President Trump won re-election in 2024 on a promise to turn Washington around. He offered to become president, where he alone could solve America's problems. What is the current reality of these promises?
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
President Trump won re-election last year on a promise to turn Washington around. He offered to become president, where he alone could solve America's problems. Now, as we reach the end of 2025, we asked Senior White House Correspondent Tamara Keith and Senior Political Editor and Correspondent Domenico Montanaro to join us to talk about the reality of those promises. Nice talking to you both.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: So President Trump is very clear that during the 2024 campaign he was proposing a version of federal government that centered himself. Did he accomplish this?
MONTANARO: Yes, he's done more to try to centralize power in the executive branch than any other president we can remember, whether it's using DOGE – that informal Department of Government Effectiveness that Elon Musk ran – or taking credit for dismantling quasi-independent agencies and demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom without any of the usual protocols. He signed a record number of executive orders, used them to pressure media outlets and law firms (taking over the Kennedy Center), and even threatened grants as leverage over higher education institutions. He truly pushed the boundaries and broke the railings of the presidency.
KEITH: There was also a lot of retaliation and persecution of his political enemies.
DETROW: Let's talk more about this. DOGE played a big part in bringing this vision to life in the early stages. This was the big story for the first half of the year.
KEITH: Yes. It can be a little difficult to separate Elon Musk's DOGE project from White House Budget Director Russell Vought's relentless focus on shrinking government and ousting federal employees. But here's a short list of institutions that under Trump were quickly dismantled, starved out or completely remade this year – the US Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Voice of America, the Department of Education, the US Institute of Peace – now the Donald Trump Institute of Peace. This week the White House tweeted, quote: “Federal employment is now at its lowest level since 2014, down 271,000 jobs since President Trump took office. Promises are made, promises are kept.”
DETROW: And we should say that as of this week, the Kennedy Center is now the Trump Kennedy Center. Change is everywhere. However, let's talk about Congress for a moment. The downside of a powerful presidency is a Congress that, it's fair to say, just stands by and lets things happen?
KEITH: Yes. This Congress, controlled by Republicans in both the House and Senate, has largely done only what President Trump said they should do. If he didn't put political capital on the line, they didn't. So Trump demanded expensive policies, such as nearly $4 trillion over 10 years, to make his first-term tax cuts permanent, while also adding to promises he made during the campaign, such as no tip taxes and no overtime taxes. And the Republicans made it possible. However, he has been lukewarm on expanding health care subsidies through the Affordable Care Act, and as of the end of this year, Congress had failed to do anything to prevent those costs from skyrocketing.
MONTANARO: The one exception to all of this with Republican resistance was the release of the Epstein files and the actions of his administration, which really became a political liability, and to some extent the moderate Republicans on these health care subsidies wanted them to be extended.
DETROW: So this is the legislative branch. What was the history of the judiciary in 2025, when the Trump White House was trying to seize so much power?
MONTANARO: Yeah, I think it's a really important branch of government right now because Trump was really eager to see how far the Supreme Court would allow him to go. Remember, he appointed three justices to sit on the high court and flipped the court with an ideologically conservative 6-3 majority. And before his second term, the court gave him enormous powers, declaring that he was insured against criminal consequences for any official actions.
With Republicans in Congress greasing Trump's wheels, the courts are really the last branch of government that can determine what, if any, obstacles exist. You know, this applies to everything from layoffs of federal employees to cutting or eliminating those federal agencies that we've talked about to how far he's trying to go with deportations.
KEITH: We're currently litigating two major cases that could determine how far the Supreme Court is willing to let the president go, involving birthright citizenship as well as a challenge to his tariff policies. And I think the tariffs are a great example of President Trump unilaterally directing an activity that would normally require some degree of congressional involvement. He imposed these significant tariffs on goods imported into the United States. In some cases, he even backed down a little, like in the case of coffee, where he saw coffee prices spike and then he rolled back some of those tariffs after facing some political resistance to affordability. But more broadly, if his first term was characterized by a man bristling over the railing, this one means breaking through it and surrounding himself with people who do not feel it is their duty to hold him back.
Detrow: The thing is, he kept doing exactly that. He was frank in his promises. He took office and generally fulfilled his promises.
KEITH: Yeah.
DETROW: Polls show voters aren't responding. They don't approve. What do we see? How should we handle public reactions throughout the year?
MONTANARO: Yes. I mean, Trump is really at the lowest point of his presidency. Just 38% of people in the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll said they approve of the job he's doing overall, and only 36% about his handling of the economy. People are really struggling to make ends meet and say Trump's policies have only made the situation worse. And one could argue that what really brought him back to the White House was the economy and his promises to lower prices, not all these other power consolidation tactics. No matter how much he says loudly that he has a broad and comprehensive mandate, this is not the case. I mean, Latinos, for example, switched to vote for him. They said the economy was most important. He won a record number of Latinos for a Republican. And now they vehemently disapprove of the work he does.
KEITH: And what we're seeing here with these approval ratings is really the answer to the question of what happens if you govern only for your base and yourself.
DETROW: This is NPR's Tamara Keith and Domenico Montanaro. It's always a pleasure to talk to you both. Thank you.
KEITH: Please.
MONTANARO: Thank you, Scott.
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