What did Donald Trump accomplish as president?

For as frustrating, confounding, and anxiety-inducing as the 2024 presidential election has been and continues to be, the voting public is — in a strange way — lucky. Not only does the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump offer the starkest choice between two visions of America in recent electoral memory, but that choice comes backed by both candidate's concrete records from their respective terms in the executive branch.

Voters don't have to imagine what a Trump or Harris administration might look like — instead, they can simply refer, at least in part, to what each candidate has already done during their time in the White House. For Donald Trump, that presidential resume has played neatly into his preexisting promise to "Make America Great Again" — at first a reference to some mythologized national past, but now, in 2024, a nod to his first four years in office as well. In that vein, most of the "agenda items" in Trump's current slate of campaign promises "aren’t brand new," NBC News said. "On immigration and other issues, Trump is making a lot of the same promises he did during his 2016 campaign that never came to fruition due to a lack of congressional support or limitations on his executive authority."

But while many of Trump's assurances are, themselves, repeats of past campaigns, there are also a number of political accomplishments from his first term that he can cite this time around.

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The judiciary

Trump's "most lasting impact on the country" is likely the drastic reshaping of America's courts, Business Insider said. By installing more than 200 federal judges, including 54 who "reshaped the ideological makeup of federal appeals courts" and three who drove a "generational shift in the highest court in the land," Trump's impact on the judicial branch of government overall will "continue shaping the American legal and political landscape for decades," CNN said.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Trump's 2017 tax bill — colloquially The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — was arguably his "biggest legislative achievement," which was intended, per Trump, to "super-charge the economy," said Politico. It was also the "biggest tax overhaul since the Tax Reform Act of 1986," the Brookings Institute said, but "skewed toward the rich" and "failed to deliver promised economic benefits," said the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One unambiguous takeaway: "U.S. corporations got to keep more of their money, and the U.S. government got less," said Bloomberg.

Space Force

It was the stuff of jokes and mockery when Trump announced in 2018 that he planned to back a long dormant plan to create a sixth, space-focused branch of the U.S. Armed Services — the first new branch since the Air Force was founded in the wake of World War II. But just one year after its official founding in 2019, Space Force had "developed from a theoretical concept to an operational service fully engaged in a broad spectrum of activities," West Point's Lieber Institute said. While the Space Force's annual budget grew over the first four years of its existence, that upward trend "will stop in fiscal 2025, for which the service is requesting $29.4 billion, down $0.6 billion from last year," Defense One said.

Criminal justice reform

While much of Trump's experience in the realm of criminal justice has been as a litigant, rather than policy expert, he nevertheless helped champion the historic First Step Act, the "most sweeping set of changes to the federal criminal justice system since the 1990s," NBC said. The bipartisan-backed law "allows thousands of people to earn an earlier release from prison and could cut many more prison sentences in the future," said Vox, and represents "modest steps to alter the federal criminal justice system and ease very punitive prison sentences at the federal level." The law has shown "promising results thus far," with beneficiaries showing recidivism rates "considerably lower than those who were released from prison without benefit of the law," The Sentencing Project said.

The death of ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Although Trump did not launch America's offensive against ISIS, the militant group responsible for acts of violence and terrorism across the Middle East, he did oversee one of the county's most significant victories in that effort: the death of founder and leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Al-Baghdadi's death was an "important milestone in the war against the Islamic State — and, more generally, in the struggle against terrorism," Brookings said. Trump's "personal involvement" in the military effort was largely centered around having implemented "new 'rules of engagement' that involved greater risks in return for faster, more decisive operations," said Peter R. Neumann, a professor of security studies.