What did Donald Trump accomplish as president?

Donald Trump is, if nothing else, a walking, talking bullhorn for his own self-aggrandizing superlatives. In his telling he is "more presidential than any president that's ever held this office" (he made an exception for Abraham Lincoln), and "the greatest jobs president that God ever created." He's claimed at various times to be the "best thing that's ever happened to the Secret Service" and "the best builder," who knows "more about drones than anybody." There is little, if anything, in which he is not somehow a self-proclaimed expert, no matter how niche or specialized the subject may be. 

When it comes to Trump's actual presidential record, however, things are decidedly less absolute. For as much as he would have the public believe his administration was the most accomplished, most successful of its kind in American history, the Trump White House was notoriously beset by disfunction and infighting. The result was a tenure akin to a political reality show in which "results" seemed less important than the optics thereof. 

This isn't to say that the Trump White House didn't notch its share of achievements — far from it. Buoyed in part by two years of a Republican congressional majority eager to capitalize on a friendly administration, Trump's time in office was marked by a number of significant accomplishments. They are now worth revisiting as he asks the public, once again, to elect him for a second term.

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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.