Throughout Trump’s first year of his second term, he placed ruinous tariffs on multiple countries, cut funding to countless universities, deported thousands of citizens, and downright ignored laws. Not only that, but he also denied the existence of climate change, dropped out of the Paris Climate Agreement, opened an insane amount of ocean floor for oil drilling, and attempted to stop wind power projects; and that’s just the start of it.
Tariffs –
President Trump says, “Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary,”; however most U.S. citizens couldn’t agree less. The tariffs that Trump enforced in 2025 made it difficult for many people to go about their daily lives. A tariff is a tax that is enforced by a country on goods that are imported from other countries. This results in a raised price for anyone that would like to buy something from somewhere other than the United States. This makes it hard for most business owners, or even just citizens, to purchase the goods that are necessary for their profession. Luckily, on February 20th, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the president’s tariffs were illegal and are now no longer in effect.
Funding Cuts to Protesting Universities –
In early – mid-2025, Trump threatened to cut funding to any colleges that allowed “illegal protests” and mentioned brutal consequences for students who participated in these protests. “All federal funding will STOP for any College, School or University that allows illegal protests,” he said, but did not define what made the protests “illegal.” “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!” These repercussions are rather extreme, considering the fact that the U.S.’s First Amendment states that citizens have the right to protest. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit organization, said, “The president can’t force institutions to expel students.” By cutting funding to universities that allow students to protest against him, Trump not only disobeyed the First Amendment of his country but also punished it with unreasonable consequences.
Deportation –
In less than a year, the second Trump administration “established a whole-of-government campaign against immigrants.” The National Immigration Law Center states that the president’s strategy is to “cultivate so much suffering and fear, through real and threatened violence, that immigrants choose to abandon their communities and lives in the United States.” According to the White House Washington website, the Trump administration has deported more than 605,000 ‘illegal aliens’ during his time as president so far. These deportations are often started with violent raids and arrests and have separated countless families. These deportations are not only hurting people, but also the nation’s health, society, safety, and economy. Not only that, but Trump was illegally executing these deportations, using a law that was meant for wartime only. Todd Lyons, an acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, said in early 2025 that he wanted the agency to “get better at treating [deportations] like a business” and said the system should work “like Amazon, getting your product delivered in 24 hours.” This is quite a cruel thing to say. People, whether or not they are immigrants, are not ‘packages’ and should be treated like the real people they are.
Climate Change –
Trump flatly denies the existence of climate change and has not failed to show this through numerous things he did during his first year. On January 20th, 2025, Trump’s first day in office, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement for the second time, an agreement created in December of 2015 in which world leaders united in order to help stop global warming. About 195 parties are involved in it. In his inaugural speech, Trump claimed that the United States has “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth” and said, “We will drill, baby, drill.” He didn’t lie, and since then, Trump has opened up tons of ocean floor for drilling. This can be absolutely detrimental to the environment and can not only ruin entire ecosystems, but also the planet as a whole. In 2025, Trump temporarily shut down many wind farms across the nation. One example of this would be the halt of an offshore wind farm that was being built off the coast of Rhode Island in August. This wind farm was nearly 80% completed and already had 6 billion dollars invested in it at the time it was canceled.
Since Trump began his second term in January 2025, many things have changed for the country, and it feels like it has been a year of madness. For example, the 43-day-long government shutdown (the longest in history) or the ICE agents who have been committing acts that may or may not be legal. Some economists claim that Trump “is setting the country on a path that will, in the long run, leave the economy less dynamic, the financial system less stable and Americans less prosperous in the decades ahead.” The Partnership for Public Service claims that since Donald Trump started his second term, America is less prepared for a terrorist attack than pre-9/11, less capable of dealing with a “catastrophic natural disaster than pre-Hurricane Katrina, and more unable to “deal with public health concerns than prior to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.” This goes to show that Trump’s first year was a rather unique one, and the country is quite in shambles. Many acts that he committed in 2025 went on to cause further problems and commence devastation for this nation.
Cites –
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-federal-funding-will-stop-colleges-schools-allowing-illegal-protests-2025-03-04/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/priorities/border-immigration/
https://www.nilc.org/articles/the-price-of-cruelty-how-trumps-mass-deportation-agenda-endangers-us-all/
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/paris-agreement
https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/01/the-inaugural-address/
https://ourpublicservice.org/publications/a-government-in-chaos-trumps-first-year-back-in-office/
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g-s1-103320/offshore-wind-power-pause-trump-administration-new-england-new-york-virginia-national-security
https://www.tradecomplianceresourcehub.com/2026/03/08/trump-2-0-tariff-tracker/
https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/glossary/tariffs/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/briefing/trump-first-year-back.html
https://6abc.com/post/donald-trump-sensitive-document-audio-recording-classified-documents/13326114/
