Domestic Policy [5:38]
I want to start by taking a look at Congress. In that realm, although Congress is Republican House, Republican Senate at the moment and even the Supreme Court seems to lean five Republicans to four Dems, it's been very difficult for Trump to get through legislative policy. One of his main promises was that he was going to reform the American Tax Code, and that's something that he has done. That's been his crowning achievement since he was first elected.
He campaigned on the notion that the American people deserved a tax break and so he created the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It was hotly fought over but ultimately it was brought through by the House and Senate. This bill, although he ran on this populist anti-Wall Street platform, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act seems to largely give permanent corporate tax cuts, huge ones in fact, dropping some from the mid-thirties to the low-twenties in terms of percentage tax rates.
It's not exactly favorable in many states to working Americans at all. Whereas he did promise this tax cut, he didn't seem to pass it as much for the American worker, largely through the removal of key deductions. Even his cabinet appointments seem to echo this favoritism of billionaires. He used corporate CEOs in a number of positions: Betsy DeVos at Education, Steve Mnuchin at Treasury and even corporate head Scott Pruit at the EPA.
The rest of his agenda really hasn't been fulfilled using legislative means. I'm going to take a look at a few of the things he's tried and maybe figure out why they've failed.
The first one was Obamacare. His real plan was to get rid of Obamacare and the spending that goes in there, and he basically promised he'd replace it with something much better, but he wanted to use that money for other programs. After months going back and forth, the House a number of times passed a repeal, but key Senators kept blocking it and it was close enough on the number of Democrats, 48, that he was not able to get it through Congress. So Obamacare continues, and though he's attacked it a little bit through executive orders, it hasn't really changed a whole lot.
Maybe the biggest executive order was his desire to remove DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. This had been created by Obama in 2012, and basically said that these now adults, these people who came here as children illegally to the United States but had gone through the American school system—and some were teachers, some police, some were soldiers—that they'd be protected here. They got the nickname "the Dreamers." There was really broad support for this program. When Trump tried to get rid of it, there was tremendous pushback. There were these marches to protest, and ultimately it's gone into stagnation at this point.
Another thing linked to the same issue is this family separation. In 2018, Trump basically said that when families come to the border illegally, they'll be arrested, and children will be put in detainment centers and their parents will be separated from them. When news got out of this, there was this tremendous pushback and there were these "Keep Family Together" marches. So much was the pushback, in fact, that Trump had to create a new executive order where he promised to "maintain family unity" as a way of hobbling that program.
He also tried to create this Muslim ban, or a travel ban if you're a fan of it. When it was very first launched, it was basically just every Muslim, and there were these massive, nationwide marches. The various federal courts, courts of appeal found the first Muslim ban unconstitutional. The second Muslim ban, there was a sense that it was violating the First Amendment, the protection of religion. Trump had campaigned against Muslims because they're Muslims and so he had to keep changing. There is a final iteration, not as strong, where he was able to include five Muslim countries plus two non-Muslim countries, and this was upheld by the Supreme Court by a single vote.
Another big area that stalled out is this infrastructure bill. He really planned that there'd be these gigantic building projects for America and that there'd be great new jobs, high pay. But when Obamacare didn't get repealed, there was really no money left for that. In fact there was no money to build a wall, either.
As far as social policy, he seems to have had a tremendous amount of success. The religious right really likes him, evangelical voters in America are a strong bloc, solidly, consistently Republican. His promises to get rid of Roe v. Wade and appoint justices to do that has been very welcome. He's also gone against transgender soldiers in the military using Twitter and an executive order to get them removed from there. But strangely, he decided to support Obergefell, which is a Supreme Court case saying that gay marriage was the law of the land.
Ultimately, his domestic policy really has not been implemented through legislative means. There were permanent tax cuts for corporations but ultimately, he's used the pulpit of Twitter, the bully pulpit, and executive orders to try to implement his goals for changing the American social order as well as the American political structure. Maybe the biggest difficulty for his voters and his power base is that people tend not to understand that the president doesn't always make the law, that has to come from Congress. Although a president can be very energetic, there still has to be this financial viability as well as checks and balances and constitutional legality. Some of his goals don't always coincide with those processes. Ultimately we'll see as time goes on what other legislation gets passed.
https://americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Topics/Display/2150157?cid=140&sid=2169153
MLA Citation
"Domestic Policy." American History, ABC-CLIO, 2026, americanhistory.abc-clio.com/Topics/Display/2150157?cid=140&sid=2169153. Accessed 19 May 2026.