Political scientists and historians catalog a growing list of Trump second term failures, from a botched Reflecting Pool project to mounting Iran war costs, arguing the pattern reflects deliberate governing choices rather than misfortune, even as Trump’s political durability remains largely intact.
A growing catalog of Trump second term failures — from a botched Reflecting Pool renovation to a war on Iran with mounting costs — is drawing sharp assessments from political scientists and historians who argue the pattern reflects deliberate governing choices, not bad luck. As inflation, debt, and casualties climb, scholars increasingly frame these setbacks not as isolated missteps but as the predictable outcome of a governing style built on personal judgment over expertise. What makes this moment notable is the gap it exposes between Trump’s persistently negative favorability numbers and his continued political durability, a disconnect several of the historians interviewed here attribute to deepening partisan polarization rather than policy success.
Trump Second Term Failures Start Small
Let’s start small. He persuaded FIFA to quash the one-game suspension of the U.S. striker Folarin Balogun, after which the American men’s soccer team suffered a humiliating 4-1 loss to Belgium.
When Trump first announced plans to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, he said it would cost $1.5 million. On July 15, The Associated Press reported that despite this initial promise, “the bill ballooned to more than $16 million by June. Trump had said the repairs would last a century, but within days of the project’s initial completion last month, the water was beset by an algae bloom and pieces of the new coating appeared to be peeling off the bottom.”
These setbacks are just two examples of Trump’s kiss of death, the defeats and economic setbacks that have come to characterize his second term in office, including the job losses following Trump’s imposition of tariffs, the surge in the national debt after passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the economic havoc resulting from his war against Iran.
Trump is one of the most — if not the most — ham-handed presidents in the nation’s history.
I asked Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, for his take on Trump in 2026. He replied by email:
Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century. At home and abroad, in many cabinet and sub-cabinet agencies, the administration’s culture is dominated by incompetence.
Trump’s infliction of harm is not a result of bad luck or malign interference by foreign and domestic adversaries — the common fate of American presidents. In the overwhelming majority of cases, Trump himself initiated the policies and actions that turned belly-up.
Iran War Looms Large Among Trump Second Term Failures
One of the most egregious examples, perhaps, is his decision to join Israel’s bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran on June 21, 2025.
“The strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump declared in an address to the nation that day. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Despite these claims of success 13 months ago, the United States and Israel struck again this year, beginning on Feb. 28, and the war on Iran is in its fifth month, with the conflict intensifying and Americans beginning, once again, to die.
On his Substack, Popular Information, Judd Legum documented 24 instances between April 17 and July 13 of Trump making some variation of the claim “that the Strait of Hormuz was ‘open’ or controlled by the United States.”
Trump also let the Iranians know that “You got beat to hell” and boasted that it was a “Total and complete victory. 100 percent.”
More important than Trump’s false claims of victory, the war on Iran — a war of choice — has inflicted severe damage on the United States, including the death of at least 17 American military personnel and the wounding of more than 400 others.
According to Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, Americans are paying $71.3 billion more for gasoline and diesel alone. The increases in fuel costs translate into average household costs of $543.94 as I write. It will be more when you read this.
Tariffs and Debt Add to Trump Second Term Failures
Let’s take a closer look at some of Trump’s proudest achievements.
On April 2, 2025, he announced “Liberation Day,” his plan to impose tariffs on America’s trading partners.
“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” the president asserted, adding, “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”
So what actually happened?
When Trump took office for the second time in January 2025, the total number of men and women employed in manufacturing was 12,673,000, according to the Federal Reserve. By June 2026, the number fell to 12,598,000, a loss of 75,000 jobs.
How about Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act?
On June 30, 2025, the title of a White House news release claimed “The One Big Beautiful Bill Slashes Deficits, National Debt While Unleashing Economic Growth.”
The reality:
Just before Trump took office, the nation’s debt was $36.2 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The debt is now more than $39.5 trillion, an increase of $3.3 trillion.
I asked political and presidential scholars how they think Trump’s mind works. Most pointed to his seemingly exclusive reliance on his own judgment while rejecting expert advice.
“Many presidents have made mistakes, but none have made mistakes so cavalierly as President Trump,” Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote by email in response to my query:
He makes rash, reckless decisions; at best, they are based on bar-stool theories of how the world works, and at worst, they are driven by corrupt motives. Since he “just knows” he is right about how tariffs work, no evidence will sway him.
In the short term, the country has been in many ways resilient, but he is corroding state capacity, democratic norms and the very sense of a unified nation.
How did he pull this off?
Trump is, however, quite skilled as a political leader, combining a hold on the Republican primary electorate with a willingness to relentlessly demand total obedience to his personal goals.
Scholars Categorize the Trump Second Term Failures
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, took a different tack, placing Trump’s misjudgments in separate categories:
There are three categories of Trump failures: disasters of mismanagement, disasters by design and disasters of greed.
What are the achievements of the second Trump presidency thus far? Persistent inflation, sluggish economic growth, an unpopular war, aggressive immigration enforcement that has outraged many and the shredding of the safety net to fund a large tax cut.
In his second term, Moynihan argued,
Trump no longer feels the need to be bound by precedent, norms or good advice. We can see this at the superficial level (the Reflecting Pool) or for issues where there are extraordinary stakes, such as the Iran war.
Trump has lost any inhibitions he had while creating a bubble where he is surrounded by yes men.
Some of the adverse effects of Trump’s policies are not results of bad judgment but are purposeful, Moynihan contended, and he’s not wrong:
Some of the failings of the second administration are by design. More people will lose access to SNAP as One Big Beautiful Bill policies are being implemented. Medicaid restrictions will kick in by next year, similarly excluding millions of eligible citizens. The buildup of an immigration police state was also a feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Many of Trump’s most punitive actions are not the result of miscalculation but the faithful implementation of his vision.
Why Trump Second Term Failures Haven’t Cost Him Support
When Trump’s favorability ratings are profoundly negative, how does he continue to get away with what he is doing, including personally amassing at least $2.2 billion largely through cryptocurrency companies designed to allow profiteering from foreign sources and domestic figures seeking special favors, including criminal pardons?
Dallek, again:
Several factors account for Trump’s political durability. The U.S. economy has avoided a recession. The stock market is breaking records. Consumer spending and A.I. have helped power the job market.
But more important, Dallek continued,
Trump benefits politically from an anti-establishment sensibility that has become perhaps the single most explosive structural force in American politics.
Millions of Americans believe that a rigged government needs to be eviscerated, and Trump, the ultimate outsider, wins support from some voters as the one man brazen enough to do the job.
Equally important, Dallek argued:
Many voters also continue to like Trump because he has done more than any politician since the 1960s to unwind liberal cultural norms and a rights-based legal order. Trump has delivered for his Christian conservative base. Roe is gone. Civil rights and voting rights have been eroded. The L.G.B.T.Q.+ movement is on defense. And D.E.I. initiatives across private and public institutions have been rolled back.
Trump’s record on social conservatism reads, at least to his base, like a list of long-denied priorities finally fulfilled. They are major achievements in the eyes of his base.
Other scholars make similar arguments.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, wrote by email:
What’s different about Trump is that many of his supporters evaluate him less by traditional policy outcomes and more by whether he’s fighting the political and cultural battles they care about. In today’s polarized environment, political identity often outweighs measurable policy success or failure.
While presidents frequently overpromise and underdeliver, “what distinguishes Trump,” Rottinghaus said, “is his willingness to pursue high-risk, high-visibility policies with relatively little concern for expert consensus or institutional caution. That increases both the potential payoff and the potential for costly failures.”
As a result, Rottinghaus argued that it’s important to use two separate standards in evaluating the Trump presidency:
By conventional measures of policy implementation, several Trump White House initiatives have fallen short of their stated goals.
By political measures — maintaining attention, dominating the news cycle and reshaping the Republican Party — he has been remarkably successful.
In key respects, polarization works to Trump’s advantage. Rottinghaus wrote:
Partisans increasingly judge presidents relative to the opposing party rather than against an objective performance standard. Many Trump supporters view criticism of his policies through a lens of distrust toward traditional media, academia and political institutions.
As a result, negative coverage often reinforces rather than weakens support. Voters frequently evaluate presidents on identity and values as much as policy outcomes. Supporters may tolerate economic costs if they believe Trump is advancing priorities like immigration enforcement, judicial appointments or cultural issues.
The Roots Behind Trump Second Term Failures
Are Trump’s policies and decisions based on a set of beliefs that lend themselves to adverse consequences?
George C. Edwards III, a political scientist emeritus at Texas A&M University, wrote:
Donald Trump is not the first president to make poor decisions, but he has shown a particular facility for making them.
He begins with faulty assumptions about the nature of problems (the balance of trade is a problem, but climate change is not; longtime undocumented immigrants are detrimental to the country but drastically cutting health research in not; renewable energy must be discouraged and fossil fuels are the future of energy) and the nature of solutions (tariffs will revive industries and will not raise prices, attacking Iran will force it to concede quickly, retribution against his opponents is appropriate, the government needs fewer experts).
Trump, Edwards continued,
is unwilling to assess, much less correct, his misunderstanding with thorough deliberation and advice. He does not read and disdains expertise.
Instead of careful, informed reflection, he acts impulsively and thinks with his gut, in which he has great confidence. He should not. Such an approach is disaster-prone.
The result?
Edwards:
These poor decisions have, among other consequences, hollowed out the government, undermined the rule of law, weakened the economy, degraded the environment, damaged our international alliances and emboldened Iran.
In the meantime, Edwards continued, the president is relentless in blaming others for performance failures, and partisan blinders shield him from attributions of responsibility by his core supporters.
H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas-Austin, succinctly summed up the distractive character of the Trump presidency in an email:
Donald Trump has a strange charisma unique among presidents. He is more like the leader of a cult than of a party, in that the worse things get for his followers, the more stubbornly they stick with him.
The Democrats have helped him by embracing policies, especially on cultural issues, that make them seem hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Americans.
All too true. The problem is that we are going to have to live with this man in the White House for the next two and a half years. Even worse, what Trump destroys with a snap of his fingers will take years to repair, except in those cases where he has broken something beyond restoration.