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In the first year of his second nonconsecutive term as president, Donald J. Trump sought to redefine the American presidency and reorient America’s place in the world. He used federal power to brazenly reward his supporters, punish his enemies, and line his family’s pockets. He dismantled large portions of the federal bureaucracy without approval from Congress. He rewired global trade relationships with punitive tariffs. He tossed aside the 80-year post–World War II international order in favor of a foreign policy resembling crude 19th-century-style imperialism that some academics have deemed “neo-royalism.”
All this radical and rapid change poses a challenge to politicians, businesses, analysts, and journalists, trying to figure out the long-term significance of what’s going on. In an end-of-the-year wrap-up story, for instance, The New York Times argued that only a handful of presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had “comparatively momentous first years” and posed the question: “How much of what he has done can be considered irreversible, and will Washington ever be the same?”
It’s not hard to find experts with pessimistic answers to those questions. “The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable,” said Robert Kagan, foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. “By the end of Trump’s term … there will be nothing left of the America we knew four years before. All institutions, norms, government, you name it, all of it gone,” Robert Litan, an economist who is also a fellow at Brookings, said. “Trump is also creating structural problems to which there are no solutions,” argued Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offered a nuanced take: “On balance, I think the United States can recover from Trump at home. I’m less confident that the United States can fix the Trumpian mess internationally.”
Such gloom and doom may help stir voters to action by showing the need for an urgent change in course, but we should not lose sight of the fact that most of what Trump has inflicted so far is reversible. He has not spent most of his energy crafting painstaking legislative compromises that produce durable new laws. He has not forged international alliances that want to carry on his foreign policy vision. He has impulsively asserted executive power to satisfy personal indulgences, not pressing needs or public demands, which has weakened the political standing of both him and his party. The political pendulum swung in the direction of the Democratic Party in the 2025 elections, and if the trend continues in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election, Democrats will be well positioned to render much of the Trump record ephemeral.
Executive actions can be reversed. Bruised and broken government agencies can be rebuilt and refurbished. Not everything will be as easy to fix as taking a name off of a building (which will need to be done in a few places), especially because so much damage has been done to the federal workforce. But that only means there is no time to waste in articulating a vision for the future and cultivating the next generation of civil servants.
Compared with his first term, Trump is spending even less time working with Congress—abandoning the legislative arena where durable presidential legacies are built and laws that live on to shape the country for decades are born.
We already have the experience of Trump’s first term as evidence of his weak capacity for lasting change. In 2024 the Washington Monthly team performed a comprehensive examination of the Trump and Joe Biden records in 22 policy areas. The resulting “Presidential Accomplishment Index” found that Biden had accomplished more in 14 areas, Trump in three, with the rest tied. I compared how much each was able to accomplish in the legislative arena, and it wasn’t much of a contest. Trump secured little from his announced list of legislative priorities largely because he never took seriously the need for laborious bipartisanship to clear the congressional obstacle course, nor appreciated how laws and programs earned with broad political support have a tendency to stay on the books across administrations.
Granted, Trump’s second term is not exactly like his first. He staffed his administration with more sycophants eager to indulge his whims, and fewer cool heads who sporadically exercised restraint. With the help of the Project 2025 effort during Trump’s interregnum, his team was prepared to aggressively wield executive power on a myriad of fronts from day one.
But compared to his first term, he is spending even less time working with Congress on legislation. That’s the arena where most presidents with durable legacies make their mark, short of winning wars. The effects of major legislation can be felt years, even decades, after a presidency is over. And legislation that passes with broad support, especially bipartisan support, is particularly difficult to repeal. Witness how Republicans have repeatedly failed to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (not passed with a bipartisan vote, but experiencing wide popularity among voters) and how Trump has taken to slapping his name on infrastructure projects funded by Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law. Yet according to The Washington Post, in 2025 “the House and Senate set a modern record for lowest legislative output in the first year of a new presidency.”
Trump’s first year back in office was not completely without legislative success. He did pass a bipartisan cryptocurrency bill that risks destabilizing the economy. And he won bipartisan support for the Laken Riley Act, which requires detention of undocumented immigrants who are arrested (but not yet convicted) for certain crimes, and is not much of a legacy play since federal authorities already had the authority to detain people in those circumstances. His biggest legislative success, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, was a partisan budget reconciliation measure stuffed with health care cuts that hurt the middle class and tax cuts skewed to the wealthy. Budget reconciliation measures can’t be filibustered, but they are also highly vulnerable to repeal once power shifts in Washington. Furthermore, several provisions of the bill expire after Trump’s term, so these are not legacy items, at least not yet.
Trump’s biggest legislative “success” is a partisan budget reconciliation bill—heavy on middle-class health care cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy—vulnerable to repeal, and with key provisions set to expire just after his term.
This limp legislative output is the best Trump could do even at the peak of his powers; presidents often get the most done when their party controls both chambers of Congress and before it risks shedding members in the midterm elections. Trump’s GOP majorities may have been narrow, but the same was true for Biden and George W. Bush, and each found a way to enact major bills by putting in the time to earn bipartisan support. Trump rarely put in that time during his first presidency and has put in even less in his second go-round.
Instead, Trump prefers to assert executive power, whether or not the power is clearly his to exert. Last year he issued more than 220 executive orders, more than the combined number of first-year executive orders from Biden, Obama, and the previous Trump presidency. Without the need to compromise with anyone, Trump has been able to move fast and wreak havoc. But any successor can move just as fast.
Some of Trump’s orders won’t even be on the books by the time his successor is sworn in, because they will be stymied by the federal judiciary. For example, in December the Supreme Court left in place a temporary restraining order preventing Trump from deploying the National Guard to enforce immigration law in Illinois, on the grounds that “the [U.S.] Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois,” not to mention other states. While the case is not yet fully adjudicated, the Court’s blunt assessment was enough for Trump to implicitly bow to the Constitution’s ultimate check and balance, announcing that he was “removing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland [Oregon]”—cities in states where Democratic governors did not approve of federalization of their Guard units.
Trump favors asserting executive power over bipartisan compromise, allowing him to move fast. Last year, he issued more than 220 executive orders. But any successor can move just as fast.
More broadly, the Associated Press counts 358 lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive actions; 149 actions have been already “partially or fully blocked.” Trump has a history of sloppy work leading to judicial defeats; in his first term, 77.5 percent of his attempts to change federal regulations were overturned in court, when the average loss rate for presidents is 30 percent.
Of course, there’s plenty that this heavily conservative Supreme Court is letting Trump do, inducing pain that cannot be fully undone. Take immigration. Trump’s quest for mass deportation has incarcerated students for exercising free speech (until federal judges intervened), whisked immigrants out of the country and separated them from family members in defiance of lower court orders, and sent asylum seekers craving freedom back to their authoritarian homelands.
But as we’ve seen in our lifetimes, repeatedly, immigration enforcement strategies can shift dramatically from president to president. Obama, concerned about public safety, prioritized deporting terrorists, criminal gang members, and convicted felons, and by the end of his presidency, more than 90 percent of deportees were in those categories. In stark contrast, Trump has prioritized deportations of immigrants who are not violent criminals. Only 7 percent of people arrested by ICE agents in the first nine months of 2025 had been convicted of violent crimes, with another 30 percent convicted of nonviolent crimes (most commonly driving under the influence or other traffic violations). Another 30 percent had pending criminal charges, and one-third had no criminal record at all.
Presumably, Trump is going after nonviolent immigrants because he wants to rack up big deportation numbers. However, the Department of Homeland Security announced in December that the Trump administration deported more than 622,000 people in 2025. That puts him at a slower pace than every president going back to Bill Clinton, with the exception of Trump in his prior term. (Trump’s DHS is also claiming an additional 1.9 million “self-deportations,” but Axios reported that figure comes from a “highly unorthodox” estimation that even a Trump supporter called “funny numbers.”) A successor to Trump will be able to end the cruel and random nature of Trump’s enforcement strategy and restore a policy that prioritizes the deportation of violent criminals, without necessarily reducing the overall number of deportations.
Just as immigration policy can turn on a dime, so too can public health policy.
Among the many transgressions made by Trump’s health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “perhaps worst of all,” argued the New York Times public health columnist Jeneen Interlandi, he fired everyone on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with “a mix of ideologues and incompetents” who have revoked past vaccine recommendations without scientific basis. Fortunately, the damage to date has been limited because private health insurers, so far, aren’t letting Kennedy’s recommendations dictate their coverage decisions. Still, Interlandi warned that the announcements are “likely to sow confusion, undermine public trust and ultimately drive the nation’s vaccination rates down.”
Rates have already gone down; a Washington Post analysis found that “the share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles—the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as ‘herd immunity’—has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent.” In turn, measles cases have more than sextupled, from 285 in 2024 to 2,144 in 2025. So long as there is an active anti-vaccine movement, we can’t expect vaccination rates to rebound overnight. But a future HHS secretary can begin to restore trust in vaccines by replacing the entire ACIP, just as Kennedy did. (And a well-financed, multiyear pro-vaccine advertising campaign couldn’t hurt.)
High tariffs are another policy that a successor can roll back with ease. The heightened import taxes have not completely upended the global economy, as the effective rate is significantly less than Trump’s sticker price, partly because many importers have employed not-necessarily-legal avoidance strategies. Still, the impact has been fatal to some businesses; bankruptcies hit a post–Great Recession record in 2025 with more than 700 businesses going under. The Washington Post observed that “the rise in filings is most apparent among industrials—companies tied to manufacturing, construction and transportation. The sector has been hit hard by President Donald Trump’s ever-fluid tariff policies.” And while affordability is a top concern for many voters, Trump’s tariffs have compounded the problem by imposing a $1,200 tax bite on the average household.
The Supreme Court might rule this year that some of Trump’s tariffs were illegally imposed using errant claims of emergency powers, but in that scenario Trump reportedly plans to cite different statutes to justify keeping the tariffs in place.
Tariffs brought in about $195 billion of revenue in fiscal year 2025, with Trump’s rates kicking in at the halfway point. Fiscal year 2026 is expected to produce $247 billion in tariff revenue. Last August, The New York Times suggested that “such a substantial stream of revenue could end up being hard to quit” when federal debt is at such high levels. But the opposite is more likely to be true. More enticing for the next president than maintaining a revenue stream that nicks the budget deficit is the power to deliver an instant tax cut. Besides, $247 billion isn’t all that substantial when the federal government took in $5.23 trillion of overall revenue during the last fiscal year. And a future Democratic president with the help of a Democratic Congress will likely be eager to impose higher taxes on the wealthy, which would help offset the cost of reduced tariffs.
No Democratic successor to Trump will let his smash-and-grab approach to foreign policy stand for one additional second, and won’t need more time than that to bury it.
Trump’s aggression on the world stage escalated in late 2025 and early 2026 with a spate of extrajudicial killings from military strikes on boats—ostensibly to stop Venezuelan drug trafficking but without clear evidence or other legal justification—capped by the capture of Venezuela’s illegitimate and authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro. But Trump and his top aides dispensed with any high-minded talk about restoring democracy in Venezuela, opting to leave in place the rest of Maduro’s government so long as it provides America with access to its oil reserves. Stephen Miller, Trump’s special assistant, defended the operation and Trump’s follow-up threats to take Greenland from Denmark by proclaiming on CNN, “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” intending to dump eight decades of decolonization, international law, and the NATO security alliance into the historical dustbin.
One can understand why Robert Kagan and others fear that Trump is permanently destroying a liberal world order that has successfully prevented a repeat of the early 20th century’s devastating world wars. A notable political science paper from Wellesley College’s Stacie Goddard and Georgetown University’s Abraham Newman says Trump’s philosophy “centers on an international system structured by a small group of hyper elites … Such cliques seek to legitimize their authority through appeals to their exceptionalism in order to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.” Frightening stuff, oblivious to the carnage that resulted from the imperialist authoritarians before the victors of World War II established the United Nations and related international laws and norms.
However, no Democratic successor to Trump will let his smash-and-grab approach to foreign policy stand for one additional second, and won’t need more time than that to bury it. There’s no significant constituency within the Democratic Party electorate or progressive activist movement for any form of gunboat diplomacy, not to mention Trump’s favorable attitude toward Russia and the undermining of NATO. A Washington Post poll taken immediately after the Venezuelan military operation found that 76 percent of Democrats disapproved of it. And a late-December poll from The Economist/YouGov showed that 75 percent of Democrats want to maintain or increase military aid for Ukraine. Any viable Democratic presidential candidate will almost surely adhere to these views.
The remaining question, related to the concerns raised by Kagan, Kristof, Litan, and others, is whether Trump permanently leaves behind mistrust among the rest of the world regarding America’s long-term commitment to the post–World War II liberal international order and the institutions that uphold it. It’s likely that lingering doubts cannot be fully washed away with a new administration. But what will also remain is the underlying logic of a rules-based global system, which most nations understand restrains imperialist behavior and yields security, stability, and economic benefits that were not enjoyed in the war-ravaged years of the early 20th century. In particular, European nations face an imperialist Russia eager to see NATO dissolved, on top of economic threats from China’s low-wage workforce.
In turn, Europe still needs American help, and won’t turn it down from the next president just because Trump often withheld it. After all, Europe was not all that happy with decisions made during the George W. Bush administration (the invasion of Iraq) and the first Trump administration (the warming of relations with Vladimir Putin) that strained America’s relationship with NATO. Yet the relationship was quickly renewed with their successors Obama and Biden.
Yes, European nations are known to be pondering a world without a reliable American partner, but this does not mean that the world order will shatter. NATO has experienced tumult and strain before—in 1966, for example, France withdrew from NATO’s military apparatus, not to return until 2009—without breaking. And America has long encouraged more contribution from Europe, supporting the formation of the EU and appealing for more military defense spending. A more assertive Europe won’t change the fact that Europe and the U.S. are inherently stronger in partnership, and geopolitical forces are likely to keep them allied.
Reversing our foreign policy strategy and scrapping executive orders with the stroke of a pen will be easier than repairing the extensive damage Trump has inflicted on the federal bureaucracy. Not only has Trump shed more than 300,000 federal employees, he also has shuttered USAID, closed down the EPA’s scientific research division, starved the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, cut Education Department staff by nearly half (including most everyone in the special education division) and slashed CDC staff by about a quarter. Seven thousand Social Security workers were forced out, disrupting customer service. Some firings are being challenged in court, but Trump has mostly avoided judicial stays that could have stopped firings from proceeding. Moreover, the vast majority of staff departures have been technically voluntary, albeit under extreme presidential pressure. More firings loom in 2026, as the administration is on the verge of implementing an executive order that will strip workplace protections from approximately 50,000 career civil servants.
The main challenge facing Trump’s successor is not the federal government’s capacity to create or scale up departments and agencies; it’s recruiting talented and competent people willing to take a government post without the assumed ironclad job and retirement security.
It’s easier to destroy than to build. But what Trump has not destroyed—because, again, he’s allergic to the legislative process—are the laws that established departments and agencies and programs. So long as they are on the books, a new administration and Congress can quickly restore funding through the appropriations process. Case in point: In Trump’s first term he clamped down on the refugee resettlement program, ratcheting down the cap on the number of people admitted from 85,000 at the end of Obama’s presidency to a scant 18,000. But Trump did this by executive action, not legislation. Biden, therefore, was able to ramp the program up after a couple of years, bringing in 100,000 refugees in 2024.
Moreover, we should not forget that we have built major cabinet departments and federal agencies before, often quickly. The Education Department didn’t always exist; it was created by a law signed by Jimmy Carter in October 1979 and began operations seven months later. USAID didn’t always exist; JFK established it in September 1961 immediately after signing legislation requiring a single agency to administer foreign assistance. The CFPB didn’t always exist; Obama, at the urging of then Professor Elizabeth Warren, created it as part of his financial regulation law, with operations beginning 10 months later. Social Security didn’t always exist; FDR signed the Social Security Act in August 1935, and the first Social Security card was issued in November 1936.
Kennedy also created the Peace Corps out of whole cloth. Carter established the Department of Energy and FEMA. Clinton signed a law in 1997 creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and by the following year 1 million children were enrolled in the program. Clinton also invigorated FEMA, which had developed a reputation as a bureaucratic backwater during the Republican administrations of the 1980s, by naming for the first time a director with disaster management experience, James Witt, who was widely credited for professionalizing the agency by the end of Clinton’s first term. George W. Bush, after initial resistance to a bureaucratic expansion, signed the law in November 2002 that created the Department of Homeland Security, which was up and running by February 2003. Bush also created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program, which was providing treatment to 2.4 million AIDS patients around the globe by 2009.
Still, building back the civilian workforce and decimated agencies is not as simple as posting some Help Wanted ads. Many of the above initiatives did not have smooth rollouts. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian who served as Kennedy’s special assistant, wrote in A Thousand Days, “Changing the direction of an agency while it continues its day-to-day operations is one of the hardest tricks in government; it has been likened to performing surgery on a man while he hauls a trunk upstairs.” He made that observation while recounting the struggles of USAID in its first year, leading to the departure of its first leader and budget cuts from a nonplussed Congress. But by 1966 USAID joined a smallpox vaccination campaign alongside the World Health Organization and the Soviet Union that eradicated the disease by 1980, the first example of global eradication.
Another forgotten example comes from the early days of Social Security, which pioneered the use of punch card technology, but workers had to first overcome a rodent infestation. One worker recounted, “I remember as we were sitting at our cardpunch machines, we were throwing paper clips at rats, and I mean they were rats. I remember one time the men were trying to get a rat down from the pipes that ran across the ceiling, and we watched them try to get that rat down. Then the mice, too, were doing damage, they were eating up all the data.”
All government initiatives take some time to stand up and refine. But post-Trump, we will have the additional challenge of convincing people that working for the federal government is still a sound career choice. One of the appeals of a public-sector gig is job security and a pension. The Trump wrecking ball has smashed that compact.
As Donald F. Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told me, “How hard is it going to be to convince younger people graduating from college or from graduate school that what they really need to do is … make a career in the federal government. And they say, ‘Well, but look what happened to the last crew. They got fired because they were probationary employees.’ The reply is, ‘We fixed all that and we’re not going to do that anymore.’ Their reply is, ‘Uh, how can we be sure?’”
In turn, the main challenge facing Trump’s successor—assuming that successor is a Democrat or an anti-MAGA Republican interested in undoing Trump’s damage to the federal government—is not the federal government’s innate capacity to create or scale up departments and agencies; it’s recruiting talented and competent people willing to take a government post without the assumed ironclad job and retirement security.
Ideally, the best way to address that problem would be with legislation that explicitly prevented capricious firing or mass pressure tactics by the president. But we can’t bank on a future Congress being composed of a civil service–friendly filibuster-proof supermajority.
Max Stier, chief executive officer of the Partnership for Public Service, which supports policies that improve the effectiveness of the federal civil service, is not sanguine about what will follow Trump. “Much of what Donald Trump is doing is actually arson, demolition, whatever metaphor you want to use here,” he told me. “And those are things that you can’t rebuild, at least quickly.” He’s particularly concerned about the norm-busting precedents set by “the removal of independent actors,” pointing to Trump’s firing without cause of 17 inspectors general, both Democratic Federal Trade Commission members, and the head of the Office of Special Counsel.
Stier is relatively more hopeful about rebuilding agencies more directly under presidential authority, citing the Department of Education and the CFPB as examples, but stressed that rebuilding “will not simply be about hiring a set of people. It will be about returning to an ethos that this is about the public’s interest rather than the leaders of the day.”
To resurrect the ethos of public service, the next president will have to rely on Kennedyesque appeals to patriotism and idealism. We all remember Kennedy’s line from his January 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That line was uttered without much surrounding context. But to many young people it was implicitly tied to a call issued by Kennedy one week before the 1960 election, when he proposed “a peace corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for three years, as an alternative or as a supplement to peacetime selective service.” Kennedy concluded the campaign speech with the following:
I am convinced that the pool of people in this country of ours, anxious to respond to the public service, is greater than it has ever been in our history.
I am convinced that our men and women, dedicated to freedom, are able to be missionaries, not only for freedom and peace, but join in a worldwide struggle against poverty and disease and ignorance, diseases in Latin America and Brazil, which prevented any child in two villages in the last 12 months from reaching one year of age.
I think this country in the 1960s can start to move forward again, can demonstrate what a free society, freely moving and working can do.
Archimedes said, “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world.” We in the Sixties are going to move the world again in the direction of freedom and I ask your help in doing so.
That speech sparked 25,000 letters of interest, and prompted Kennedy to create the Peace Corps by executive order just six weeks into his presidency. Upon its creation, Kennedy announced, “More applications for the Peace Corps have come to us than have come for positions in all the rest of the United States government put together. What is remarkable is that there is no salary for the members of the Peace Corps. They will go abroad and live on the same standard as people of other countries.”
We need to recapture that spirit and tap into the desires of Americans to be part of a great cause.
In a time of deep skepticism toward institutions, candidates need not ask voters to trust another political class, but to recognize that America’s renewal depends on them, their friends, and their neighbors stepping up to work for America.
In the aftermath of Trump, a broader, sustained appeal for Americans to serve their country will be necessary to revitalize the civil service. It should not wait until the week before the next presidential election, and it should not be narrowly targeted to the creation of one program. Americans should hear—now and for the next several years, to break through the social media cacophony—that hundreds of thousands of people of different occupational backgrounds and talents will be needed to fix what has been broken, to make the federal government work more efficiently than it ever has before, to better educate our children, promote public health, modernize our infrastructure, regulate our financial system, and eradicate poverty at home and abroad.
At a time when skepticism of political establishments and institutions is palpable, candidates need not try to push the uphill argument that cynical voters should invest their trust in another set of politicians. Instead, candidates can tell voters their country needs them, their friends, and their neighbors to revitalize America by working for America.
Sixty-five years ago, Kennedy didn’t need to dangle big paydays to staff up the Peace Corps. The opportunity to be part of a world-changing initiative was enough. Today, if the promise of a government job for life is no longer available, we can still offer government jobs with meaning and purpose. And if a career change as a federal civil servant isn’t the right fit for everyone, then Americans can be encouraged to explore ways to pitch in on a volunteer basis in their communities, including at schools, health clinics, food banks, and local government bodies.
Trump will only have a lasting legacy if we allow our future leaders to replicate his authoritarian divide-and-conquer governing style. By resurrecting a patriotic spirit of community service, we can ensure that we not only remove his name from government buildings, but we also remove any trace of policy from his time in office as much as we can.
