Promises made, promises kept, almost all 

So far Trump has essentially closed the southern border, started deporting the worst of the illegal alien gang members, made our streets safer, and freed the last American held in Gaza. He created DOGE, which has found huge government waste and abuse. RFK Jr.’s HHS has cut out harmful chemicals in our food. And an executive order is making Big Pharma stop price gouging us.

When will this insanity ever end?!  

Or that is what the Democrats are trying to say. They are in such a dismal state that they still cannot agree whether Elon Musk or Trump is Hitler. With the tell-all books by Dems about them suddenly recognizing Biden’s cognitive decline four years ago, Dems might stop calling Trump Hitler and start calling him Biden.

The stock market wobbled, but it didn’t fall down. Inflation numbers came in less than expected at 2.3 percent, and jobs numbers were better than expected. There were 177,000 new jobs taken in the USA. But to be fair, a third of them were taken by Marco Rubio. He’s the only Hispanic in the cabinet, so he works several jobs.

There is talk that even the more generic and necessary of the drugs we need will be made essentially free for us. I remember in college, you could only get free drugs by wearing a short dress and a low-cut top to a fraternity party.

Democrats are saying that the Hispanic community is being targeted, citing the fact that many Mexican groups canceled their public Cinco de Mayo celebrations for fear of deportation raids by ICE. So, I guess they could not celebrate their love of their native Mexico for fear of being sent back to Mexico.

Libertarians and other believers in limited government have plenty of reasons to applaud those DOGE cuts. Given the incentives and propensity of federal government to only grow bigger each year, with no one reasoning through the simple question of “Why?” it’s reasonable to regard DOGE’s work as Trump’s most important accomplishment.

Yet the savings will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, not $2 trillion a year. The idea of cutting $1 trillion or $2 trillion was never feasible to begin with when 75 percent of spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest payments on the national debt – nearly all of which was taken off the table by Trump as political suicide (not that they don’t need to be reckoned with, but the spineless weasels in Congress would not support it).

Tariffs have been a mixed bag. Signs that they may work? Well, we’ve produced the first American-made Pope, but so far the success is limited to that. For tariffs to work, there must be a long-term commitment to them so the markets understand that they are here to stay. No company builds a plant in America (which takes two years) until they are sure the next Congress is not going to reverse the Trump tariffs.

No new wars have started, and it seems both the Ukraine and Gaza wars are subsiding. Trump didn’t put an end to them on “day one,” as he boasted. But the trajectory is good — much better than Biden’s.

There have been no terrorist problems under Trump. He has bombed Yemen pirates to open sea lanes. Biden offered little but rhetoric on the matter. He threatened to go after the Houthis, and said he’d take it a step further, promising to get their backers, the Blowfish, too. But he really did nothing.

Trump seems to have quickly calmed the skirmish between India and Pakistan. It would be dangerous to let that escalate into World War 7-11.

He wants to increase the U.S. birth rates, but with Elon Musk working 24/7 at three jobs, that has been hard to do.

Trump trolls the left, sending them into a tizzy. He is talking about accepting a jet from Qatar to become Air Force One. Dems yelp! But to be fair, if the U.S. is owed a jumbo airliner or two, it would be better from the United Arab Emirates. 

To make it worse, Trump goes to ultra conservative Saudi Arabia for his first major trip. George Washington crossed the Delaware, Teddy Roosevelt charged San Juan Hill, George H.W. Bush was shot down and rescued during World War II –all profiles in courage in the face of danger. And Trump? Well, he played the Village People’s “YMCA” gay anthem as his walk-off music in Saudi Arabia. 

Ron Hart is a libertarian op-ed humorist, award-winning author, and a frequent guest on TV. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on X.