January 20 marks one year since Trump returned to the presidency. He came into office promising a new American “golden age.” While liberals warned of an authoritarian blitzkrieg, the first year of Trump 2.0 was characterized by dysfunction, disorder, and disarray rather than dictatorship.
Trump has vacillated wildly on domestic and foreign policy. Meanwhile, he’s been damaged by the Epstein scandal and growing economic unease, threatening to tear his cross-class MAGA coalition apart. What follows is a ledger of the attacks, retreats, promises, blunders, and contradictions that Trump has laid bare.
November 2024: Trump Wins, Democrats Faceplant
Image: public domain
The Democrats faceplanted spectacularly in the election. After ushering Joe Biden offstage, Harris’s strategy was to pretend “Bidenomics” was a success. Scaremongering about “fascism” couldn’t save her campaign, and she promised that “not a thing” would differentiate her policies from Biden’s.
Trump reprised his old “outsider” routine. He tapped into working-class anger and distorted it into a tool for his reactionary aims.
Both Trump and Harris leaned on the classic bourgeois tactic of stoking anti-immigrant sentiment to split and pit workers against each other. But Trump acknowledged hard realities: America is a superpower in retreat, with an economy fraying at the seams and a ruling class too weakened to impose its will abroad unchallenged. He promised to tackle inflation, bring back millions of lost manufacturing jobs, and end the Ukraine War in 24 hours.
January: DOGE Wreaks Havoc on Federal Workers
Image: Andrew Harnik, Getty Images
Trump “flooded the zone” with executive orders. He largely leaned into culture war issues, while other orders targeted immigrants and union workers.
Setting up DOGE with Elon Musk at its helm, Trump began firing federal workers in an attempt to create a leaner state and lay the groundwork for future austerity cuts. He appointed a cabinet of billionaires worth more than half a trillion dollars, which started to undermine the populist image that propelled him into the White House.
February: Breakdown of Liberal World Order
Image: President Of Ukraine, Wikimedia Commons
Trump triggered a geopolitical rupture when he called Vladimir Putin to discuss a Ukraine peace deal. His administration announced plans to open negotiations directly with Russia, keeping both Western European leaders and the Kiev regime away from the peace table.
The diplomatic turn was an admission of what communists said all along: this was a proxy war between Russian and American imperialism, in which Ukraine was a mere pawn. It also sounded the de facto death knell of the postwar liberal world order, signaling Trump’s desire to turn away from Europe and focus on retrenching US imperialism in the Americas.
March: Tariff Barrage on Canada and Mexico
Image: public domain
Trump launched his initial tariff barrage on Canada and Mexico, initiating a ham-fisted attempt to reshore manufacturing industries. The administration followed this by floating plans to seize control of key border-trade corridors under the guise of “national security.” This sharpened divisions inside his own base which includes capitalists, farmers, and truckers who depend on cross-border commerce.
Trump’s “America First” foreign policy began unraveling upon first contact with reality. He praised Putin one day and threatened new sanctions the next, while simultaneously claiming Beijing was both a partner in trade and an existential threat. This zig-zagging continues up to the present day, a sign of the weakness of US imperialism’s position.
April: Global Trade Shaken by “Liberation Day”
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By spring, the $36-trillion-and-counting federal debt had pushed the debt-to-GDP ratio past 123%. Burdened by nearly $18 trillion in household debt, consumer spending—the last pillar propping up the economy—had been plummeting since the winter.
Consumer confidence indices posted their steepest early-year drops since the Great Recession. Credit-card delinquencies hit 14-year highs, auto-loan defaults reached levels unseen in three decades, and early withdrawals from retirement accounts surged as workers struggled to pay their bills.
Trump unleashed his “Liberation Day” tariffs into this deteriorating economic landscape—promising “revival” while tightening the vise between stagnant wages and rising prices. Stocks, bonds, and the US dollar plummeted on the markets. To ward off capital flight, Trump was forced to pause his tariff barrage.
May: Tariff Mayhem, Trump Seeks Distractions
Image: In Defence of Marxism
Markets lurched between panic and euphoria as the administration swung from tariff threats to half-baked easing measures. Business investment froze. Manufacturers announced fresh layoffs, supply-chain gaps widened.
Trump needed a distraction. For months, ICE had been terrorizing migrant communities across the country, mainly in small towns. To whip up his base, Trump selected the largest population of immigrant workers in America for his next act.
June: L.A. ICE Raids, Israel and U.S. Bomb Iran
Image: Avash Media, Wikimedia Commons
The raids in Los Angeles showcased the brutality of ICE, LAPD, and federalized troops against working people. Trump tripled arrest quotas and rolled out a surveillance app to track hundreds of thousands. Sweeping “collateral” arrests turned entire neighborhoods into ICE targets.
Democrats denounced the optics while helping coordinate the repression—Mayor Bass imposed a curfew, while Governor Newsom bragged about working with ICE.
Tens of thousands took to the streets. Clashes escalated across the country. Low morale among National Guardsmen signaled the possibility that troops might refuse to act against their own communities. But without a conscious, organized political force rooted in the working class, the movement remained uneven and reactive.
Businesses in border states—especially in Texas and California—reported significant labor shortages due to ICE raids. In response, Trump deescalated the ICE assault but kept the National Guard on standby in several states. ICE continued its work less brashly than before.
Abroad, Trump backed Israel’s 12-Day War on Iran, spending billions on “Operation Midnight Hammer”—attacks on three nuclear sites in Iran with “bunker-busting” Massive Ordnance Penetrators and Tomahawk missiles. Trump claimed victory, but there’s no evidence the strike did anything to impede Iran’s nuclear program. Some elements in MAGA, like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, openly questioned US support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.
July: “Are you still talking about Epstein?”
Image: public domain
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to expose Epstein’s “client list.” By late summer, the White House line was: Epstein who?
Polls showed 79% of Americans, including 75% of Republicans, wanted all Epstein documents released. Two-thirds believed Trump was covering it up. His approval among under-30s collapsed from 53% to 29%, and he was “ratioed” for the first time on Truth Social.
Trump’s “ big beautiful bill” passed, promising cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, while increasing the deficit by an estimated $3.4 trillion. The debt trajectory, combined with erratic trade policy, continues to undermine confidence in US Treasury Bonds as a “safe haven,” threatening another pillar of the postwar order.
August & September: Attacks on Venezuela, Kirk Assassination
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The White House began dispatching naval and air forces to the Caribbean—a naked act of imperialist aggression against Venezuela—under the thin cover of a renewed “war on drugs.” Trump’s goal: to push China out of the region and secure Venezuelan oil reserves before the next all-out regional conflagration in the Middle East.
On the economic front, the rhetoric of revival, strength, and stability had been stripped bare. Official inflation rebounded to 2.9%, and food prices rose 3.2%. Manufacturing slowed, capacity utilization dipped, and unemployment climbed to 4.3%—the highest since 2021. Unhappy with the weak jobs report, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with William J. Wiatrowski, a Heritage Foundation MAGA yes-man.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, while temporarily rallying the right around a martyr, did nothing to seal up the cracks in Trump’s base, and the rifts have only widened since as questions about his killing abound.
October: Longest Government Shutdown in History
Image: Daniel Huizinga, Flickr
Three-quarters of a million federal workers were furloughed during the government shutdown. The rest were forced to work without pay.
Democrats attempted to cast the crisis as a fight over healthcare, with little success. The current system is largely the product of “Obamacare,” a massive handout to the healthcare monopolies. Most workers saw through the Democrats’ cynical politicking.
Trump’s approval numbers kept sinking, especially on the economy. He relied once again on distractions: ICE raids, National Guard deployments, and loud talk about “restoring order.”
November/December: The Rot is Eating at the Foundations
Image: RCA
After fighting tooth-and-nail against the release of the Epstein files, Trump was forced to relent. The scandal shined a crack of light on capitalism’s dark underbelly, exposing the depravity of the ruling class.
Prices surged as pre-tariff stockpiles ran out. Government statistics on inflation and unemployment weren’t published due to the shutdown, but workers didn’t need charts to tell them that grocery prices were on the rise and it was getting harder and harder to find a job.
Only 30% approved of Trump’s handling of prices. More than a million workers had already been laid off. UPS announced 48,000 jobs cuts, while Amazon axed 14,000 in its largest layoff ever. Seasonal hiring for the holidays was projected to hit its lowest level since 2009.
That phrase—“since 2009”—hung in the air. Auto repossessions surpassed 2.2 million. Subprime auto delinquencies were higher than during every recession of the last quarter-century. Warnings of a $35 trillion AI-bubble implosion and an imperialist lurch into Latin America both showed a stumbling system trying to brace its footing.
What’s ahead in 2026
When Trump took office, 88% of American adults believed the US political system had been broken for “decades.” Millions hoped his second term would be the shock therapy required to set things right.
Instead, 84% of survey participants today say “democracy is in crisis or facing serious challenges.” A November Gallup poll found only 36% approve of Trump’s job performance.
Just as communists predicted at the start of last year, the “fascist takeover” prophesied by the liberals hasn’t happened. Neither have there been triumphs for American workers, as Trump promised.
Trump kicked off the year with a barbaric attack against Venezuela. He’s followed it up with threats against Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland. Trump is fully committing to hemispheric dominance, but this won’t change the fundamental instability of US capitalism. His attempts to dislodge China from the Americas could quickly turn into another of the “forever wars” which Trump campaigned on ending. The more Trump exposes himself as a servant of the warmongering, imperialist elite, the more his MAGA coalition will fracture.
The killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has caused a wave of outrage, with protests taking place across the country. Now, communists must prepare for a winter of discontent and the monumental class struggles that await us in the years ahead.