Salon is running a meme with a photo of Trump looking tired above the headline "How long can this Weekend at Bernie's presidency go on?" The subtext is that Trump fever is finally breaking on Capitol Hill and something dramatic is about to collapse. This is the kind of coverage that has been written about Donald Trump at regular intervals since 2015, through two terms, four indictments, two impeachments and one assassination attempt, and it has been wrong every single time. The man sitting in that photograph signed his signature legislation into law on the Fourth of July 2025. He bombed Iran's nuclear program. He closed the southern border to historic lows. He dismantled DEI from the federal government and pressured the private sector to follow. He is negotiating on multiple international fronts simultaneously. The "Bernie" in the Weekend at Bernie's meme is supposed to be politically dead. This one keeps showing up and delivering. That is not a presidency on life support. That is a presidency that drives its critics to metaphors because the actual record will not cooperate with their narrative.

The Big Beautiful Bill Got Done

The left and the media spent the first half of 2025 insisting Trump's domestic agenda would never pass, that Republican defections would sink it, that the Senate parliamentarian would gut it and that the Medicaid provisions would fracture the caucus beyond repair. Three Republican senators did vote against it. The bill passed anyway. Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4, 2025, exactly the deadline he had publicly set. The legislation delivered $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, made the 2017 rates permanent, eliminated taxes on tips and overtime, boosted the child tax credit, created Trump Accounts for children, expanded Opportunity Zones, ended the inheritance tax on family farms and cemented border security enhancements that went well beyond what existed before. This is the largest working-family tax package in American history by most measures. It is already producing real results that real voters notice. A North Carolina waitress described doing her taxes twice because she could not believe how much she was getting back. That is not Weekend at Bernie's. That is a president delivering what he promised to the people who elected him.

The Border Is Not a Crisis Anymore. It Is Under Control.

The Biden administration produced four years of record illegal border crossings. The numbers were so large they strained every system they touched: communities, courts, social services, schools and public budgets in cities that had declared themselves sanctuaries until the migrants actually arrived. Trump ended that in months. Customs and Border Protection reported the sharpest decline in illegal crossings in the agency's history in the period following January 2025 policy changes. Catch-and-release ended. Remain in Mexico returned. The wall continued. Criminal aliens with violent records were removed at a pace the previous administration had explicitly refused to match. The people most affected by illegal immigration, working-class Americans in border communities and the cities that absorbed the overflow, called it relief. The people most offended by it write for Salon.

The World Is Negotiating With America Again

On Iran, the story is told in full elsewhere on this site. Operation Midnight Hammer struck Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan in June 2025. The IAEA confirmed enormous damage. The Twelve-Day War ended in ceasefire. For the first time since 1979, Iran paid a direct military price on its own soil for a half century of aggression, terror sponsorship and the patient pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Nine presidents watched that buildup and responded with diplomacy. Trump responded with aircraft and ordnance. Whether one agrees with the method, the accountability was long overdue and the regime that had been killing Americans through proxies for forty-six years learned that the price had changed. That is not Weekend at Bernie's foreign policy. That is foreign policy with consequences.

On China, the trade pressure that the foreign policy establishment spent thirty years refusing to apply is now applied. Tariffs, technology transfer restrictions and a posture that puts American economic power on the table rather than trading it away for promises of future cooperation that never materialized. The negotiations are ongoing. The framework has shifted. On Europe, NATO allies who had been free-riding on American defense guarantees for decades are finally meeting their commitments, not because they suddenly became more civic-minded but because the administration made clear the alternative was an uncertain American commitment to their defense. On Russia, the ceasefire framework being pushed for Ukraine is contested and imperfect. It is also the first serious diplomatic effort to end a war that the previous approach was simply sustaining at Ukrainian expense with no exit strategy in sight.

Two Genders, No Surgeries on Children, and the Return of Common Sense

On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14168, titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." Eight days later he signed Executive Order 14187, "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation," which directed federal agencies to end funding for puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgical interventions on minors and required institutions receiving federal research and education grants to stop providing gender-affirming procedures to children. On December 18, 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the most sweeping follow-through: proposed regulatory actions that would bar hospitals from performing sex-rejecting procedures on children as a condition of participation in Medicare and Medicaid, which covers nearly every hospital in the country. Kennedy's statement was direct: this is not medicine, it is malpractice.

The gender ideology movement had spent the better part of a decade presenting itself as settled science. The medical establishment's largest associations endorsed it. Hospital systems built pediatric gender clinics. School curricula adopted frameworks teaching children that gender is a social construct existing on a spectrum with no biological anchor. Corporate HR departments trained employees in pronoun protocols. Social media platforms suppressed users who questioned any of it. The entire apparatus was built on the premise that objecting to the surgical or chemical modification of children's bodies was bigotry, that common sense was hate, and that parents who were alarmed by what was happening to their children were the problem. That apparatus is now in retreat. The administration declared there are two biological sexes. It stopped federal funding for the procedures. It required hospitals to choose between Medicare and Medicaid participation and performing these interventions on minors. Most of them chose their funding over the ideology. The clinics that had been building waiting lists quietly closed those lists.

The idea that gender exists on a spectrum of dozens or hundreds of identities, each requiring social affirmation and potentially medical intervention, was never biology. It was a philosophical position that captured institutional medicine for a period and was then used to gatekeep anyone who questioned it as bigoted. The science being relied on to support it came primarily from the WPATH guidelines, which the administration correctly described as ideological advocacy dressed as clinical guidance. The United Kingdom's Cass Review, an independent systematic review commissioned by the NHS and released in 2024, reached the same conclusion: the evidence base for pediatric gender medicine was "remarkably weak" and the push to medically transition children had been driven more by ideology and social pressure than by rigorous outcome data. When Britain's own national health service commissioned an independent review and got that answer, the American left dismissed it. The Trump administration read it and acted accordingly.

Woke, DEI and Identity Politics Are Losing

The cultural rollback has been as consequential as the legislative one. DEI programs were eliminated from the federal government by executive order on the first day of the second term. Federal contractors were required to certify they do not operate DEI programs as a condition of doing business with the government. The pressure on the private sector followed immediately, with major corporations that had spent years building DEI bureaucracies quietly dismantling them once the federal signal changed. The argument that DEI was simply good management practice collapsed when the people running the programs discovered they had no appetite for defending them in a changed environment. Programs that were supposedly about fairness turned out to be fragile enough to disappear when the political wind shifted. That is not evidence of their moral strength. It is evidence of their political nature.

The gender ideology agenda that had been advancing through public school curricula, medical institutions, athletic governing bodies and corporate HR departments for a decade is in retreat. Biological males competing in women's sports was presented for years as an inevitable social evolution that only bigots would question. It has been reversed at the federal level and in dozens of states. The people making the reversal are not primarily motivated by hatred. They are motivated by the same common sense that most parents apply when they ask whether a biological male athlete competing against their daughter in a state championship track meet is fair. That question was treated as hateful for years. It is now settled policy. The voters who felt that their common sense was being dismissed and their children were being used as a social experiment made themselves heard in 2024. The administration heard them and acted.

Identity Politics Has a Bill Coming Due

The broader collapse of identity politics as an electoral strategy is the story the left is least equipped to discuss honestly. Reducing every political question to the race, gender, orientation or religious identity of the people involved and then assigning predetermined political positions based on those categories turned out to alienate the very constituencies it claimed to champion. Hispanic voters who had been assumed to be a reliable Democratic bloc moved toward Trump in 2024 in numbers that stunned Democratic strategists. Black male voters moved in the same direction. Working-class voters of every background moved away from a party that had decided their lived economic concerns were secondary to a set of cultural signaling requirements they had never been consulted on. Identity politics assumed that group membership determined political interest. A large and growing number of Americans declined to accept that assumption. The 2024 election recorded their answer.

CRT, the academic framework that teaches American history as primarily a story of racial hierarchy reproduced through institutions, spread from university campuses into K-12 curricula during 2020 and 2021 with a speed that alarmed parents who had no idea what was being taught to their children until the pandemic put them in a position to see it. The parental revolt that followed, in school board meetings and state legislative chambers across the country, was dismissed by the media as manufactured outrage and astroturfed opposition. It was neither. It was parents who disagreed with specific curriculum choices making their disagreement known through the democratic process available to them. The result was legislation across dozens of states and a federal posture that ended federal support for CRT-based approaches. The parents were not wrong about what was being taught. The media was wrong about the parents.

My Bottom Line

The Salon meme is a mood. The record is a fact. Trump signed the largest working-family tax legislation in American history. He closed the border. He deported criminal aliens. He bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. He pressured China, restructured the NATO conversation and is pushing for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war. He rolled back DEI from the federal government. He reversed gender ideology policies in sports and in schools. He ended CRT-based federal funding and supported state-level legislative action against it. He did essentially what he said he would do. That is the presidency the meme is calling Weekend at Bernie's. The presidency that produced none of that was the one the meme's editors preferred. The voters compared the two records in November 2024 and made their choice. The choice is producing results. That is not a presidency in decline. It is a presidency in delivery.

A president who does what he said he would do is not a Weekend at Bernie's presidency. It is an election mandate in action. The people who cannot tell the difference are the same people who have been wrong about this man every single time they were certain they had him figured out.

Why This Matters

It matters because the Weekend at Bernie's framing is not neutral observation. It is a political strategy. If you can convince people that a functioning presidency is an illusion being propped up by handlers, you demoralize the supporters and embolden the opposition before the 2026 midterms. The framing is timed and intentional. The antidote is the actual record. The border numbers are not an illusion. The Big Beautiful Bill is signed law. The Iran strikes happened. The DEI rollback happened. The gender ideology reversals happened. The cultural shift is underway. None of that is propped up. None of it requires a Bernie in the room. It requires reading what actually happened instead of what Salon needs to believe happened in order to keep its audience engaged through November.