I constantly hear on the news from both conservative and liberal media that Americans are complaining about unaffordability and how families are struggling to make ends meet under the Trump Administration. Well, it is high time that middle America woke up and discovered that it is not Trump’s fault that things are unaffordable. The left will continue to propagandize us about the war with Iran and how everything is so unaffordable.
I, for one, will continue to cheer Trump on, as he is the first president in 47 years who was willing to take on the Iranian problem. Removing Iran’s nuclear capability has made the whole world a lot safer. The reality is that we should all stop looking at the glass that is half empty and instead look at the glass that is half full and rising. Our economy is just beginning to recover after four years of Biden and America is starting a new era of expansion with trillions being invested in new plant and equipment that will soon need tens of thousands of employees to operate them. It is a time for patience and presentence as things are improving. This is not a time to give up when we can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. Take a look at the score card of Trumps first and current second term compared to Joe Bidens four miserable years of misleading our country. I think you will agree with me that things are not as bad as the news media would have you believe.
First term (2017–2021) the scorecard
The centerpiece was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cutting the corporate rate from 35% to 21%, nearly doubling the standard deduction, fueling the pre-COVID boom: unemployment hit 3.5%, a 50-year low, with record-low Black and Hispanic unemployment and real wage gains concentrated at the bottom of the income scale. Alongside, these changes came the most aggressive deregulation push in decades.
Most important were the court appointments: Trump reshaped the judiciary for a generation by appointing three Supreme Court justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett) and more than 230 federal judges and this the achievement conservatives prize most, and the one that later produced Dobbs.
Trump stopped the border crisis with: Remain in Mexico, construction of the wall, and asylum agreements which drove crossings to low levels before the pandemic.
The U.S. became a net energy exporter for the first time in decades: America finally became energy independent.
Trump’s foreign policy gave us the Abraham Accords: He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem something previous U.S. presidents promised but never accomplished. He destroyed the ISIS territorial caliphate, killing Baghdadi and Soleimani.
He pressed NATO allies on burden-sharing requiring they pony up contributions of 5% of GDP and replaced NAFTA with the USMCA, and confronted China on trade all while starting no new wars. Let’s not forget the bipartisan First Step Act on criminal-justice reform.
Second term (2025–2026) the scorecard
The signature legislative achievement, “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, signed July 4, 2025. This made the 2017 tax rates permanent, delivered no tax on tips (~7 million workers) and no tax on overtime (~28 million claimants), raised the SALT cap, and created “Trump Accounts” seeded with $1,000 for newborns. The Tax Foundation pegged average 2026 tax relief around $3,750 per filer.
The most dramatic result of Trump’s election was at the border: every month since February 2025 has seen fewer than 10,000 southwest encounters the lowest levels in over 50 years, per CBP and Pew with extended stretches of “zero releases,” apprehensions down roughly 90%+, and large-scale deportations with 3 million to date. Conservatives call this the clearest proof that the prior surge was a policy choice, not an uncontrollable force.
Rounding out Trump’s list of achievements: an aggressive tariff/trade-renegotiation agenda, DOGE deregulation and spending cuts, continued judicial confirmations, and a “drill, baby, drill” energy posture which has made America energy independent. While the DOGE savings figures have been disputed as overstated once audited there is no question that DOGE had a positive effect in pushing hundreds of thousands of government workers to retire or quite their jobs as the federal workforce shrank by 10.3% in 2025. His tariff policy caused some serious concern with economists warning of higher consumer prices and market volatility. It was a SCOTUS decision that found most of the tariffs to be unenforceable and refunds are still being made but not all of the refund recipients are sharing those rebates with consumers and many have not lowered their prices.
The War with Iran has been the most contentious of Trump’s Decisions: We are 6 months into this war and the cost is approximately $200 Billion and is surely going to be higher when u include the cost of rehabilitation and hospital stays for those who have been injured. The real question was and still is “Were we going to allow Iran to have a Nuke and hold it over not only our heads but that of any country they decided to threaten. Allowing Iran to have a nuclear device and deliver system was like the sword of Domiciles being held over every one’s head. Was President Trumps decision the right one. Only time will tell but he removed the immediate threat of Iran being a nuclear power and the oil from the Middle East is once again flowing through the Straight of Hormuz.
How much “damage” did Joe Biden really do to the economy?
From the conservative vantage point, the indictment centers on one word inflation and the numbers back up that it was the defining economic failure of the term as all figures via FactCheck.org’s final tally:
Cumulative inflation of 21.5% over four years, with a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, a 40-year high. Prices simply never came back down; the rate slowed, but the higher price level stuck.
Real (inflation-adjusted) weekly earnings fell about 4%. This is the crux of the conservative argument: even though paychecks rose 16.7% on paper, workers ended the term with less purchasing power than they started with.
Gasoline up 31% peak ~$5.02/gal (Jun 2022)
National debt up 33% (roughly $21.6T to $28.8T), with a FY2024 deficit over $1.8 trillion conservatives tie the $1.9T American Rescue Plan directly to overheating demand and igniting the inflation.
Add the border surge as a fiscal and social cost borne disproportionately by states and localities. Rents and home prices surged higher as A Federal Reserve (Dallas) study attributes ~30% of the 2021–24 home-price jump and ~20% of rent growth to the surge a demand shock hitting fixed supply. Total fiscal cost of the surge: An honest range is tens of billions up to ~$150B/yr net, depending on whether you count citizen children and how much tax offset you allow with the housing and wage effects sitting on top.
Biden’s legacy is the real cost of removing all of these illegals: and sending them back to their countries of origin? That is the big question. To date it is estimated that 3 million have either deported or been sent back to their countries by the immigration service. The cost to remove all illegals will be very expensive by any measure ≥$315B one-time or ~$88B/yr sustained which is an estimate of the American Immigration Council. So, Joe really put us between a rock and a hard place as the cost of having him in the oval office will continue to plague us more than likely for decades.
“We Get the Government We Deserve”
