It has been 12 months since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025, and to say it’s been an eventful year would be a massive understatement. We’ve seen the DOGE-led gutting of federal government agencies, a whirlwind of tariff announcements, a rigorous and seemingly indiscriminate immigration crackdown and the longest-ever government shutdown in history. We’ve seen the U.S. pull out of dozens of international organizations and treaties, question long-standing alliances and fully embrace a new “America First” approach to foreign policy. In the past three weeks alone, the U.S. captured Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, took control of the country and is now trying to strongarm Denmark and other European allies into giving up Greenland.
And while Trump and his supporters would read this as a progress report, as a list of all the things the president got done, his political opponents shudder at the thought of how much more damage will be done over the next three years if America is already barely recognizable after one year of Trump 2.0. The American public, while not as vocal in their criticism of the administration as many observers would hope, is not particularly happy with Trump’s first year back in office. According to RealClearPolitics, Trump’s average approval across 13 national polls currently stands at 42.5 percent, which is close to the lowest it’s been since his return to the White House. Meanwhile an average of 55.1 percent disapprove of the president’s job performance, with Trump’s net approval, i.e. the difference between the share of people approving and disapproving of the job he’s doing, negative across all polls.
Looking ahead at the midterms in the fall, Trump’s low popularity doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party. With some experts expecting a Republican “wipeout” that could result in the Democrats taking control of the Senate, Trump has, some say jokingly, suggested that there shouldn’t even be an election given how well he’s doing. It wasn’t the first time that the president mused about not wanting elections. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned that his country doesn’t allow to hold elections during periods of martial law, Trump joked that if the U.S. was in a war in 2028, that would good for him. Given the events of January 6, 2021, it is perhaps understandable that many people don’t think this matter should be joked about.
