Isaac Saul (9:35)
With that, we're going to get into the core promises of the Trump administration. First up is the border, immigration and deportations. Trump campaigned heavily on immigration in 2024, making a few specific promises related to the southern border deportations and immigration policy. In particular, he vowed to perform the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, which in its early stages would focus on violent criminals and ultimately lead to the deportation of millions of people here illegally. He also promised to seal the border, resume construction of the border wall, hire 10,000 new Border Patrol agents and deploy active duty troops to the border, and aim to crack down on drug traffick gang activity across the border. In order to achieve his goals, Trump said he would reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy, revive the public health measure title 42, and restrict asylum eligibility. He also promised to terminate Biden era initiatives like the CBP1 app, and deport students who were involved in pro Palestinian protests that gripped college campuses across the country in the wake of October 7th. Finally, he promised to end birthright citizenship, a right granted to the children of unauthorized migrants laid out in the 14th Amendment. To achieve all these promises, Trump said he would focus on exercising his executive power rather than waiting for Congress. And he expressed confidence that he would succeed thanks to his reshaping of the judiciary in his first term. On the whole, Trump is moving fast to implement his immigration agenda despite a few hurdles, and he can claim some early successes, most notably with border encounters. Customs and Border Patrol tracks every encounter it has with unauthorized migrants at the border, a very useful metric for measuring border security, and the numbers since Trump took office are the lowest on record. In March, encounters with unauthorized migrants at the southern border fell to around 11,000, down from 96,000 in December, the last full month of the Biden administration. Trump has nearly brought catch and release to an end, though he hasn't been able to detain every migrant because a lack of detention space. So far, Trump's progress on deterring illegal immigration has been perhaps the crowning promise kept of the Trump administration. Immigration was key to both his 2016 and 24 victories, and securing the border has been a major focus in his first hundred. Conversely, Trump's mass deportation effort is much more of a mixed bag. Trump did declare a national emergency at the southern border on his second day in office, and according to the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 150,000 unauthorized immigrants and deported over 139,000 so far under Trump. That's a higher number of arrests than Biden's monthly average in 2024, but fewer deportations than Biden's mark of 57,000 per month. The White House has claimed that 75% of the people deported have had criminal records, though CBS learned that only 25% of the 238 migrants sent to a Salvadoran megaprison had criminal records in the United States. At this rate, Trump's goal of deporting 15 to 20 million people looks unattainable, which is not surprising. Immigration experts were skeptical he could bring a program of that scale into existence, and Trump is predictably running into bottlenecks with the capacity at detention centers. He's also running into a lot of legal trouble since Trump tried to stretch his executive authority through invoking a national emergency, designating members of foreign gangs as members of terrorist groups and claiming he can deport them as participants of an invasion under the Alien Enemies act, he has been stymied by the courts. Cases of American citizens being deported, detained or interrogated have also ramped up public and legal criticisms of his actions. On some of the smaller scale promises Trump is following through, he has shut down the CBP1 app, reinstated remain in Mexico, implemented a broad asylum ban, instituted ideological screenings at ports of entry, and ordered 1500 active duty soldiers to the border. ISE is also conducting workplace raids across the country. He has not re implemented Title 42, but the combination of his executive actions and policies are largely having the same impact on other smaller scale promises. The administration is attempting to follow through, but running into some roadblocks for instance, Trump has attempted to deport several students who participated in pro Palestinian protests, as promised, though some of those cases are also tied up in legal challenges. He has also ordered more border wall construction, but, as happened during his first term, has faced land acquisition and funding disputes. Finally, Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship on his first day in office, but the administration was immediately sued and the order is now before the Supreme Court court. As for the drug trade and gang activity, Border Patrol has boasted major fentanyl seizures, and the lower number of crossings have also reduced the amount of drugs seized at the border. The New York Times also did a deep dive into how Trump's crackdown has struck fear into cartel leaders, some of whom have gone into hiding and shut down drug labs. So on Trump's promise meter, we give him an 8 out of 10. Trump is largely pursuing his immigration agenda how he said he would, and most of the hangups are tied to legal challenges. Next up is Trump's promises on spending and waste. As part of his agenda, Trump favored cutting federal costs through impoundment or underspending the budget Congress approves for executive departments. This turned into a new federal initiative on efficiency, which Donald Trump first discussed publicly in a conversation with Elon Musk that was live streamed on X on August 13, 2020. I think we need a government efficiency commission to say, like, hey, where are we spending money? That's sensible. Where is it not sensible? Musk said, adding, I'd be happy to help on such a Commission. On November 20, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy announced in an op ed in the Wall Street Journal that they would lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, or doge, primarily aimed at cutting the size of the federal government and cutting costs. Since taking his second oath of office on January 20, Trump has pursued federal cost cutting by directing DOGE to cancel wasteful contracts and the Office of Personnel Management, or opm, to cut the size of the federal workforce. So how have those initiatives fared? Let's start with the Department of Government Efficiency. Shortly after Trump was inaugurated and Ramaswamy dropped out of running DOGE to pursue a bid for Ohio governor, one of Trump's Day One actions was to sign an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the president's Doge agenda by modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity. The initiative listed $55 billion in savings through canceled contracts and grants and now claims to have cut $160 billion in federal spending. However, DOGE has had to revise its goals several times. And while it's still too early to accurately quantify its total savings, it appears to be well short of even its revised target. Musk first set Doge's cost savings goal at $2 trillion a year. Then he lowered it to $1 trillion, then to $150 billion. Of the $160 billion the initiative currently says it has saved, an analysis from BBC has found that only $61.5 billion has been itemized and only $32.5 billion has been detailed with a receipt. What's more, a separate analysis from the Partnership for Public Service has found that Doge has actually cost the federal government $135 billion. Doge has also run into legal trouble with its methods. Most notably, 19 Democratic attorneys general sued Doge after it gained access to Treasury Department data. A federal judge temporarily banned Doge employees from accessing Treasury Department data, and now one employee is able to read that data if completing a mandated training. The initiative to cut the federal workforce, meanwhile, started in earnest in January with an email from OPM asking federal employees to commit to working in person from federal offices and a culture of restored accountability. OPM offered full pay and benefits through September to workers who couldn't commit to the new standards and agreed to resign by February 6th. Then, in February, Musk posted on X that federal employees must respond to an email from OPM asking for five things they accomplished in the previous week or risk being fired. Requirements to respond to those emails have since been dropped or ignored by many agencies. The Trump administration says 75,000 people have taken its buyout offer, but the number of federal employees currently on leave may be fewer. Separately, the administration has also laid off tens of thousands of probationary employees and defunded entire federal departments, notably including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Many of the employees dismissed by the federal government have since either been reinstated in their positions following successful legal challenges. Others have been rehired, as was the case when the Department of Health and Human Services fired 10,000 employees in early April. Taken together, the impact of Trump's focus on making the government more efficient is on track to fare much more poorly than past initiatives. President Clinton's Reinventing Government program of the 1990s consolidated over 100 agencies and cut over 250,000 federal jobs, and only about 25,000 of those came through an OPM buyout. The Clinton administration delivered a deficit reduction of $476 billion and four straight years of deficit cuts. Meanwhile, Trump is ahead of Clinton's pace on eliminated federal jobs at an estimated 121,000. But he may not have cut any spending and simultaneously has led a Republican Senate to pass a budget that will increase the deficit. In sum, Trump did establish DOGE as a task force to combat government efficiency and waste. He did put Musk in charge of it, and he has directed the executive branch to reduce the size of the federal government and workforce. However, he has not resolved inefficiencies or delivered savings anywhere close to the scale that he and Musk have suggested it would. On the contrary, he is overseeing an expanding federal budget and growing deficit, though notably, Trump did not actually campaign on a promise to balance the budget. Meanwhile, efforts to downsize the workforce have resulted in the dismissal of hundreds of thousands of federal employees. But the effort has been sporadic, disorganized and often stymied in court. So here on our promise Meter, we give Trump a 3 out of 10. He's attempted to implement the programs he promised to implement, but those programs have either been blocked or maximally ineffective at accomplishing their stated goals. All right, next up is ending inflation. President Trump campaigned extensively on bringing down inflation and prices for consumer goods. In his inaugural address, the President said he would direct all members of my cabinets to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices. Then he signed an executive order instructing all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief to Americans. The average year over year inflation rate under President Joe Biden was 4.95%, as measured by the consumer price index, the CPI, that was meaningfully higher than any president since George H.W. bush. Yearly inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, the highest increase in 40 years, then gradually fell for the remainder of Biden's term. When Trump took office, the rate was 3.0%. Inflation has continued to ease over Trump's first three months in office, dropping to 2.8% in February and 2.4% in March. Price increases for common goods and services have risen moderately but remain far below levels they reached and sustained during most of Biden's term. For example, the price of meat, poultry and fish rose 1.1% in Trump's first three months, while the cost of rent for a primary residence increased 0.62%. New car prices were virtually unchanged, and the sticker price of used cars and trucks rose only 0.2% between January and March. Meanwhile, the average price of retail gasoline has risen 3% from $3.20 per gallon in January to $3.30 per gallon in March. However, the average price of all gasoline types has actually dropped 6.3% in March. Conversely, egg prices increased approximately 17% and were 60.4% higher in March than the Due in large part to supply challenges linked to the bird flu, prices have begun to come down from these highs. Now, I know I'm throwing a lot of numbers at you here, but we're going to keep going. Many Americans continue to say that inflation remains an issue, with 62% of respondents to a February 2025 CBS YouGov poll reporting an impression that prices are going up, while 77% say their income is not keeping up with inflation. Furthermore, the potential impacts of Trump's tariff prices loom large. 89% of US adults think the tariffs are likely to result in higher prices on the products they buy, according to an April 2025 Gallup poll. With tariffs and other economic policies still in the early stages of implementation, it's just too early to say whether President Trump has fulfilled his promise to bring down inflation if current trends hold, he appears on track to keep inflation at low levels, though that would still fall short of his repeated promises to bring prices down and end inflation altogether. What's more, the current trends do not seem likely to hold. The economic impact of tariffs, or at least the uncertainty of their implementation, has raised the prospect of increased inflation in the months and years ahead, making his campaign promise one of the most difficult to evaluate through a hundred days. That being said, for now we're giving Trump a 6.5 out of 10 on the promise meter. That's because inflation has continued the downward trajectory that Trump inherited, but some common goods have gone up and sentiment remains negative. Plus, Trump's tariffs are widely expected to lead to price increases. Next up is manufacturing and tariffs. In February of 2023, Donald Trump posted his plan to leverage tariffs as tools to encourage domestic production. Rather than raising taxes on American producers, President Trump will impose tariffs on foreign producers through a system of universal baseline tariffs on most imported goods, the post on Trump's campaign site Agenda 47 said. In addition to universal baseline tariffs on most foreign goods, President Trump's plan will reclaim our economic independence from China. President Trump will revoke China's most favored nation trade status and adopt a four year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals. Elsewhere on the Agenda 47 website, Trump has promised to impose reciprocal tariffs with any country that currently has levies on US Imports. If India, China or any other country hits US with 100 or 200% tariff on American made goods. We will hit them with the same exact tariff. In other words, 100% is 100%. If they charge us, we charge them an eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff. Same exact amount, trump said in a video detailing the strategy. Trump also promised to impose tariffs at several other times on the campaign trail. In an interview with Fox Business's Larry Kudlow in 2024, Trump expressed support for a 10% global tariff. I do like 10% for everybody, he said. But the problem with 10% is that some countries are much bigger abusers than others. Trump also repeated this objective several times at rallies a month before the election. Trump said that he would renegotiate the United States, Mexico, Canada trade deal, saying that he would consider imposing tariffs in excess of 100% on vehicles made by Chinese companies manufactured in Mexico. In short, Trump has been promising to widely impose heavy tariffs consistently for a long time. On February 1st, President Trump signed an executive order announcing new tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada, specifically 10% on all Chinese imports and 25% on all Mexican and Canadian imports except for Canadian energy imports, which would be taxed at 10%. The tariffs were then paused, but Trump threatened additional tariffs on Canada, Mexico, Europe and Venezuela before announcing his global tariffs and reciprocal tariff plan on April 2. The reciprocal tariffs were then paused for 90 days, but the 10% global tariffs remain in effect. Chinese imports, meanwhile, are currently being taxed at 145%, though the white House has exempted many tech products from the heightened rate. Ultimately, Trump has pursued almost exactly the tariff strategy he said that he'd pursue as president. He has implemented a 10% global tariff, pursued aggressive reciprocal tariffs, and has taxed imports from China in excess of 100%. He has only failed to deliver in some detailed aspects of this promise. For instance, the reciprocal tariffs weren't based on what the US Is charged by foreign countries, but instead calculated off the trade deficit the US has with each country individually. However, the tariffs also come with major asterisks. First, Trump has paused the reciprocal tariffs since they were first announced, and it's unclear if they'll ever be fully instated. Second, Trump's rollout of the tariffs has been unpredictable and sporadic, and the goals he's communicated for them are contradictory. So while he's made progress toward delivering on tariffs, it's not clear if he's on track towards his campaign promises. The only promise Trump has not made any progress toward is removing China's most favored nation trade status, which is defined by the World Trade Organization and not within the president's unilateral ability to control. On the Promise meter, we give Trump a 7 1/2 out of 10. He talked about imposing tariffs repeatedly while campaigning, and outside of a few details, he is pursuing the strategy he said he would. However, his commitment to his promises seems unsteady. We'll be right back after this quick break.
