As 2025 closes and 2026 takes off, the outlook for the nation going forward will ride heavily on the assessment by citizens of the shock and awe strategies and tactics that President Trump and his administration imposed on the nation in the first 12 months of his second term.
Looking back over 2025, it is now eminently clear that our second term president came into the Oval Office for the second time determined to overturn and disrupt scores of standard operations, historical practices and relationships with established allies and enemies. Disruption was the mantra.
Almost every morning Americans woke up to fresh attacks on policies, regulations and laws that had been put into place over decades of governance. On a broad scale, here are some of the standard ways of doing business that got shoved aside during the year as Trump and his loyalist lieutenants took over the reins of power:
• Agencies Unwound — Federal agencies that had been set up by Congress — by law — were dismantled either in whole or in part with little resistance from established organizations. Who would have predicted that our government would retreat from foreign aid in a world with screaming needs for life or death assistance? Who would have guessed that the Education Department would be sidelined from its impact on education across the land?
• Alliances Disrespected — More than 80 years of post-World War II alliances were downgraded. United States became estranged from allies in most of the hemispheres. Our most threatening enemy in the world, Russia, became a fellow traveler as our president rolled out the red carpet to Vladimir Putin on U.S. soil in Alaska. Our long time security alliance with Ukraine and war support against Putin’s invaders was put at arm’s length.
Any affection for Americans worldwide, earned at the cost of dollars and blood in multiple wars, eroded in short order in the face of continuing insults and challenges to other countries large and small from the Oval Office.
• Universities Undercut — Hallowed institutions like our great universities that have propelled our American economy with talent and technology breakthroughs have been hobbled by the Trump attacks on their independence and financial structures.
• Tariff War Backfires – The president’s reliance on tariffs as an economic cure-all has backfired. Aside from AI companies, many employers are hedging or cooling their bets on job creation and investments as their sales projections show weakness.
These are just some of the demolitions that brought chaos and uncertainty to the nation’s modus operandi in 2025.
The biggest impact, though, of Trump’s tenure has been psychological. His nasty rhetoric and tactics have fractured the country. The “Great Divider” favors his loyalists, such as his pardons of 1600 insurrectionists in the January assault on our capitol.
He seeks to punish what he sees as his greatest adversaries – not Russia and China — but “the enemies from within.” He thrives on creating enemies – Americans who oppose him.
He has no use for “big tent” politics that are inclusive versus exclusive.
How will his overriding presence in daily affairs – he never shuts up — affect us in Wisconsin in 2026?
First off, he will have an enormous impact on the November elections here. The two Republican candidates for governor, Tom Tiffany and Josh Shoemann, have linked their political futures tightly to Trump and his agenda.
The six Democrats running for governor will undoubtedly spend huge amounts of time and energy opposing what our president has wrought. His shadow shades all American politics.
At the end of the day, Trump’s standing will be determined by how much he wins or loses the hearts and minds of the American people. The year 2025 ended with Trump looking more like a loser in American polls than winner. Remember when seven million Americans protested him and his policies last Fall? It was an historic out-pouring of opposition.
The two biggest issues that carried him to a narrow victory in November, 2025 were the state of the economy and the nation’s policies on immigration.
Despite his braggadocio that the economy is booming like never before and his claim that affordability for the average family is a hoax issue, the American people know better. They deal with the reality of everyday life. They know the prices of consumer goods are rising on most products and services.
They know that Trump has delivered higher government spending, slightly lower taxes and interest rate cuts that serve to hike the rate of inflation.
Real wages have dropped, job creation has slowed to a snail’s pace, and business investment has shrunk. The economy is in decidedly worse shape as we enter 2026 than it was in the last year under President Biden. The AI-juiced stock market hides the overall pain.
On immigration, Trump earned positive points early on by securing the southern border, but his harsh tactics to roust immigrants and visitors out of the country have come off as inhumane, un-American and impractical.
Most Americans, descendants of immigrants a generation or several back, appreciate what immigrants have brought to this country. They appreciate legal immigration by talented and energetic newcomers.
So, the long and short of Trump’s last 12 months in office is that his wide-ranging, unfocused agenda has turned off one slice of Americans after another. He is experiencing self-induced political death by a thousand slices. Gallup reports that only 36% of Americans approve of his governing, and almost half “strongly disapprove.” In short, he disgusts them.
Can he turn that around in 2026? One old adage says that when you are in a deep hole, stop digging. Partly because of his aging brain, he probably won’t be able to put down the shovel.
As examples, he recently launched airstrikes in Nigeria, blew up more small boats off South America and sent an envoy to Greenland as an obvious precursor of some kind of Putinesque annexation of that part of Denmark.
His witches brew just keeps boiling, and Americans of all stripes are leaving him in droves, especially independents, a barometer for future elections..
Our president is facing a political dead-end in 2026.
