By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
At this writing, the Trump presidency has just passed the nine month mark, a statistically significant point in human life, and perhaps similarly significant in this particularly unusual presidential term.
Just as the Democratic Party’s psychopathic devotion to the abortion industry sets out to terminate individual human lives by the end of their nine-month gestation period, so too did the Democrat Party work to put an end to the second Trump term in many of the same ways they hamstrung his first term. Flooding the legal system with frivolous lawsuits, stirring up their pop culture influencers to declare the president anathema, unleashing the storm troopers of Antifa and the illegal alien gangs to attack federal agents in our cities, and holding multiple national days of demonstrations, entitled “No Kings!”
Despite attracting hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, both paid and unpaid, to these protests, and getting more free media coverage than was ever awarded to President Trump’s much bigger campaign rallies over the years, the Left has failed to seriously impede the Trump agenda, thus far at least. And if they couldn’t score any real direct hits in the first nine months, it’s unlikely they’ll have a better chance in the future, unless they can manage to flip one of the houses in the midterms, which looks increasingly unlikely.
So – while you can’t really evaluate an administration properly until afterward – this is still a reasonable time for a quick review of how this term looks so far, just three quarters of a year into it. (Trigger warning for the Left: only being 75 percent of one year into a four-year term means there’s still 81 percent of the Trump Presidency still to go, so, buckle up!)
Organization: The presidency is famously no place to learn on the job. There’s a reason why the electorate likes to vote governors into the White House, or barring that, politicians who’ve been around long enough to already know how Washington works. President Trump’s first term took a long time to get organized, and this second term is the polar opposite of all those first term problems.
This time, President Trump had his team ready to go as soon as he won the election, shepherding the most important posts through the confirmation process as quickly as possible. While there were still the expected confirmation hurdles, caused by not having 60 votes in the Senate, this administration was able to largely hit the ground running.
Thinking outside the box: Sorry for the cliche, but there’s no better expression for many of this administration’s projects and policy choices. Inviting in Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to put DOGE together, and empowering it to do things that President Reagan’s WR Grace Commission didn’t have the authority to do, enabled this administration to lift up the veil and display – in some ways, for the first time ever – just how outlandishly wasteful, counter-productive, and outright anti-American much of the entrenched bureaucracy is.
Without DOGE – and the President’s spotlighting of its findings in his televised State of the Union address – the public wouldn’t have had the chance to learn how much of their government has been working against their own interests for so long. Those early months of often-daily revelations won countless fence-sitters over to the President’s side of the argument, as they realized that this establishment is indeed an enemy, after all.
Presidents normally appoint a transition team to smooth the way for the new secretaries, then get out of the way and leave them to it. This time, the Trump-Vance administration empowered groups like Musk’s to highlight outrages that would have otherwise never seen print, and to simultaneously draw some of the fire away from the official cabinet members doing their more mundane (but equally important) work. This has been the most brilliant and effective combination of cabinet and kitchen cabinet in generations.
Fearlessness: It has been argued that the reason many administrations fail is fear; they may have the right policies and the right people, but they fear public backlash, or fear too bold a move, so they pull their punches and just tread water for four years.
This administration is fearless. They are daring necessary moves that past Republican administrations often claimed to support, but lacked the courage to attempt, even with bigger majorities in Congress.
They have stopped paying lip service to the cult of global warming, and have in fact taken it on head-first, overturning the 2009 Endangerment Finding, terminating the executive mandates requiring EVs, acknowledging out loud the simple truth that most senior politicians don’t dare to confess: that solar and wind power are producers all right: not of efficient energy for America at all, but of crooked profits for China.
This administration is dealing with foreign crime by sending in ICE and the national guard. They are dealing with drug smuggling by blowing the cartels’ ships out of the water. They are dealing with the unjustifiable, marxist-islamist, anti-semitic hostility of the United Nations by calling them out, in public, to their faces, on international television. And finally, they are dealing with corrupt swamp officials by indicting them. Too slowly and too few, perhaps, but they are doing it, surgically, where they can be certain of convictions, and where they can be certain that such convictions will have the most effect.
Humor: This is worth mentioning, not just because humor helps popularize an administration in the pop culture, but also because the theme of the “happy warrior” is an indicator of a successful movement. President Trump has always been funny, but his use of his own very special brand of humor this year has been exceptional. We watch as much for the administration’s latest zingers as we do the day’s news.
The Democrat minority in Congress, or their surrogates in the newsrooms and their has-beens and wanna-bes in the presidential races, all hold their little press conferences and think they’ve won the news cycle, only to find that President Trump’s latest post on TruthSocial – or his vice president’s responses on X or Facebook – has demolished the Left yet again.
When the Left cheered their No Kings! events last weekend, scoring points with their lunatic fringe base, President Trump’s announcement of relief – that he had been afraid a king was coming to take his place and he was relieved to find that he was, in fact, still our president – not only cheered his base, but won over the middle with its gentle humor.
Three and a quarter years to go: All in all, this is shaping up to be an impressive, and astonishingly ambitious, presidential term.
The pace has been impressive thus far, and there is no reason to expect it to let up. This is already a transformative presidency, and it is no exaggeration to say that it’s already certain to be ranked among the five or ten most consequential presidencies in American history.
There are challenges, of course, some out of the President’s control. Despite their best efforts, foreign wars can have an impact even if we don’t join them; global recessions can have an impact even if we don’t cause them. And the thousands of little powder-kegs left behind by past presidencies, from destructive agencies to foolish policies to economic sinkholes, will continue to cause trouble no matter how carefully the Trump administration tries to manage them.
There are two problems that were neglected in the first term, which we hope will be handled in this second term: the recent problem of social media censorship and the age-old problem of vote fraud. Either or both of these could still derail this administration – and this country – if they are not tackled by the midterms.
But aside from these few cautions, we must acknowledge how amazingly successful this second term has been thus far, and is likely to continue to be.
We’ve passed the nine-month mark; the administration is healthy and kicking, ready to take on the world, fearlessly taking in oxygen and unapologetically producing carbon dioxide. Let us pray that Divine Providence continues to bless this team with great success, as they do everything in their power to Make America Great Again.
Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo
