SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
President Trump won reelection last year on a promise to upend Washington. He pitched a presidency where he alone could solve America's problems. Now, as we come to the close of 2025, we have asked senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro to join us to talk about the reality of those promises. Good to talk to both of you.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: So President Trump very clear during the 2024 campaign he was pitching a version of the federal government with him at the center of it. Did he follow through on that?
MONTANARO: Yeah, he's done more to try and centralize power in the executive branch than any president we can remember, whether that was using DOGE - that informal Department of Government Efficiency that was run by Elon Musk - or putting himself in charge of things from dismantling quasi-independent agencies and demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom without going through any of the usual protocols. He signed a record number of executive orders, used them to push back on the media, law firms - taking over the Kennedy Center, even - threatening grants as leverage against institutions of higher education. He's really pushed the limits and bent the guardrails of the presidency.
KEITH: There's also been a lot of retribution and just going after his political enemies.
DETROW: Let's talk more about that. A big part of how he executed this vision early on was DOGE. This was the big story of the first half of the year.
KEITH: Yeah. It can be a little difficult to untangle Elon Musk's DOGE project from White House Budget Director Russell Vought's relentless focus on cutting government and driving out federal employees. But here's a short list of institutions that under Trump have been rapidly dismantled, starved or completely remade this year - the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Voice of America, the Department of Education, the U.S. Institute of Peace - now the Donald Trump Institute of Peace. This week, the White House tweeted, quote, "federal employment is now at the lowest level since 2014, down by 271,000 jobs since President Trump took office. Promises made, promises kept."
DETROW: And we should say, as of this week, the Kennedy Center is now the Trump Kennedy Center. Changes all over the place. Let's talk about Congress for a minute, though. The flip side of a powerful presidency has been a Congress that's, is it fair to say, just standing aside and letting things happen?
KEITH: Yeah. This Congress, controlled by Republicans in both the House and the Senate, basically only did the things that President Trump said they had to do. If he didn't put political capital on the line, they weren't doing it. So Trump demanded expensive policies, like nearly $4 trillion over 10 years to make his first-term tax cuts permanent, also adding promises he made during the campaign, like no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime. And Republicans made that happen. He was lukewarm, though, on extending subsidies for health care through the Affordable Care Act, and as of the end of this year, Congress has failed to do anything to prevent those costs from skyrocketing.
MONTANARO: The one exception on all of this with Republican pushback has been the release of the Epstein files and his administration's handling of that, which has really become a political liability, and to an extent with moderate Republicans on these health care subsidies wanting to see those extended.
DETROW: So that's the legislative branch. What was the story of the judicial branch in 2025 as the Trump White House tried to seize so much power?
MONTANARO: Yeah, I think this is a really crucial branch of government right now because Trump has really pushed to see how far the Supreme Court will let him go. Remember, he appointed three of the justices who sit on the high court and flipped the court to a 6-3 ideological conservative majority. And the court gave him huge powers before the second term, saying that he's immune from criminal consequences for any official acts.
Given Republicans in Congress are greasing the wheels for Trump, the courts are really the last branch that can spell out what, if any, guardrails exist. You know, this applies on everything from the firings of federal workers, reducing or eliminating those federal agencies we were talking about, and just how far he's trying to go on deportations.
KEITH: We are currently watching two major cases in the court that could determine how far the Supreme Court is willing to let the president go, including birthright citizenship and also a challenge to his tariffs policy. And I think tariffs are a great example of how President Trump has led unilaterally in an area that typically would require some congressional involvement. He's imposed these significant tariffs on goods imported to the United States. In some cases, he's actually walked a little bit of it back, like on coffee, where there's been a spike in the price of coffee, then he rolled some of those tariffs back, facing some political pushback on affordability. But just to go more broadly, if his first term was characterized by a man bristling against guardrails, this one is about blowing through them and surrounding himself with people who don't view it as their job to constrain him.
DETROW: The thing is, he ran on doing exactly that. He was explicit in his promises. He took office, and he by and large followed through on those promises.
KEITH: Yep.
DETROW: And polls have showed that voters are not responding. They do not approve. What are we seeing? How should we think about public reaction over the course of the year?
MONTANARO: Yeah. I mean, Trump is really at the lowest point in his presidency. Just 38% of people in the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll said that they approve of the job he's doing overall - just 36% on his handling of the economy. People are really struggling to make ends meet, and they're saying that Trump's policies have made things worse. And you could argue the economy and his promises to lower prices are really what got him put back into the White House, not all these other tactics to consolidate power. No matter how much he says loudly that he had a broad and sweeping mandate, it just wasn't the case. I mean, Latinos, for example, crossed over to vote for him. They were saying that the economy was most important. He won a record share of Latinos for a Republican. And now they're hotly disapproving of the job that he's doing.
KEITH: And what we're seeing here with these approval ratings is really the answer to the question of what happens if you only govern for your base and yourself.
DETROW: That is NPR's Tamara Keith and Domenico Montanaro. Always good to talk to you both. Thanks so much.
KEITH: You're welcome.
MONTANARO: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
