The Supreme Court’s decisive 6-3 ruling against Donald Trump’s tariffs added a capstone to more than a year of policy failure on every front for the Trump administration. Not only will this ruling trigger countless lawsuits against the administration to recoup tariff costs—it also totally reverses Trump’s signature economic policy, returns the White House to square one on trade and worsens the global climate of economic uncertainty that Trump created.
Constitutional experts had warned President Trump that invoking emergency powers to address an entirely hallucinated “emergency” could lead to ruin. But the president, addicted to the sugar high of governing almost exclusively by executive orders, simply could not resist the temptation of remaking American trade policy by fiat. By refusing to take the lawful path of asking Congress to implement his preferred economic agenda, he has ended up with the worst of all possible worlds—routed in the courts, embarrassed on the domestic and world stages and left clinging to virtually nothing other than a handful of fragile bilateral trade agreements.
This pattern of overpromising and dramatically underdelivering has characterized the entirety of Trump’s second term in office. He and his henchman Elon Musk promised a radical reduction in government waste through DOGE. Instead, government spending rose $248 billion year-over-year from 2024 to 2025. Musk did manage to terrorize the federal workforce with pointless cruelty and reduce its size. But tangible budget reductions, let alone realizing sufficient savings to cut every American a DOGE dividend check, was never going to happen. That’s because spending on government salaries is only a tiny fraction of overall federal spending.
The ill-conceived tariff mayhem that the Supreme Court just ended decisively was also supposed to juice the economy and jump start American manufacturing, ushering in a “golden age.” But manufacturing employment fell again in 2025, in part because many tariffs raised the price of inputs used by existing American companies, and because the general climate of uncertainty and fear was helpful to almost no one other than insider traders looking to make a quick buck from the latest policy pivot.
In terms of delivering for the American people, it has all been, at best, a complete waste of time. After President Trump was forced by immediate and potentially catastrophic market turmoil to roll back many of the most absurd Liberation Day tariffs, stocks rose only modestly for the rest of the year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics now estimates that the economy added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, with a fourth-quarter GDP growth estimate of an anemic 1.4 percent. Inflation, meanwhile, remains stubbornly high.
Not content with public pratfalls on tariffs and manufacturing, the Trump administration also preposterously oversold its mass deportation regime. Not only has the administration (thankfully) not deported nearly as many people as it promised, but terrorizing American communities with an endless stream of ICE outrages and civil rights abuses has not in fact lowered the cost of housing as the president ridiculously claimed it would throughout 2024. If anything, the inhumane, reprehensible effort to indiscriminately round up as many undocumented immigrants as possible has increased construction costs by reducing the supply of labor.
No sanctuary cities have reversed course and embraced the Trump administration’s vision for immigration restriction, and the infuriating, military-style campaigns waged against peaceful communities in the Twin Cities, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere have succeeded only in turning the public decisively against the administration. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos survey, just 38 percent of respondents approved of the administration’s immigration policies.
It’s the same story overseas. After his lawless attack on Iran in June 2025, for example, President Trump declared that the Iranian nuclear program had been destroyed. Nine months later, the U.S. is engaging in an expensive and unexplained military buildup in the Persian Gulf, presumably preparing to (illegally and without authorization from Congress) attack Iranian nuclear facilities it only recently declared vanquished. Again: overpromise, underdeliver.
It’s the same philosophy that led the president to declare endlessly during the 2024 election campaign that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war in a matter of days with his omniscient negotiating genius. Thirteen months in to Trump’s term, the war grinds on. The only Nobel Peace Prize the president could get his hands on is the one he extorted from the dissident whose cause he betrayed by (illegally, of course) installing a Nicolás Maduro crony as Venezuela’s leader.
As they stare down what looks like it could be a catastrophic drubbing in the midterm elections, Republican officials may soon need to reckon with a difficult reality—their elderly, incoherent leader has failed them, has no feasible plan to achieve his goals and has three long years left to wreak havoc on American society while inflicting what could be permanent damage on the GOP’s brand.
Some golden age.
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and a contributing writer at Slate, The Nation, The Week and Newsweek. He is the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. You can follow him on Bluesky.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
