Six months in, Trump reaches his apex

7Essentially, he got it all done before the honeymoon expired.  Not bad at all.  and off course we are all distracted completely by tariffs which will disappear like the snow as folks do sort things out.

More troubling is that trump is now 79 years of age and suffers from the arrival of those old man issues.  This includes chronic venous insufficiency which tells us that standing for hours is a poor choice., although unmentioned in published material.

Worse though is that he has to now wear a catheter which smells awful.  pretty distressing for a famous clean freak.  this could well point to prostate surgery.  All this will slow him down and he still has three years to get through.

This could also explain the accelerated full press approach.

Six months in, Trump reaches his apex

Jul 7, 2025

The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 27

July 7, 2025

This week:Trump reaches his high point so far

A week of big wins leading up to July 4

Scheme to overcome toxic Dem brand comes to Idaho

Outlook

After last week’s events, President Donald Trump has reached the pinnacle of his political career so far. That’s not to say he cannot accomplish more, but he has never succeeded before at so many things so quickly.

In fact, it would be difficult to find any presidency whose promises were kept so completely in less than six months.

‘Big, Beautiful’ passage: The most important element by far came last Thursday — the passage of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. That was, incredibly, the actual name of Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, until — perhaps even more incredibly — Senate Democrats deleted the name from the bill with a unanimous consent request. Despite their high hopes that they could derail this bill and Trump’s agenda overall, thus regaining their footing in opposition, this purely symbolic move was the only accomplishment they made in the entire process. Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) were then able once again to pull the rabbit out of the hat and run the Senate-altered version of the bill back through the U.S. House. Trump signed it on the Fourth of July, capping off his biggest success to date.

The bill extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, and sets a budget outline that includes Medicaid reforms and far more resources for mass deportations. Oddly, Democrats dwelt almost exclusively on Medicaid cuts during the process, only to begin complaining about the money for additional mass deportations after it had already passed.

The passage of this bill means that Trump’s full agenda will be implemented during his term. It also means that he has already kept most of the promises he made on the campaign trail, including no taxes on tips (up to $25,000 of them, at least), no taxes on Social Security income (for about 90 percent of seniors), and an increased cap (to $40,000) on the state and local tax or SALT deduction.

On the spending side of the ledger, Trump also had a few bonus accomplishments that conservatives probably were not expecting — the defunding of Planned Parenthood and the abolition of USAID being two of them.

The remaining promises Trump has not yet kept are largely non-policy items. There will still be tons of pressure for his administration to release the full Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking files. Then again, conservatives would just as soon forget that Trump promised to pay for everyone’s IVF during the campaign.

Jobs report: Democrats were trying to get some momentum in their fight against the “big beautiful bill” by arguing that the economy was souring under Trump. The Bureau of Labor Statistics dampened their argument, though, by releasing an unexpectedly strong jobs report that showed native-born workers gaining an especially large number of jobs.

Supreme Court ruling: The Supreme Court’s recent ruling barring most (but not all) universal injunctions will clear the way for Trump to implement his agenda going forward on everything from a revamping of the nuclear industry to higher education reform to mass deportations. It was a carefully planned and choreographed attempt to get the issue in front of the justices, since Trump is all but certain to lose the underlying case — which is about birthright citizenship — on the merits.

UPenn apology: As gravy, the University of Pennsylvania submitted to federal defunding threats and agreed to apologize to female athletes for allowing a male athlete to compete against women in swimming. The Trump administration threatened hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for UPenn. The university allegedly bullied female athletes into accepting Lia (formerly William) Thomas’s participation on their team, at the potential expense of actual women making the swim team, winning scholarships, and winning victories and recognition, thus violating Title IX.

This is a huge win for Trump, and one that strikes at the heart of what cost Democrats the male vote especially in the 2024 election. Democrats intransigence on transgenderism, against broad public opposition to gender ideology, flies in the face of political common-sense after Kamala Harris’s destruction over this issue specifically in ad after ad during football season. The possibility remains that this albatross will follow many of their candidates right into the next election season — for example, with candidates for governor (starting in New Jersey) being asked if they will continue to house men in women’s prisons.

The Trump administration’s next move is to begin jawboning the Federal Reserve for an interest rate cut, although last week’s positive jobs news makes this marginally less likely.