WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has made good on many of his campaign promises since taking office for the second time a year ago.
Standing in the Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 — the inauguration having been moved indoors due to frigid temperatures in our nation’s capital — Trump took the Oath of Office, then addressed an expectant nation, outlining his goals and priorities for this second and final term in the White House.
The 45th and 47th president pledged that “from this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.” Trump planned to restore American greatness by securing the southern border “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,”; by making “our children safe, healthy, and disease-free” and safe from radical gender ideology; and by “defeating America’s enemies” to promote peace.
It was an ambitious agenda, but one Trump and his administration say they’ve met.
“President Trump accomplished more in one year than many presidents did in eight,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Daily Wire. “Under President Trump’s leadership,” Leavitt said, “America is safer, stronger, and more prosperous than ever before, and the best is yet to come.”
Perhaps most notable has been Trump’s handling of the border crisis. The president completely shut down the border, which had become dangerously porous under President Joe Biden. After four years of record illegal immigration, Customs and Border Protection touted record-low number of encounters most months last year. November was the seventh straight month of zero releases into the United States.
In the first 10 months of Trump 2.0, CBP said, there were less apprehensions than one month under Biden, and nationwide apprehensions averaged under 10,000 a month.
“These numbers reflect the tireless efforts of our agents and officers who are delivering results that redefine border security,” CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott promised in December. We’re not slowing down. We’re setting the pace for the future.”
Additionally, the president’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers have detained more than 66,800 illegal immigrations this year, with huge numbers of detentions in Texas, Arizona, California, and Louisiana, despite protesting, unrest, and even rioting over the apprehensions in some cities.
(Photo by Aristide for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Fixing the illegal immigration problem is just one of several ways Trump has upended Biden’s legacy. By rescinding executive orders, pardons, and policies, Trump has significantly minimized his predecessor’s impact — and reducing Biden’s legacy, as Axios reported this weekend, to a mere “footnote.”
This includes purging Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and policies from government agencies and academic institutions, one of the “radical political theories and social experiments” he lambasted in his second inaugural address. The president also targeted fraud resulting from illegal immigration and the Biden administration’s failure to properly vet refugees in the aftermath of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
While the Biden administration revered climate change and warned that it presented a threat to the entire world, Trump has given the topic little discussion, instead focusing on things like the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. After elevating leading MAHA figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump made waves with announcements about infant vaccinations, dietary guidelines, and nutrition.
In his second inaugural address, Trump only spoke of health when he spoke of children. To that end, Trump signed an executive order almost immediately protecting children from irreversible gender transition procedures, calling them a “stain on our Nation’s history.”
The president’s order states that the United States will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the attempted gender transition of a child, promising that it will “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Since the signing of that order, transgender programs all across the United States have shut down or ceased offering dangerous hormones to children: in New York, NYU Langone Health, in Colorado, Denver Health, in Virginia, both VCU Health and the Children’s Hospital of Richmond, in Washington, D.C., Children’s National Hospital, to name just a few.
The Department of Health and Human Services has also taken further steps to penalize hospitals involved in these procedures, and the White House has told The Daily Wire that it would “certainly” back legislation protecting children in this way.
Trump also pledged last year to fix an education system that “teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves — in many cases, to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them.”
So far this term, as Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon work to dismantle the Education Department, the president has prioritized patriotic curricula. He also created a joint task force between the Department of Education and Justice Department to aggressively investigate schools that have discriminated against women by allowing men in women’s sports or spaces.
SCOOP: Tomorrow, Donald Trump will sign an executive order on keeping men out of women’s sports, @realDailyWire has learned.
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) February 4, 2025
That task force is one of several ways Trump is enforcing a February executive order banning men from women’s sports, a historic moment in the fight to protect the integrity of women’s spaces from gender activists and ideologues. Trump signed that legislation surrounded by female athletes, including women like Riley Gaines who spoke out against men competing in their sports.
The executive orders Trump signed in his first few months largely set the stage for the year to come. In his inaugural address, Trump pledged to sign a day-one executive order “designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.” His second-term war on narcoterrorists escalated in recent months, culminating with a daring midnight raid on Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro, capturing the authoritarian and bringing him back to the United States to face trial.
That raid, which is widely considered to have been carried out flawlessly, stunned the world. And as he explained the president’s actions to the press, Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized that the raid shows that Trump, unlike many world leaders, absolutely means what he says.
Following that raid, Trump dubbed his foreign policy “The Donroe Doctrine.” Through strategic military action and negotiations, Trump aims to achieve what he said would be his “proudest legacy…that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
The president has told the press many times that he has ended almost 10 wars, referring to conflicts between Israel and Gaza, Israel and Iran, Pakistan and India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo. He has also been heavily involved in helping Russia and Ukraine negotiate an end to their ongoing war, hosting both leaders in the United States.
With the president’s blessing, Pete Hegseth is aggressively straightening out the War Department, freshly re-named to emphasize the deadly seriousness of the administration when it comes to protecting the United States and American interests. The Pentagon is cracking down on loosened standards, woke ideology, and more.
None of which is to say that the foreign focus of Trump’s second term distracted from domestic policy. In just one year, the president secured almost $10 trillion in both private and foreign investments for the United States, including $600 billion in investments from Saudi Arabia, a $350 billion tech deal with the United Kingdom, and more.
“In recent years, our nation has suffered greatly,” Trump told the nation a year ago. “But we are going to bring it back and make it great again, greater than ever before.”
“We will stand bravely, we will live proudly, we will dream boldly, and nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans,” Trump concluded. “The future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.”