Bob Cusack evaluates Trump’s first year of his second term, crediting border security as a success but calling inflation stubborn, despite administration claims of progress, with 58% of CNN poll respondents viewing it as a failure. He dismisses quick fixes like tax cuts or tariffs—though they’ve avoided worsening inflation—as ineffective against cyclical economic pressures, while noting partisan resistance to debt reform amid warnings that Medicare and Social Security face insolvency. Trump’s trade policies, including tariffs on Denmark over Greenland, reflect his shift from traditional GOP stances, though legal challenges loom, forcing potential pivots to other strategies. Ultimately, the episode underscores deep divisions in economic priorities and structural limitations in addressing long-term fiscal crises. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, let's talk about the president's first year in office of his second term.
He was inaugurated just a year ago today, the only president since Grover Cleveland to leave the White House and return for a second term four years later.
Talk to us about what the president's most notable successes and achievements have been.
Now, one thing that he was able to pass was that first reconciliation bill.
I know you said Republicans wanted to do another one, but the first one passed last summer, the One Big Beautiful Act law, now they call it, which expanded those 2017 tax cuts.
Do voters perceive that bill as beneficial to them?
I know that the White House has said that they're going to see really a lot of the benefits this year in 2026, but what about in the last 12 months or since it's been passed?
Yeah, Democrats will be messaging that, messaging more on health care, particularly if those ACA subsidies don't get expanded or something doesn't happen on health care.
I want to turn to this poll that we talked about at the beginning of the show from CNN that was released a week ago, where it showed that 58% of those surveyed believe that the president's first year in his second term is a failure.
Just 42% say that is a success.
What do you think of when you see numbers like that that are pretty large?
When you think about a year ago, President Trump came in maybe as the most powerful president since Obama.
Obama came in with 67, maybe 70% approval rating.
President Trump won all the battleground states.
He won the popular vote.
He not only won, but he exceeded expectations.
He had this enormous power.
He went after the media.
Corporate media was scared of him, and they were cowering, as well as foreign countries.
He used a lot of political capital to do a lot of stuff, including the Big Beautiful Bill.
But a year later, his numbers are not good.
They are in the low 40s.
Some, depending on the poll, would be high 30s.
That poll is not good.
Now, President Trump would tell you he would give himself an A ⁇ .
But that's kind of what he always says.
So overall, President Trump and Republicans have some serious issues going into 2026 and the midterms, especially with the House really being up for grabs.
The Senate, I think, is safer for Republicans because of the map, but you never know what's going to happen in elections, and conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Well, we do have to think of when did inflation really start to increase, and that was during the Biden administration.
And that's why President Biden, well, there were a lot of reasons why President Biden didn't get a second term, and obviously he was shelved by the Democratic Party, and Harris was the one who lost to Trump.
So it really did start in the Biden administration.
However, promises are promises, and Trump said he was going to eradicate it.
At times, he has said issues like affordability are a hoax, and then sometimes he backs off on that.
Lisa Murkowski, a Republican but very independent-minded Republican, has said it's not a hoax because members are hearing this back home, that too much is unaffordable, whether it's groceries or housing or anything else, or buying a car.
So now, gas prices are down.
So it's a mixed view, but if Republicans are going to have a good election, there's going to have to be, those type of polls are going to have to change.
Is there something that the president has enacted within the last 12 months or what you think that the White House could try to enact to try to bring down some of these prices that we know that folks are reacting really negatively to?
One thing that the president in the White House has been focused on is this idea of executive power, expanding the power of the presidency from a number of executive orders that they've done, from a number of court cases that they've defended in his executive orders.
I wonder how do you see the president coalescing power within the executive in a way that has been different than presidents before him?
I mean, just to go over just a list of some of the executive orders within the last 12 months, securing our borders and a national emergency declaration, of course, talking about immigration, establishing the Doge Department, Department of Government Efficiency, unleashing American energy, which encourages energy exploration of production on federal lands and waters, pardoning the January 6th rioters, ending federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
That's just one half of my long list that my producers put together.
I mean, the president has been extremely active these last 12 months.
And a lot of these things, like you said, he doesn't go to Congress on.
One more question for you before we turn to some calls.
I want to talk about tariffs, something that the president has done when we're talking about expansion of power, something that he has done unilaterally, I think sometimes to the annoyance of some members in Congress on both sides.
Your company this morning has a piece out.
Trump's tariffs aren't raising prices, but they are shrinking Americans' manufacturing workforce.
That's from January 15th, excuse me.
And Christian writes, President Trump's tariff agenda hasn't increased inflation as many as predicted by many economists, but it does appear to be having one intended consequences, shrinking America's manufacturing workforce.
There's also been a recent article, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, about how Americans are taking more of the burden of those tariff costs.
I wonder tariff costs versus companies.
I wonder what you make of the president's tariff agenda and how that has impacted the view of his first year in office.
Well, as Christian wrote, it hasn't been, the sky hasn't fallen.
A lot of people did predict that.
However, if you look, talk to some economists, there have been some negative consequences.
But it's certainly gotten the attention of a lot of countries.
And I think it's a fair point that the president raises is that a lot of trade policies were not fair to the United States.
And President Trump, I first interviewed him in 2015, he's been talking about this well before then, about how the U.S. was, in his words, getting screwed.
And so we need to fix that.
So he's applying the power of the United States and all the consumers of the United States to get deals.
Has he gotten some deals?
Yes.
Republicans on Capitol Hill, they're not.
Trump has changed the Republican Party because tariffs used to be just the worst thing to the GOP.
And now the leader of the GOP is leading the charge.
And leaders like Senate Majority Leader John Thune wanted these tariffs to be short.
We're still talking about them.
That was last year, the beginning of last year.
He wants them to be short-lived.
We're still talking about it.
He is not abandoning it.
We're waiting for the Supreme Court to issue a huge ruling on tariffs.
The betting is, you never know, but the betting is, is that the court is going to reject his authority on tariffs.
Now, what will Trump do then?
It depends on the ruling exactly, but then he can rely on another law and still go forward.
But he doesn't want to lose this case.
And he's won a lot of cases with the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
Yeah, he's true socialed a lot in the last few days about how those tariffs are necessary and bringing great, tremendous change, he says, to the American economy.
One place that he's also used tariffs, though, is to bend nations to his will.
I want to take a listen to the soundbite from yesterday night on the tarmac when the president was asked about Greenland before he heads to Davos.
unidentified
What do you plan to say to European leaders in Davos when they push back on your Greenland plan?
Well, I don't think they're going to push back too much.
Greenland is very important now the president there says he's done more than any other president for NATO but now he's also you can continue watching this event if you you go to our website c-span.org.