Well, that thing that all the great minds of political punditry told us could never happen happened again last year: Donald Trump won a presidential election in the United States. He assumed the highest office in the land on 20 January for the second time. And by now, he is getting ready to celebrate Christmas and the New Year in the White House again.
So, let’s take a quick look back at how his first calendar year panned out for him back in office, with his biggest Wins and Losses.
W: Gas Prices
Under President Biden, the average cost of a gallon of gas climbed up to as high as $5.016 in June 2022. This prompted his administration to quietly abandon its green energy agenda. Also, the commodities markets eventually adjusted to the halt of Russian oil and gas imports imposed due to the invasion of Ukraine. Thus, in the second half of the previous administration, there was a gradual decrease in fuel prices. President Biden ended up leaving the office with the average gallon of gas costing $3.120 on 19 January, according to AAA—not too bad a bang for your buck.
However, when President Trump took over the helm with his aggressive ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda, he managed to push those numbers down even lower. The average cost of gas remained lower than on the same date in the previous year, consistently, with a brief exception in mid-November. That short period of escalation was followed by historic lows: on 2 December, the average gallon of gas dropped below $3 according to AAA, for the first time since May 2021. It has stayed under the $3-mark ever since, currently at $2.855.
W: The Stock Market
Back in April, one could hardly have imagined that this would be going into the ‘win’ column for President Trump at the end of the year.
A few days after his tariff frenzy kicked off on ‘Liberation Day’, the Dow Jones closed for the day down 13 per cent year-to-date. However, as President Trump promised, the tariff threats did eagerly bring all the countries to the negotiating table. The United Kingdom was the first to sign a new trade agreement in May, followed by countries such as Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, among others, as well as the European Union.
This did more than stabilize the markets: the Dow, as of market close on 19 December, is up 13.55 per cent YTD, the S&P 500 is up 16.46 per cent, while the NASDAQ Composite is up 20.89 per cent.
W: JD Vance Dominating Republican Primary Polling
It is always a great sign if a party can avoid a highly contested primary and has a unifying figure to rally behind ahead of a presidential election. This is exactly what seems to be the case for the Republican Party right now: of all the national polls for potential GOP primary candidates released by major pollsters this year, there has only been one (!) where Vice President JD Vance is not leading by double digits. The fact that Vance, President Trump’s hand-picked running mate at the 2024 Republican convention, dominates the Republican field so aggressively shows that President Trump still has his grip on the party and that his base is satisfied with his way of running the country.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Governor Gavin Newsom of California is leading the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate by just four points ahead of the party’s losing candidate in 2024, Kamala Harris.
W: Meeting with Cristiano Ronaldo
In an interview with Piers Morgan in November, Portuguese football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo expressed his desire to meet with President Trump in person. Given that Morgan has a personal relationship with Trump, he told him that he can probably arrange that ahead of next year’s FIFA World Cup co-hosted by the United States. Little did he know that the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the country where Ronaldo is currently playing on the club level, would step in and arrange that meeting between the two power players within two weeks.
On 19 November, Cristiano Ronaldo posted an image to his Instagram page proudly posing in the Oval Office alongside his wife and President Trump. That post has received 28.9 million likes, one of the most in the platform’s history.
L: The Dragged-Out Shutdown Fight
With Republicans controlling the Presidency, the Senate, and the House, Democrats were able to take advantage of the filibuster rule in the Senate by taking it as far as no party has taken it before: shutting down the government while being in a complete minority. Many Republicans hoped that the optics of Democrats continuing to vote against reopening the government would backfire on them, but, alas, that turned out not to be the case.
Members of the Democratic caucus in the upper chamber of Congress refused to vote to remove cloture on the vote to continue funding the government, which resulted in many federal workers (not members of Congress, though...) not getting paid for their labour, and the federal food assistance programme SNAP being suspended for 43 days. In the midst of all that turmoil, Democrats ended up outperforming expectations in off-year elections (more on that later).
However, despite that, eight Senators from the opposition decided to abruptly give in in mid-November, thus the federal government is now funded until 31 January. Will we have another such fight in just a month? The Democrats are certainly incentivized to do so, since their poll numbers and election results significantly improved during the last one. In hindsight, the GOP’s mistake was structural. Given that reconciliation bills already bypass the filibuster, exempting Continuing Resolutions from the rule would have prevented a minority from holding the government hostage altogether. By failing to close that loophole, Republicans allowed Democrats to turn procedural obstruction into a surprisingly effective political weapon.
L: The Gubernatorial Elections
This point is very closely tied to the previous one, since the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia happened during the historically long shutdown.
The two Democrat candidates, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, won by 13.8 and 15.2 points, respectively, outperforming polls by wide margins. Pollsters and pundits expected an especially tight race in New Jersey, given the gains the GOP had made in voter registration leading up to the election. President Trump only lost these two states by around six points each in the 2024 presidential election. In Virginia, even scandal-ridden Jay Jones, running for Attorney General, who was exposed for wishing for the deaths of the young children of his political opponent, won by more than that...
L: MAGA Infighting on Social Media
If Nick Fuentes, a self-admitted 27-year-old virgin who has made seemingly sincere claims that Adolf Hitler is ‘f***ing cool’ and women should not have the right to vote, suddenly becomes a prominent voice, that cannot be good for any political movement. He has also made attempts to rally the Republican base against President Trump. However, that is nothing new, as he has done so even right before the 2024 presidential election, just to change his tone comically quickly after he won.
What is new is that Tucker Carlson, once the highest-rated cable news personality by far, has been under constant attack by the more pro-Israel faction of the Republican Party since he hosted Fuentes on his online platform. Ben Shapiro dedicated a good chunk of his speech at the recent AmFest in Phoenix, Arizona, to speaking out against his fellow speaker, Carlson. Meanwhile, right-wing online media personality Candice Owen has put out a whole plethora of conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, much to the dismay of his organization, Turning Point USA.
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