One year into Trump 2.0: Here’s how much America has radically changed on his watch

U.S. President Donald Trump has been a disruptive force since he burst onto the political scene a decade ago — but the pace of change in the first year of his second presidency is unlike just about anything seen before in the nearly 250-year history of the American republic.

Since his inauguration in January, Trump has upended the global trade order with a sweeping new tariffs scheme, radically curtailed immigration while deploying enforcement agents to round up migrants en masse and issued pink slips to federal public servants at a scale unmatched in the modern era.

Trump has waded into global conflicts, wielding economic threats to try and bring conflicts to a close — sometimes successfully, as he claims was the case in the Middle East. He has used his bully pulpit to do everything from goading Texas into redistricting its congressional maps for his benefit to shaming the late Hollywood star Rob Reiner for his liberal views mere hours after death.

While his legislative agenda has been relatively light, Trump’s party passed a turbocharged One Big Beautiful Bill, omnibus legislation that slashes taxes and cuts federal health programs while dismantling climate-friendly initiatives.

USAID is a shell of its former self and the federal body that helped support public broadcasting was shut down after Trump, in what has become an unusual presidential manoeuvre, encouraged Congress to claw back previously approved funding.  

Trump has initiated a partial takeover of Washington, D.C., ramming through massive structural changes to the White House without the usual approvals, deploying National Guard troops to patrol the streets and directing local officials to clean up parks and clear out the homeless.

And then there’s the Kennedy Center — the historic performing arts centre he commandeered, a place his hand-picked board just renamed in his honour.

"This has just been a remarkable presidency. I'm not sure that you can compare it to any other in American history," Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and first-term Trump appointee to the State Department, said in an interview with CBC News.

"I think you may have to go back to ancient Egypt, to the Pharaoh Akhenaten, for a comparison. I mean, this is just a radical transformation," he said. "This is an omnipresent president."

Presidential historian Barbara Perry said other presidents have been revolutionary or pushed through major reforms in their first year in office — former president Abraham Lincoln grappling with the U.S. Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt with his New Deal during the Great Depression.

Still, "the pace of change, Trump's style, how it's been done, his approach to all of it — it's like no other president in American history," Perry said in an interview. "Everything is extreme and performative. He's turned the presidency into a reality show."

CBC News has gathered some data to illustrate just how much has changed on Trump’s watch — so far.

Record number of executive orders

Trump has issued more executive orders in the first year of his presidency than any of his recent predecessors, according to federal data.

On his first day in office, the president signed a flurry of them, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords — even rescinding birthright citizenship, which many legal scholars regard as a constitutionally protected right.

His use of the presidential pen hasn't stopped since. He's taken on Canada and Mexico with burdensome tariffs, using constitutionally dubious authorities to do it. He's restored the federal death penalty, dismantled the Department of Education and recently expanded his so-called "Muslim ban" by limiting travel from nearly 20 per cent of the countries in the world as he tries to root out people from what he calls "third-world countries."

As of December, Trump has put pen to paper on an eye-popping 220 such orders — easily dwarfing what he churned out in his own first term.

"It's been an incredibly tumultuous year on just about every front," Matthew Lebo, a professor of U.S. politics at Western University in London, Ont., said in an interview.

"And Trump likes executive orders because he doesn't need to go through Congress. He gets to just write things down on a piece of paper saying, 'That's no longer in effect' — even if it's unconstitutional. It's not just that he has an expansive agenda, it's a sign of lawlessness."

Trump himself acknowledged his unorthodox style of governing — generally flouting the system of checks and balances to do what he wants — at a pre-Christmas rally in North Carolina.

"This is a far better term than it would have been had I done it the more traditional way. It really is. It's a more powerful term," he told supporters.

Economic upheaval

While Trump has the unwavering loyalty of a core group of MAGA Republicans, polls suggest the president’s popularity has slipped in the months since he initiated such a radical overhaul.

Trump promised to fix inflation on "Day 1," a lofty goal that was never in reach. Now, he's paying for the cost of living crunch as voters sour on his economic management. Recent polls suggest about two-thirds of Americans surveyed disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy.

Inflation, which was on the downward slope at the outset of his second term, shot up after his tariffs took effect, spiking prices at a time when many Americans tell pollsters they can least afford it.

"While there's been so much change, one constant is the persistent pain of affordability," Bartlett said. "It's the biggest thing that continues to plague this administration."

The latest unemployment data, released in mid-December, shows the economy added 64,000 jobs in November. By comparison, Canada, which is roughly nine times smaller by population, added 54,000 jobs in the same month.

Many experts say Trump’s trade action has hurt American consumers and businesses by driving up prices. Meanwhile, his tariffs have delivered few of the promised jobs — in fact, the U.S. economy shed more than 100,000 jobs in October, many of them in manufacturing.

"Employment growth in the United States is really terrible," Lebo said.

"Trump drastically changed trade policy. He has totally taken ownership of the U.S. economy. That's all on him, and he's going to have a hard time ducking that."

As Trump himself readily concedes — and actually boasts about on occasion — the unemployment rate has also ticked higher in part due to mass layoffs in the federal public service, job losses that picked up this fall, according to government data.

"Those jobs are not necessary," Trump told reporters at the White House last week. "You can't have the government jobs. You have to have the private sector jobs."

Trump's friend turned foe, Elon Musk, wielded a chainsaw promising to bring bureaucracy to heel.

While his department of "government efficiency" was something of a flop — it never reached its touted savings targets — and he left government after a dispute with Trump over cutting even deeper, the mission to downsize has continued apace.

Soaring health-care costs

The perennial issue of health-care costs is also sapping Americans' bank accounts.

Premiums have soared and are expected to go even higher, barring a congressional breakthrough on extending federal Obamacare subsidies.

Trump has given the issue little attention. He famously quipped during a presidential debate in 2024 that he has the "concepts of a plan" — and those concepts still haven't come to light.

Immigration crackdown

Trump has made reining in immigration the centrepiece of his political agenda since he rode down that golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president.

As illegal immigration surged under former president Joe Biden, Trump tapped into the anxiety voters felt as the border seemed more porous than ever.

Trump has done what his predecessor couldn’t — or wouldn’t — do.

Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) show fewer migrants are trying to sneak across the U.S.-Mexico boundary after Trump beefed up security and effectively ended all refugee programs, closing the door to would-be asylum seekers.

The much smaller number of what the CBP calls "encounters" with migrants at the southern border reflects those efforts.

The Trump administration has also deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to arrest as many undocumented migrants as they can — breaking records along the way.

According to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, enforcement operations have resulted in more than 605,000 deportations since Trump was inaugurated.

An estimated 1.9 million illegal aliens have also voluntarily self-deported, according to the Trump-controlled department.

Bartlett, the Republican strategist, said the Biden years featured "just one of the most insane policies on the border" and "Democrats paid dearly at the ballot box over this."

While Trump has done "a fine job of sealing the border," there's a risk the aggressive ICE raids could result in some political consequences.

"This is a more sensitive issue — their overreach on some of this ICE posture might bode better for the Democrats in the future," he said.

Trump has been "terrorizing non-white American citizens," added Lebo, and there could be a price to pay at the ballot box in next year's congressional midterms.

Oh, Canada

The number of illegal immigrants has dropped, but so too has the number of tourists.

Trump’s aggressive trade action has been felt acutely in Canada. The tariffs have hammered certain sectors and threatened the long-term viability of others.

The trade war, combined with Trump’s 51st state mockery and threats to Canadian sovereignty, have caused the longstanding friendly ties between the two countries to fray.