Political commentary in America has a settled habit of evaluating presidents primarily on the basis of whether the commentator likes them personally - their tone, their style, their Twitter habits, their press conference demeanor. That habit produces bad analysis and worse history. The correct measure of a presidency is not whether the man strikes you as likable. It is whether the things he did needed doing, whether he did them when nobody else would and whether the country is better positioned as a result. By that measure, the second Trump administration has produced a run of policy corrections that the professional commentariat has worked very hard not to acknowledge because acknowledging them requires conceding that the policies of the prior decade were wrong, that the people defending those policies were wrong and that a man they spent years dismissing as an authoritarian clown was right about the things that mattered most to the ordinary Americans who sent him back to Washington. This post is not an argument that everything is perfect or that every method has been ideal. It is an argument that the substance deserves honest credit from the people who have been hiding from it behind tone complaints.

The Border: Finally Treating Sovereignty Like It Means Something

The southern border of the United States processed somewhere between eight and ten million illegal crossings during the Biden administration - a number that represents not just an immigration failure but a comprehensive breakdown of the basic governmental function of knowing who enters the country and under what conditions. Fentanyl flooded in through that same border and killed more Americans annually than the Vietnam War. Human trafficking networks operated openly because the border's porousness provided cover. Border Patrol agents were stretched to administrative roles processing paperwork rather than enforcing law. The communities along the border that bore the immediate human cost of the chaos - the ranchers whose land was crossed, the towns whose emergency services were overwhelmed, the residents who lived with the daily reality that the federal government had made a policy decision to stop enforcing federal law in their communities - were told by the political and media class that their concerns were xenophobia.

The Trump administration closed the border. Not perfectly, not without controversy over methods, but functionally. Monthly illegal crossing numbers dropped to levels not seen in years. The asylum claim processing system that had become a vehicle for indefinite legal presence was reformed. The remain-in-Mexico policy that the Biden administration abandoned was restored. Deportation operations that the prior administration had stopped resumed. The specific claims that this would produce mass family separation, economic catastrophe and humanitarian horror were the same claims made in the first term, which also did not materialize in the forms predicted. What materialized instead was a border that began functioning as a border - meaning that the United States started making again the basic sovereign determination that every other country on earth makes without apology: who gets in, under what conditions and what happens when those conditions are violated.

Deportation: Enforcing the Law Is Not Optional

The argument against deportation as a policy instrument has always rested on a deliberate conflation of two very different populations: the long-settled resident who entered illegally decades ago, built a life, raised American-born children and poses no threat to anyone, and the criminal alien who entered illegally, was convicted of serious crimes, was ordered deported by a federal court and remained in the country because the prior administration chose not to enforce its own court orders. The political left treated these two populations as identical in order to generate the maximum emotional response to any enforcement activity. The Trump administration separated them in practice. The prioritization of criminal aliens for deportation - people with violent felony convictions, gang affiliations, drug trafficking records, sexual offenses - is not a moral ambiguity. It is the minimum that any government owes the communities where those people are committing crimes against citizens and legal residents who have every right to expect the government to enforce the law on their behalf.

The sanctuary city policies that multiple Democratic-governed jurisdictions maintained - explicit refusals to cooperate with federal immigration detainers for people with criminal records - were a remarkable piece of political theater in which local governments announced that they would not assist the federal government in removing people who had been convicted of crimes against the people those local governments were elected to protect. The Trump administration's decision to defund sanctuary jurisdictions and use every available legal instrument to override those policies was not authoritarian overreach. It was the federal government insisting that federal law means what it says in Los Angeles as well as in Texas. Americans are not stupid. They watched sanctuary cities release people with violent criminal records who then committed more violent crimes, and they drew the obvious conclusion about which political party was serious about their safety.

Children Are Not Experiments: Ending Irreversible Medical Procedures on Minors

The policy of permitting and in some cases incentivizing the administration of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender transition surgeries to minors - children who cannot legally buy alcohol, sign contracts or vote - is one of the most extraordinary medical experiments conducted on a generation in American history, and it was conducted with institutional momentum, activist pressure and deliberate suppression of dissent that prevented the honest evaluation that any experimental medical intervention should receive before being administered to children at scale. The long-term effects of puberty blockers on bone density, neurological development and fertility are not fully understood. The studies claiming high satisfaction rates among transitioned individuals have methodological problems that their own authors have acknowledged. The rapid rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses among adolescent girls - a demographic with no historical precedent for this pattern - did not produce the careful epidemiological caution it should have produced. Instead it produced waiting lists at gender clinics and social media ecosystems that reinforced transition as the primary therapeutic response to adolescent psychological distress of any origin.

European countries that were earlier and more aggressive adopters of pediatric gender medicine have been reversing course. Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the United Kingdom have all substantially restricted or ended puberty blocker and hormone administration to minors following systematic reviews that found the evidence base for these interventions to be weak and the risks to be underappreciated. The UK's Cass Review, a comprehensive four-year independent review commissioned by the NHS, concluded that the evidence supporting pediatric gender medicine was remarkably thin and that the previous clinical approach had caused harm. That is not a right-wing talking point. It is the conclusion of a distinguished British pediatrician after four years of examining the evidence. The Trump administration's executive orders ending federal support for gender-transition procedures on minors brought the United States into alignment with the direction that evidence-based medicine in Europe was already moving. The children who will not receive irreversible interventions before they are old enough to fully consent to them will not be harmed by that protection. Some of them will be grateful for it.

Women's Sports: Biology Is Not Bigotry

The policy question of whether biological males who identify as female should compete in women's athletic categories is not complicated and the people treating it as complicated know it. Women's sports exist as a separate category because the physiological differences between male and female bodies after puberty produce systematic performance advantages in most athletic contexts - greater lung capacity, greater muscle mass, greater bone density, higher testosterone-driven explosive power - that make integrated competition unequal in ways that eliminate women from competitive outcomes. Title IX was passed precisely because integrated competition was not working for women. The separate category is the remedy. Allowing biological males who have undergone male puberty to compete in that category, even with hormone suppression that does not fully eliminate the physiological advantages developed during male puberty, is not inclusion. It is the elimination of the category that Title IX created to protect.

The women and girls who have been displaced from podiums, roster spots, scholarships and records by biological males competing in their categories are not hypothetical. Lia Thomas won an NCAA swimming championship in the women's 500-yard freestyle. Female swimmers who trained their entire lives for that competition finished behind a biological male who had competed in the men's category for three years. The executive orders and Title IX reinterpretations issued by the Trump administration restored the commonsense reading of women's sports protections: that the category exists to provide fair competition for biological females and that including biological males in that category regardless of their gender identity defeats the purpose of the category. The women athletes who benefit from this restoration are not bigots. They are people who trained for fair competition and are entitled to have the word "fair" mean what it meant when Title IX was passed.

Gender Ideology in Schools: Parents Are Not the Enemy

The penetration of gender ideology into K-12 education over the past decade produced something the advocates of that penetration did not anticipate: a massive backlash from parents who discovered that their children were being taught that biological sex is a social construct, that there are dozens of genders, that children as young as five should be encouraged to explore gender identity and that parents who expressed concern about this curriculum should be treated as threats to their children's safety. School administrators in multiple jurisdictions adopted policies of social transition - helping children use different names and pronouns at school while explicitly keeping that information from parents - that treated parents as obstacles to their children's wellbeing rather than as the primary stakeholders in their children's development.

The proposition that a seven-year-old child has a stable and autonomous gender identity that exists independent of parental knowledge, that schools are equipped to facilitate medical or social transitions without parental involvement and that parents who want to know what is happening to their children at school are endangering those children requires a theory of parental authority and childhood development that is not supported by any serious psychological framework and is directly contradicted by the developmental research on adolescent identity formation. The Trump administration's restoration of parental rights in education - the principle that parents have the right to know what their children are being taught, how their children are being addressed at school and what medical or psychological interventions are being discussed with their children - is not an attack on transgender children. It is a reassertion of the foundational principle that parents, not school administrators, are responsible for their children's upbringing.

Iran: Forty-Six Years of Patience, Finally Over

The previous post in this space covered the Iran strikes in detail, so the argument does not need to be rebuilt from scratch here. The short version is this: Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. It took American hostages. It bombed American servicemembers. It armed the militias that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. It supplied the Houthis who attacked American ships and personnel. It funded the proxies that murdered Israelis on October 7. It spent forty-six years advancing toward nuclear weapons while eight American presidents applied increasingly elaborate diplomacy and sanctions in the belief that consequences short of military force would eventually change Iranian behavior. They did not change Iranian behavior. They produced more enriched uranium, more advanced centrifuges, more capable missile programs and more proxy armies spread across more countries.

The strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2026 were not reckless. They were overdue. They were the application of the one instrument that four decades of evidence demonstrated Iran actually responds to: the credible threat and eventual exercise of military force against capabilities that Iran cannot afford to lose. The argument that diplomacy should have been tried longer is an argument that ignores what forty-six years of trying longer produced. The argument that the strikes risk escalation is an argument that Iran's existing forty-six-year campaign of killing Americans through proxies is somehow less escalatory than holding Iran accountable for it. The argument that international law prohibits preemptive military action against a state actively seeking nuclear weapons while funding terrorist organizations across the region is an argument that international law should produce outcomes that protect aggressors at the expense of their victims. None of those arguments should be taken more seriously than the forty-six-year record they are defending.

My Bottom Line

The policies described in this post share a common feature: they were all things that a substantial majority of ordinary Americans wanted done, that the professional and media class declared undoable or unconscionable and that turned out to be doable when a president was willing to do them without waiting for permission from the people who had been telling him he could not. The border can be controlled. Criminals can be deported. Children can be protected from irreversible medical procedures until they are old enough to consent to them. Women's sports can be protected for women. Parents can be treated as the primary authority in their children's lives rather than as obstacles to institutional ideology. Iran can be held to military consequences for forty-six years of aggression. None of these was a mystery or a miracle. They were all policy choices that previous administrations made in the other direction. The current administration made them in this direction. The results are visible and the argument that they represent catastrophe rather than correction has not survived the encounter with what actually happened. Give the man his due.

History judges presidents on whether the things they did needed doing. By that measure, this list is going to look better with time than the opposition coverage of it has suggested. The things that needed doing got done. That is not nothing. That is most of the job.