Affordability
What He Said During the campaign, Mr. Trump said that his administration would “rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again.”
What He Did Mr. Trump has yet to provide the relief many Americans were hoping for. Elevated inflation persists, and most prices are higher than they were a year ago, according to government data.
White House officials contend that their policies have driven down gas prices, which hover around $3 a gallon. But experts are mixed on whether Mr. Trump’s policies have been the primary factor.
Prices for many household items, including groceries, remain higher than they were a year ago. Mr. Trump has started to relax tariffs on some imports like coffee, bananas, beef and tomatoes, to help bring prices down.
The economy did grow vigorously through the end of September, the Commerce Department reported recently, showing that Mr. Trump’s tariffs have not had the depressive effect that many economists once feared.
Tariffs have still undoubtedly raised the costs of some goods. With prices high, voters increasingly say that they are unhappy with Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, recent polls show.
Mr. Trump has pressured the Federal Reserve to sharply lower interest rates, despite inflation moving in the wrong direction. The central bank has started to do so gradually, but officials are wary about lowering borrowing costs by too much.
As a result, mortgage rates remain high, and both Democrats and Republicans have widely panned Mr. Trump’s proposal for a 50-year mortgage. They say it does not address the root issue with housing costs: a nationwide housing shortage.
Under pressure from his party, Mr. Trump has proposed other policies to address affordability, including direct checks of $2,000 to many Americans. The details of that plan remain unclear.
Combating Illegal Drugs
What He Said During the campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to take on drug cartels. But he did so in the context of threatening to bomb Mexico, where labs create fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has caused a surge in American overdose deaths over the past decade.
What He Did Mr. Trump has trained military fire on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that he has said are carrying cocaine.
Mr. Trump’s drug policy in his second term has been a mix of extraordinary aggression and extraordinary contradictions.
Mr. Trump ordered his administration to begin designating drug cartels and criminal gangs as terrorists. The move was unprecedented. By definition, terrorists are groups that are motivated by ideology or religion; drug cartels are unscrupulous businesses seeking illicit profits.
In July, Mr. Trump secretly ordered the military to start attacking boats in international waters suspected of smuggling drugs linked to cartels his administration had labeled terrorists. The Coast Guard had long dealt with maritime drug runners by intercepting boats and arresting people. But since Sept. 2, the U.S. military has attacked 29 such boats, killing 105 people.
The administration declared that the extrajudicial killings were lawful because Mr. Trump had “determined” that the United States was in a formal armed conflict with publicly unspecified drug cartels, and that the people on the boats being killed were “combatants.”
A broad range of legal specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have rejected the logic that drugs can be legitimately recast as a weapon, and that trafficking them can be described as an armed attack.
The Trump administration’s core justification is a surge in overdose deaths by American drug users over the past decade. But that surge was caused largely by fentanyl, which is manufactured in Mexican labs using chemicals from China. The attacks have targeted boats suspected of carrying cocaine from South America.
Despite the messaging about drugs, there have been signs that the attacks may be a precursor to a leadership-change operation in oil-rich Venezuela. Mr. Trump has sent an extensive amount of naval firepower into the Caribbean, and his aides have urged him to use force to remove President Nicolás Maduro from power.
The administration’s talk about ousting Mr. Maduro has centered on his indictment on charges of conspiring to export cocaine to the United States. But in December, Mr. Trump pardoned a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in federal court last year of conspiring to export cocaine to the United States.
This month, Mr. Trump also signed an executive order that would ease some limits on marijuana.
Wars
What He Said Mr. Trump ran on a promise to get and keep the United States out of wars. He pledged to use his personal relationship with foreign leaders to swiftly end overseas conflicts.
What He Did He played a key role in bringing about a cease-fire in Gaza, but failed in his pledge to get a quick peace deal in Ukraine. He has exaggerated his success in settling other conflicts, and has departed from his vow to not start wars, by confronting Venezuela with military force.
Mr. Trump failed to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine within 24 hours of his inauguration, as he vowed to do on the campaign trail. His special envoys are working with Ukrainian and Russian counterparts. But despite concessions from Kyiv, Moscow has been unwilling to agree to a deal.
Still, Mr. Trump secured a peace deal intended to end a two-year war between Israel and Hamas. Violence has continued to flare in Gaza, but the United Nations Security Council approved the plan last month.
Mr. Trump has also frequently overstated his efforts at ending wars, once insisting he had solved eight wars in eight months.
But that claim lacks context.
Mr. Trump used the threat of halting trade to help broker a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia in July. Fighting still broke out between them in December.
And while Mr. Trump often brags about brokering a peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, deadly fighting has persisted.
In the case of India and Pakistan, New Delhi said the Trump administration did help mediate a potentially larger conflict. But India has noted that it directly negotiated with Pakistan to reach an end to fighting.
And Mr. Trump angered many of his supporters when he greenlit a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, raising concerns of a broader regional war. Days later, Mr. Trump announced that the United States had mediated a cease-fire.
