What did Donald Trump accomplish in his first term as president?

In the months since President Donald Trump took the oath of office and returned to White House for a second term, the United States has experienced a seismic upheaval perhaps familiar to residents of the former Soviet Union — but largely unprecedented in modern American history itself. Declaring this the start of a "golden age of America," Trump's effort to dismantle whole swaths of the Federal government while working to deport a growing list of political adversaries and marginalized people alike has propelled the country into what seems to be both a continuation and a reinvention of his first term. Where this all will lead, no one truly knows.

While the full extent of Trump's imperial designs remains to be seen, we do have an extensive reservoir of past experience to inform this current moment. Although initially deployed to harken back to a mythologized national past, Trump's repeated promise to "Make America Great Again" is in many ways a nod to his first four years in office. Despite a perpetual sense of tumult and crises, Trump did, in fact, accomplish enough political wins during that first term to hint at what his current administration might have in store.

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 first-term impact on the judicial branch of government overall will "continue shaping the American legal and political landscape for decades," CNN said.

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The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was arguably his "biggest legislative achievement," 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

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

Trump's historic First Step Act was one of 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.