06/24/2026

Clocking It: The Political Rundown — Halfway Clocked

Let’s be honest about something uncomfortable: Trump’s first administration was better than his current one.

Yes, yes, we know. That is like saying a root canal is better than having your teeth pulled with pliers. It’s still a root canal. But at least during Trump 1.0, there were some adults in the room. There were people who occasionally said “no.” There were guardrails, however flimsy. There was something resembling sanity when it came to some policies and legislation.

This time around? The guardrails are gone. The adults have been replaced by sycophants, true believers, and people whose primary qualification is having groveled sufficiently for any past opposition. The result is not just more chaos, it’s chaos on a scale that makes the first term look like a practice round.

This is Halfway Clocked. Grab a drink. You’re going to need it.

The Vice Presidential Downgrade

Let’s start at the top of the ticket. Mike Pence to JD Vance is not an upgrade. It’s a downgrade so steep it should come with a warning label.

Pence, for all his faults, and there were many, had something Vance lacks: actual governing experience. Pence spent years in public office before becoming Trump’s first vice president. He was selected in 2016 to assuage GOP leaders’ concerns about Trump’s lack of experience. He brought a respectable record on education reform from Indiana. He was, for better or worse, a known quantity.

Vance, by contrast, “has little to show for his limited time in the Senate, or otherwise, save for his first book”. His primary qualification for the job was a years-long effort to ingratiate himself with a guy he had previously called “America’s Hitler.” That’s not a career arc. That’s a humiliation ritual.

And the results are predictable. Vance is now Trump’s “amplifier and absorber: a political instrument who articulates Trumpism with youthful aggression while simultaneously insulating the principal from the consequences of his own risk-taking.” In plain English: he says whatever Trump wants him to say and takes the blame when things go wrong.

The Atlantic put it best: “J. D. Vance Learns What Mike Pence Already Knows,” signing on with Trump “might seem like a shortcut to the top, but it’s actually a guarantee of humiliation.” Pence learned this the hard way when a mob chanted “hang Mike Pence” and Trump did nothing. Vance is learning it now as he defends Trump’s disastrous war in Iran.

One Republican operative captured the absurdity perfectly: “The fact that Mike Pence is more on board with Donald Trump in 2026 than JD Vance is just wild”.

Yes. Yes it is.

The Cabinet: From “Respected” to “Unpredictable and Less Qualified”

The downgrade extends to the entire cabinet.

In Trump’s first term, most of his Cabinet officials were “generally regarded as being respected, orthodox and within the norms of presidential appointees”. People like Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and John Kelly, whatever you think of their politics, had resumes that didn’t require a magnifying glass to find actual qualifications.

In Trump’s second term? “The cast of characters in the 2025 Trump White House and Cabinet are themselves more unpredictable and less qualified to serve in their assigned posts than the 2017 appointees”. The No. 1 qualification is “being a long-time Trump devotee, or having made amends and grovelled sufficiently for any past opposition.”

The Senate has confirmed cabinet nominees faster in 2025 than in 2017, more than double the pace. That’s not a sign of efficiency. That’s a sign that the Senate has stopped pretending to care about qualifications.

And the results speak for themselves. In Trump’s first term, the turnover of his “A-Team” hit 35 percent in the first year. People resigned under pressure. People got fired. It was chaos.

This time around? “There are far fewer resignations under pressure in this first year, 2025 than there were in 2017”. That sounds like stability, until you realize why. The adults who would have resigned in protest are gone. The people who remain are the ones who will never say no. As one analysis put it, Trump is now “surrounded purely by enablers, sycophants, and true believers, and thus encounters zero resistance to his whims and abuses”.

Zero. Resistance.

The Policies: From Bad to Worse

If the personnel downgrade weren’t enough, the policies have taken a nosedive too.

Tariffs. In 2017, Trump imposed no significant tariffs in his first year. The first tariff hikes weren’t even announced until January 2018. The weighted average tariff when he took office was 1.6 percent.

In 2025? Tariffs became the “marquee economic policy”. They cover a “much wider range of countries and a much longer list of industries”. The potential impact could “dwarf what was seen in 2017”. According to the Yale Budget Lab, Trump had roughly doubled tariff revenue by 2019 from 1.5% to 2.9% of U.S. goods imports, and 2025 went far beyond that.

The result? Nonfarm employment grew only 0.2 percent between January 2025 and January 2026. In 2017, it grew by 1.6 percent. Manufacturing jobs, which the administration targets as a primary objective, saw an even worse decline. Trump is averaging just 15,000 jobs per month, about one-tenth what the economy needs to break even.

Immigration. In Trump 1.0, immigration policy was harsh but mostly followed existing legal frameworks. In Trump 2.0, the administration is “dismantling legal pathways for immigrants and threatening to revoke the citizenship of hundreds of Americans.” It’s taking steps to “denaturalize citizens, removing citizenship from immigrants who have gone through the long, arduous, invasive, and well-documented legal process to earn it.” Trump signed more executive orders on immigration in the first year of Trump 2.0 than during four years of Trump 1.0.

Foreign Policy. The 2017 National Security Strategy identified “great power competition with Russia and China as the animating US foreign policy challenge, grounded in ‘principled realism’ that sought to advance US values and account for global power dynamics.”

The 2025 strategy? It “reads like a very different administration”. It’s “far more to the right” and “redefines ‘America First’ foreign policy” by declaring that “protecting core national interests,” not maintaining the post-war international order, is the “fundamental purpose of US foreign policy.” The document mentions Trump 28 times, compared to just six references to the president in the 2017 version.

Translation: the narcissism has been codified into official policy.

The Economy. In Trump 1.0, he inherited an economy that had been growing steadily since the end of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. In Trump 2.0, he inherited an even stronger economy, over 16 million jobs created under Biden, unemployment at 4.1%, wages rising. And he’s squandering it.

The Washington Post compared 2025 to 2017 to isolate the impact of tariffs. The conclusion? “Trump’s boast about all the good that his tariffs are supposedly bestowing on America falls apart.” The economy performed better in his first term than in his second.

The Adults Have Left the Building

Remember the “adults in the room”? The people who, critics argued, were restraining Trump’s worst impulses?

In Trump’s first term, I rolled my eyes at that idea. It seemed like wishful thinking, a fantasy that competent people were somehow containing the chaos.

I was wrong.

“We’re now barely more than half a year through his second term, and I have to admit: I miss the adults in the room,” wrote Alex Shephard in The New Republic. “It is clear now what happens when Trump really is surrounded purely by enablers, sycophants, and true believers, and thus encounters zero resistance to his whims and abuses. Everywhere you turn, there is even more destruction and chaos, nearly all of it on a much grander scale than during his first term in office. And there is not an adult in sight.”

The New York Times made the same point. “Nine months into Trump’s second term, he has done several things he was stopped from doing during his first term”. He has exerted “more direct pressure on the Justice Department to bring charges” against his enemies. He has “greatly expanded presidential powers, including by deploying the military on domestic soil in more sweeping ways.”

The guardrails that existed in Trump 1.0, people like John Kelly and Donald McGahn who actually said “no,” are gone. “We are now seeing how a truly unshackled Trump uses his power”.

It’s not pretty.

Halfway Clocked: The Tea

Here is where we stand halfway through the week.

The first Trump administration was better than his current one. That is not a compliment to Trump 1.0. It is an indictment of Trump 2.0.

The first term had Pence, a man with actual governing experience. The second has Vance, a man whose primary qualification was groveling. The first had a cabinet that, for all its flaws, included people with resumes. The second has a cabinet chosen for loyalty, not competence. The first had tariffs that were relatively restrained. The second has tariffs that are the largest since the 1930s. The first had some semblance of sanity when it came to foreign policy. The second has a National Security Strategy that reads like a Trump vanity project.

The first term had guardrails. The second has enablers. The first had adults in the room, or at least people who pretended to be. The second has sycophants.

And the results are measurable. Fewer jobs. Worse economic performance. More chaos. More destruction.

This is not a return to normalcy. This is not “draining the swamp.” This is a man who learned from his first term that the only thing stopping him from doing whatever he wanted was the presence of people who occasionally said no. So he got rid of them. And now, surrounded by people who will never say no, he is doing whatever he wants.

The first Trump administration was a warning. The second is the disaster the warning was supposed to prevent.

Halfway through the week, halfway through his second term, halfway through a presidency that has already done more damage than the first, we are left with one uncomfortable truth:

The first time around, at least there were adults in the room.

This time, there is just Trump.

As uncomfortable as it is to say, Trump’s first administration was better.

Halfway Clocked. That’s the tea.

Sources

· “Measuring Trump 2.0 Against Trump 1.0: Tariff Boasts Meet the Data,” The Daily Economy, June 12, 2026
· “Trump’s second coming is worse than the first,” The New Daily, February 26, 2025
· “I Miss the ‘Adults in the Room’ From Trump’s First Term,” The New Republic, September 2, 2025
· “J. D. Vance Learns What Mike Pence Already Knows,” The Atlantic, March 16, 2026
· “When the Trump Guardrails Fall,” The New York Times, October 15, 2025
· “Comparing Trump’s First and Second Terms,” James Zogby, February 24, 2025
· “Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy,” LSE United States Politics and Policy, December 19, 2025
· “How the Trump tariffs differ from his first term,” Axios, March 5, 2025
· “The Best Evidence Against Trump’s Tariffs? His Own First Term,” AEI, February 9, 2026
· “Trump 2025 vs 2017 economy jobs comparison,” Brunswick Democrat, March 19, 2026
· “Momentum lost: Taking stock of Trump’s nominations at the 300-day mark,” Brookings, November 24, 2025
· “Less personnel drama but still sky high turnover one year into Trump’s new term,” KUOW, January 20, 2026

---

About the Author

Andrew Greene is a quality-obsessed, results-driven powerhouse with nearly two decades of experience transforming complexity into clear, actionable solutions. His secret weapon? A mix of analytical sharpness, problem-solving precision and a communication and leadership style that’s equal parts clarity and charisma. From Quality Assurance to political data analysis, you can think of him as the Swiss Army knife of operational excellence, minus the corkscrew (unless it’s a team celebration).