What Donald Trump's first term wins can tell us about the next four years

Illustration of Donald Trump superimposed with red stripes and stars

Trump's accomplishments in his first term offer a hint at what his second term might have in store

(Image credit: Illustration by Stephen Kelly / Getty Images)

last updated 23 January 2025

It has been less than a week since Donald Trump took the oath of office and returned to the White House as the 47th President of the United States. Declaring his tenure the start of a "golden age of America," Trump's second administration has propelled the country into what seems to be both a continuation and a reinvention of his first term. Where all of this will lead, no one truly knows.

However, 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. While initially a reference to some mythologized national past, Trump's repeated promise to "Make America Great Again" in 2024 is in many ways a nod to his first four years in office too. Although those four years were marked by a perpetual sense of tumult and crises, Trump did, in fact, accomplish enough political wins to offer a hint at what his current term might have in store.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.