President Trump indisputably dominated 2025. Only the second president to be elected to nonconsecutive terms, the reinvigorated Mr. Trump plunged back into office with a muscularity unmatched by any other president in my lifetime. Ignoring convention, precedent and, at times, the law, he rammed through vast changes aimed at curtailing immigration, walling off our economy and dismantling the agenda of his predecessor (and successor) Joe Biden. But by year’s end Mr. Trump’s popularity had sunk to historical lows, as many Americans recoiled from his brutality and his extremism. Above all, they fretted about his failure to improve their economic well-being.
Sidestepping Congress, Mr. Trump chose to refashion the federal government largely by issuing executive orders at an explosive pace. He spent part of his first day in office in 2025 signing 26 and went on to issue a total of 225 as of December 18, more than he did in his entire first term and nearly three times as many as any other president did in his first year in over 40 years.
Some tested — and perhaps exceeded — the limits of executive power. For example, Mr. Trump decreed an end to birthright citizenship, a principle that at least until now had been adjudicated to be a constitutional right.
Continued inaction by the 119th Congress mirrored Mr. Trump’s hyperactivity. The legislative body passed just 61 laws, mostly prosaic ones, in its first year — a small fraction of the number enacted annually between 1975 and 2005. While Republicans controlled both chambers, they lacked the 60 votes needed to pass most legislation in the Senate and had only a razor-thin margin in the House. In October, bitter partisan divisions led to what became the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
2. The System Fights Back
Mr. Trump’s predilection for pushing boundaries spurred an avalanche of litigation. To date, 358 lawsuits have been filed against the second Trump administration, 149 of which partly or fully blocked the administration’s initiatives. The courts left just over 100 in effect, and a similar number of suits are pending.
Many of the suits center on Mr. Trump’s unilateral actions around immigration and deportations, as well as his refusal to spend money appropriated by Congress on such programs as scientific research and foreign aid. While the Supreme Court has yet to rule against the administration in any major way, the most important cases — from birthright citizenship to tariffs — have not been decided.
3. One Bad Budget-Busting Bill
Mr. Trump’s extensive tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, dwarfed similar packages passed by previous administrations. Over the next 10 years, it will add at least $3 trillion to the deficit and send the ratio of debt to gross domestic product to nearly 130 percent, from just under 100 percent at present.
The law will cause significant damage. Its tax provisions heavily favor high-income and business taxpayers. As many as 10 million Americans will be forced off Medicaid, and much of the progress made under the Affordable Care Act will be undone. The package also rolls back significant green energy provisions, markedly slowing the projected fall in greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr. Trump leans heavily on an “America First” philosophy. One of the most visible manifestations of that approach is his imposition of tariffs on trade, a keystone of his international economic policy. For decades, America and the world moved toward lower tariffs and increased trade in the belief that globalization would generate prosperity. On Inauguration Day, our average tariff rate was a mere 2.4 percent.
That approach has been substantially reversed. On April 2, or “Liberation Day,” Mr. Trump imposed a 10 percent charge on imports and imposed additional tariffs — often significant — on imports from about 90 countries. In the ensuing months he fiddled with his tariff rates, often almost daily, as he attempted to beat America’s trading partners into submission. By year’s end, the average effective tariff rate had settled at 16.8 percent, the highest since 1935.
Accompanying his tough trade policy was an even tougher immigration stance. Mr. Trump essentially sealed our southern border. Encounters fell to their lowest level in decades; in 2025 they averaged 15,400 per month (through November), compared with 137,200 the prior year.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump moved to sharply curtail legal immigration. He has paused all asylum applications, suspended the diversity visa program, imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas and fully or partially restricted entry by citizens of 39 countries and people under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.
Thus far, “America First” has demonstrated little clear benefit to our economy, particularly, the darkening employment picture. The unemployment rate inched up to 4.6 percent by November, from 4.0 percent in January. Concerningly, the rate of unemployment among Black workers and young people rose disproportionately, a common sign of a weakening jobs environment.
Job creation has slowed significantly. In the first 11 months of Mr. Trump’s second term the country created a monthly average of just 55,000 jobs, compared with 192,000 jobs a month in the last two years of Mr. Biden’s term. The number of manufacturing jobs — a centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s agenda — also fell.
7. Inflation Sticks Around
In 2025, “affordability” became the Democratic mantra as Americans felt squeezed between modest wage increases and prices that continued to rise. Inflation remained elevated, sometimes reaching a 3 percent annual rate — significantly higher than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent.
Largely because of tariffs, it remained above projections that firms like Goldman Sachs made before Trump was elected, when Goldman forecast a fall in inflation to 2.2 percent. Goldman now does not expect it to reach that level until late 2026.
8. The Worst Economy Ever
Frustrated by continuing inflation, Americans’ anger at the economy rose, and dissatisfaction with the state of the economy reached near-record levels. In November, consumer sentiment fell to the second-lowest level since tracking began in 1952, behind only June 2022, when inflation reached 9 percent amid the economic shocks of the pandemic.
The consumer sentiment reading was particularly striking because it was lower than at times in modern history when the economy was, objectively, in far worse condition. In May 1980, for example, inflation was more than 14 percent and the country was in a recession. Similarly, in November 2008, the country was grappling with the terrifying financial crisis. Mr. Trump didn’t seem to get it, continuing to insist that we have “the greatest economy.”
Negative economic sentiment contributed significantly to Mr. Trump’s poll numbers. At 36 percent, his approval rating is the lowest of any president at the end of his first year in the past five decades, lower than it was at this point in his first term and lower even than Mr. Biden’s 40 percent when he left office.
In addition to on the economy, Mr. Trump’s approval rating has been weakest on the Middle East, Ukraine, the budget and health care. He has been faring a bit better — but still under 50 percent — on crime, trade and immigration.
While Mr. Trump dominated the news, the explosion of artificial intelligence also garnered its share of attention and adoption of the technology soared, outrunning the advent of both the internet and mobile phones by wide margins. In September, ChatGPT, the leading consumer A.I. model, had almost 800 million active weekly users and many more at year’s end.
Its popularity notwithstanding, A.I. quickly stirred controversy. Importantly, Americans wondered: Will it create jobs or destroy them? My answer: While there is the potential for substantial disruption over the short term, no technological innovation in human history has failed to ultimately add jobs.
