The Stew Year in Review: Twelve months of Trump 2.0

In January, the second Trump administration hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders, and the pace has not let up. The administration has made drastic changes to the federal bureaucracy, reworked trade agreements, and spent significant time in court defending controversial actions, all while Congress debates its own role and relationship with the executive branch. Here are a few of the top stories from 2025:

Can he do that? Trump’s second term

In the past year, President Donald Trump has signed 225 executive orders, more than any president in a four-year term since Jimmy Carter. The vast majority, though, have been tied up in legal battles, with judges imposing injunctions to block many orders from taking effect. It all came to a head at the Supreme Court this year, which heard arguments over whether judges had the authority to broadly pause actions while litigation played out. But the case that sparked many of the injunctions will head back to the nation’s highest court in the new year, with the Supreme Court deciding whether Trump’s executive order to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants is constitutional.

It’s also been a year of emergency declarations. In April, Trump declared a national emergency over trade, which he said gave him the authority to levy strict tariffs on goods from other nations. It set off a barrage of renegotiated trade agreements, a tit-for-tat trade war with China, and legal fights over whether Trump even had the authority to impose the tariffs. Trump also declared a national emergency over crime and deployed the National Guard to major cities across the country to assist state and local law enforcement. The first such deployment was in Washington and is ongoing. Other units went to Memphis, Tenn., Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. Last week, the Supreme Court found that Trump did not have sufficient justification for sending the National Guard to Chicago. On Dec. 31, Trump announced in a social media post he would withdraw troops from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Ore., but said he might send them again if crime rates rise.

DOGE days

The Trump administration hit the ground running on its campaign promise to take an axe to the federal bureaucracy. At the helm was tech billionaire Elon Musk, a special government employee in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was the retooled version of the digital services department. DOGE built a website to track and slash federal contracts and halt spending. The first major division on the chopping block was the U.S. Agency for International Development. Over a weekend, workers found themselves locked out of their emails and ordered to go on leave. DOGE claimed it had found abundant waste, fraud, and abuse in federal contracts, but voters across the country protested the cuts at town halls. Now the agency exists as a fraction of its former size, housed under the State Department. DOGE claimed to cut $52 billion in taxpayer dollars and fired 271,000 federal employees, though independent analyses have disputed the final sum. In July, Congress passed a rescissions package, which codified many of the cuts DOGE enacted.

Peace plans 

In September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined Trump at the White House to finalize a 20-point peace plan to end the war with Hamas. The two sides are still working through the first of the plan’s three stages, which includes a potential path to Palestinian statehood if years of reforms take place.

The thornier peace agreement for Trump has been the nearly four-year war between Russia and Ukraine. Throughout the year, the president held talks with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump criticized both leaders at times, accusing them of circumventing the peace process. He levied several deadlines on both countries to come to a deal, though all of the deadlines have passed.

Healthcare stalemate 

In October, Democrats voted against a temporary government funding package to try to force Republicans to extend COVID-era subsidies for Obamacare plans. Republicans insisted that they would only start healthcare negotiations after Congress passed a funding bill. The stalemate lasted 43 days, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. By the end of it, Democrats came away with only a promise of a future vote, but more Republicans were willing to discuss extending the temporary subsidies. After the shutdown, conservatives proposed several of their own bills to address the subsidies and broader concerns with Obamacare, but none passed.

Anti-Semitism

Israel proved to be a defining issue both politically and theologically in 2025. Early in the year, the Heritage Foundation rolled out Project Esther, a plan to combat left-wing anti-Semitism. Congress also considered but rejected the Antisemitism Awareness Act after members disagreed over whether the language defining anti-Semitism went too far. At the White House, Trump launched the White House Faith Office, led by charismatic Florida televangelist Paula White-Cain. Over the past year, she has hosted a revolving door of pastors from around the country, many of whom have varying views on the end times and the nation of Israel’s role in them. But as the year wound on, one of Trump’s own executive nominees was found to have texted anti-Semitic comments. Popular conservative podcasters hosted Holocaust deniers on their shows, and a large group of scholars left the Heritage Foundation after the organization’s president defended one such podcaster, Tucker Carlson, for doing so. In the fallout, conservatives launched new organizations, this time to combat a rising trend in right-wing anti-Semitism.