological sex.

Mr. Trump’s actions have not been simply what he has cast as a war on “wokeness.” He has also abandoned core tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Presidential Power

What He Said During the campaign, Mr. Trump and some of his closest advisers made clear that concentrating greater power inside the Oval Office would be a policy end to itself.

What He Did In office, Mr. Trump and his team have gone all-in on an ambitious and multifaceted effort to expand presidential power and centralize more control over government in his hands.

Many presidents push at mainstream understandings of the limits of executive power when they are trying to solve a specific policy problem. But Mr. Trump has made many attempts to accumulate greater power all at the same time, while routinely and prolifically using emergency authorities meant for dire situations.

A major theme of those efforts has been to centralize control over the executive branch in his own hands, stamping out pockets of independence created by Congress. He has fired many different types of officials in violation of statutory limits, including at independent agencies. This has set up the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed supermajority to strike down limits on presidential power over the executive branch — a longstanding goal of the conservative legal movement.

Another theme involves a core authority the Constitution gives to Congress: the power of the purse. The Trump administration has set a series of precedents taking some of that power for the presidency. That includes delaying, canceling or otherwise refusing to release grant funds and other spending Congress had authorized.

Beyond the expanded powers he has claimed over matters like using the military and controlling prosecutions, Mr. Trump has also directed the Justice Department not to enforce a law banning TikTok. In doing so, he has established a precedent that suggests presidents have the power to nullify a statute based only on a vague claim that it interfered with their constitutional duties.

Ana Swanson and Colby Smith contributed reporting from Washington, and Albert Sun from New York.

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

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