One year ago today Donald Trump was elected to his second presidential term.
Since then he has upended the federal government, launched a global trade war, deployed troops against US citizens, overseen a mass deportation campaign, challenged and broken legal norms and tested the limits of executive power unlike any president before him.
Here are a series of charts that illustrate key facets of his second term in the White House.
A majority of Americans are unhappy with the job Trump is doing as president. In recent weeks his approval rating has fallen to 42 per cent, its lowest level in his second term.
But despite this, and the unpopularity of some of his administration’s policies, so far he remains more popular in his second term than in his first.
High levels of inflation were a key issue in the 2024 election campaign. Price increases had reached troubling highs during Joe Biden’s post-pandemic presidency, when they peaked at about 9 per cent.
While inflation has since come down, it has been sticky and inched up to 3 per cent in September.
Trump’s trade war has stoked fears of further inflation. This has unfolded as a whiplash series of threats, announcements, pauses, starts and deals, and the coining in this publication of the term “Taco” — Trump always chickens out. Even with all the changes, the de facto tariff rate is at its highest level in nearly a century.
Despite the trade war and the uncertainty it has introduced, US stocks have been surging in recent months. The S&P 500 reached an all-time high in October, recovering from steep losses following Trump’s tariff announcements on “liberation day” in April.
US jobs growth has stagnated since the summer, with non-farm payrolls even shedding positions in June. Dragging down employment are losses in wholesale trade, manufacturing and energy and mining sectors — all sectors that are exposed to the president’s tariffs.
While unemployment rates remain low, companies appear to be maintaining their workforce and slowing hiring.
“You’re in a low-hire, low-fire economy,” Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell said in September, adding that companies facing uncertainty wanted to see “how it all shakes out”.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has already missed one jobs report because of the government shutdown, leaving economists and traders “flying blind” without gold-standard federal data.
Trump has bypassed Congress to enact his agenda and instead issued more than 400 executive orders — more than any president in recent decades, including himself in his first term.
The orders are part of a drive by Trump and his allies to shape a “unitary executive”, where the president has sole authority over the executive branch of government, giving him the right to govern without approval from Congress or the courts.
Courts across the US have tested the legality of Trump’s orders, ruling on everything from the limits of presidential power to the right to citizenship. While a slim majority of cases have resulted in a full or partial block of the Trump’s executive action, more than 200 cases await a final ruling.
Trump’s critics believe the courts have a duty to check his moves to bypass Congress, persecute opponents and reshape federal institutions. His supporters hope the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority — which includes three Trump appointees — will ultimately endorse his administration’s theory of broad executive authority.
Over the past year, Trump has bolstered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that enforces US immigration laws, with approximately $75bn in funding over four years, as part of his administration’s pledge to carry out the “largest mass deportation operation in history”.
The result has been widespread ICE raids across the country, from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Portland, Oregon to Chicago and Los Angeles, where widespread protests against the agency broke out in June.
One of the most controversial aspects of Trump’s mass deportation campaign has been a surge in arrests of immigrants with no criminal record, with ICE officers rounding up undocumented migrants in workplaces, retail store parking lots and courthouses.
According to an October survey by the New York Times and Siena University, a majority of Americans broadly approve of deporting immigrants living illegally in the US, with a similar percentage saying that the Trump administration’s methods have gone too far.
Trump is rapidly following through on his campaign promise of becoming America’s “first crypto president”. This year, he has installed crypto-friendly leadership at US regulatory agencies and ordered the creation of a national bitcoin reserve.
Last month, Trump also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who had plead guilty to charges related to lax money laundering controls.
The president and his family are also building a sizeable cryptocurrency empire that has already reaped more than $1bn in pre-tax profits over the past year, according to a Financial Times investigation.
A wave of mass lay-offs, a hiring freeze and a push for civil servants to retire early or resign has rapidly reduced the size of the federal workforce over Trump’s first year in office.
According to the non-profit Partnership for Public Service, more than 200,000 federal workers have left the civil service over the past 12 months because of mass firings and programmes to incentivise early retirement or resignations.
Budget director Russell Vought — who has said “trauma” must be inflicted on the civil service — and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, initially driven by billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk, have been two primary forces tasked with shrinking the federal workforce and finding budget savings. They have also led the drive to end many government programmes that the administration has deemed “woke”.
Over the past year this has included shuttering USAID, the US government’s foreign aid arm, as well as firing meteorologists in the National Weather Service and hurricane researchers, among others.
Vought has also attempted to use the federal government shutdown as an opportunity to fire even more workers before a federal judge intervened.
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