When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the promise was simple: restore strength, reclaim control. The reality has been anything but simple. In less than a year, his administration has turned governance into a high-speed experiment in unilateral power. Executive orders have replaced negotiation, and national emergencies have become policy shortcuts. This is a calculated volatility strategy, where chaos is framed as security and disruption is sold as leadership. The result? A world paying the price in fractured alliances, economic shockwaves, a climate agenda pushed to the brink and the suppressing of diversity.
Executive power & regulatory overhaul:
By the close of 2025, Trump had transformed the executive order from a procedural instrument into a governing philosophy. With over 200 executive orders being signed, policy is being delivered by pen, not by persuasion. Environmental safeguards were dismantled, education oversight diluted, and diversity frameworks stripped back. But the most aggressive front was immigration. On day one, the administration launched a fusillade of orders: curbing asylum access, declaring a national border emergency, and attempting to erode birth-right citizenship. These moves were framed as security imperatives but functioned as mass demonisation. Courts intervened quickly, blocking the most sweeping provisions and reaffirming that due process is not optional. Yet even partial victories mattered. They signalled a presidency willing to govern through velocity, wherein legality becomes a hurdle to clear, not a principle to uphold.
immigration & border crackdown:
The administration didn’t just tighten the border. Green card renewals were stalled, and deportation machinery was expanded, under the shadow of the Alien Enemies Act – a statute dragged from the archives to justify twenty-first-century removals. This wasn’t policy fine-tuning; it was a structural rewrite of belonging. A newly curated Homeland Security Task Force was tasked with dismantling cartel routes whereby enforcement became performance and vulnerability became a bargaining chip.
The courts stepped in, overturning the most far-reaching measures and reaffirming that humanitarian safeguards are non-negotiable. Still, even limited enforcement carried significant weight. It signalled a presidency willing to govern through velocity and spectacle, diminishing the notion of democratic legitimacy in its entirety.
national security strategy shift:
Trump additionally unveiled his 2025 National Security Strategy. Here, “America First” was not solely a slogan, but rather a strategic map. This map cemented the prioritisation of Western Hemisphere dominance, burden-shifting to allies, and a deliberate cooling of ideological crusades against China and Russia. Gone was the language of universal norms. And in its place, lay a vocabulary of transactional power. The NSS reframed global legitimacy: who counts, who pays, and who is left to fend for themselves. It represented a presidency that sees alliances not as communities of trust but as contracts – revocable, negotiable, and always contingent on America’s bottom line.
CLIMATE & ENERGY DEREGULATION:
Within weeks of returning to office, the U.S. walked away from the Paris Agreement – again – while the administration dismantled the social cost of carbon framework. These were structural erasures, designed to strip climate governance down to its bones. In parallel, Trump fast-tracked nuclear energy deployments, framing them as pragmatic infrastructure rather than ecological compromise. For this executive, environmental limits are negotiable, but industrial velocity is not. In Trump’s calculus, climate isn’t a crisis – it’s collateral and a “hoax”.
TRADE & TARIFFS:
Trump’s trade policy in 2025 was less about quiet recalibration and more about spectacle with teeth. Tariffs became the blunt instrument of diplomacy: a baseline 10–35% levy slapped on imports under emergency powers and trade statutes, targeting China, Canada, Mexico, and beyond. These weren’t symbolic skirmishes; they were systemic shocks. These shocks being strategically designed to broadcast sovereignty through price tags. The administration celebrated a five-year-low trade deficit and rising tariff revenues, touting them as proof of economic resurgence. But independent models tell a different story: long-term GDP drag, wage compression, and consumer costs that ripple far beyond the Beltway. Tariffs here are not a surgical tool. Instead, they are a political performance, and a way to make power visible in every checkout line.
Legislating the Worldview – The “One Big Beautiful Bill”:
If executive orders were the scaffolding, this was the concrete. On July 4, 2025, Trump signed what he called the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. This embodies a package that hardwired his priorities into law. It locked in the 2017 tax cuts, carved out no-tax zones for tips and overtime, and pumped billions into border enforcement and defence spending. Behind the patriotic branding sat deep cuts to Medicaid, rollbacks of nutrition assistance, and the quiet dismantling of climate programs. This wasn’t simply fiscal policy. It is a statute that recodes belonging through economics: rewarding consumption, penalizing vulnerability, and framing environmental retreat as economic liberation.
the price of power:
Trump’s second term has not merely rewritten policy. It has redefined the architecture of power itself. In a world where disruption is branded as strength, the cost is measured in fractured alliances, weakened institutions, and a global order struggling to hold its shape.