America's Talking - 2025 Year in review: Trump's presidency

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

The Center Square reporters discuss President Trump's first year of his second term. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America's Talking. I'm Brett Rowland. I'm part of the national team. And joining me today is Morgan Sweeney, another key member of our national team. And we're going to be talking about Trump's second term. It's been quite a shift. We started in January. We watched Joe Biden leave the White House and Trump come in. And it has been a change. Morgan, tell us about what you've seen. Well, I really think that someone could take an hour, maybe a little more of just straight talking about what happened in the last year to touch on even just the biggest things that have happened. But we don't have that kind of time. So I'll try to just touch on a few key highlights. So, yes, it is a huge shift from the Biden presidency. One thing I think anyone who's been following this administration would say is that a main theme is that Trump has been trying to kind of reassert power and authority that he believes belongs to the president and the executive. And that's been highly disputed. but that is one thing that they've been kind of trying to do.

And so part of that is this kind of, we're not going to wait around on Congress attitude, and we're just going to get a lot done, I think, which kind of goes along with how we know Trump, you know, this New York businessman, real estate mogul, kind of no nonsense, cares a little bit less about the how and more just, you know, the results. and so he has issued over 220 executive orders in this past year, which is really unique because no American president going all the way back to FDR in 1942, no American president since him has signed that many executive orders in that amount of time. And just for comparison, I mean, since going back to Bush,

Presidents have averaged between like 35 and 55 former Trump executive orders a year. And so this is, it is definitely a big shift kind of in a way of getting things done. So those executive orders, if you look at them, they kind of touch on every major policy initiative that I think this year is going to be most remembered for, including immigration, the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, which Elon, Musk led for about three months, you know, major reductions in the federal workforce, shuddering entire, you know, organizations under government departments that weren't America first or that they saw as corrupt, birthright citizenship, national guard deployments to American cities that are fighting crime, tariffs, shuddering of the Department of Education, And this is kind of maybe a less far-reaching thing, but renaming the Department of Defense to the War Department, I kind of felt like that was a significant, you know, thing this year.

So they touch on all those things. And with immigration, the administration says that there have been more than 2 million deportations this year. and that many of those have been self-deportations. Earlier in the year, the Department of Homeland Security said it would pay people to self-deport. So they're saying that that's been successful to some degree. And then there's also just been a huge immigration crackdown across the country. So they've sent out ICE agents to big cities for sure. And they've conducted large-scale raids on workplaces.

And they've, I mean, that was very controversial what happened in Los Angeles earlier this year. It's just kind of ICE's enforcement has been much more visible than I think it ever has in recent history. And a lot of people have taken issue with that and said that it's inhumane. It's too aggressive. But it is what the administration is doing. So that's kind of what's happened with immigration. They've also just cracked down on the border, sent a lot of reinforcement. a lot of resources to the border in the first few months.

And now border crossings are down to historic lows. It's just nothing like, I mean, obviously nothing like the previous administration at all. At the end of Biden's presidency, I think there were something like 14 million unauthorized people living in the U.S. And so obviously one of Trump's big points was that he wanted to correct that. and fix what's happened. So that's kind of where that's at. And then in terms of the economy, you know this, because you've written all about them this whole year.

But a central pillar of Trump's strategy has been tariffs. And they've even kind of been a part of his like foreign policy, international relations, which will come back to. But the administration has argued that Trump has, the authority to impose broad and far-reaching tariffs and kind of raise and lower them, however he wants at this point in history. They say for various different economic reasons, but one of his favorite things that he likes to say is that other countries have been

ripping off the United States for decades. And so the way that they've portrayed this is like he's writing this. here. Like, he's correcting the course. Morgan, I know that we're going to talk about tariffs in another segment, but Trump has also said that he's used these tariffs really effectively to bring peace. Tell us more about what he's said here. So he's said now multiple times that the U.S. has pretty much ended eight wars since he regained office. He's speaking about Israel and Gaza, which, of course, They're in a ceasefire now, but we have yet to see how things are going to turn out in a more final way there.

Russian, Ukraine, still ongoing, still to be seen how that's going to come to a close, if it's going to come to a close. But yeah, there's a number of others, India and Pakistan, for instance, earlier this year, they got into a conflict. And it was a little scary there for a little bit because both of them are nuclear armed. but Trump has said that tariffs were critical in getting them to both, you know, agree to not, to not entering into a greater conflict. Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. And there's just several others that he says, you know, tariffs have been critical. And if I didn't have this authority or I wasn't using them this way, we wouldn't be in this position. That's right.

And we'll have to see what happens with those tariffs. as the Supreme Court takes up the case, a ruling inches closer, so we'll have to see. But it's been quite a change since last year. Looking ahead at 2026, do you think that we're going to see a more involved Congress? Do you think we're going to see all of these executive policies that Trump has put in place, at least temporarily, do you think we'll see Congress make these a little more permanent? Or is it too early to tell? I think it's really hard to tell.

I mean, I can see Congress, you know, trying to advance several of his priorities through legislation, but it's just difficult to know how any of those are going to end up. And I would say I don't think we're going to see the administration slowing down because it just would seem kind of uncharacteristic of them. But like one really never knows with Trump. So he's kind of full of surprises all the time. so we'll have to see uh thanks morgan so much for joining me um that's it for this segment of america's talking uh check out the center square dot com for more stories