President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025.
Does Donald Trump’s revolutionary start make the grade?
On Tuesday, America once again celebrated the great presidential tradition called “marking your own homework,” also known as the Joint Session of Congress address. You didn’t need to sit through all 99 minutes of Trump’s peroration to know that he gave himself an A++ on his first six weeks in office.
“We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years, or eight years, and we are just getting started,” Trump said, causing half the room to explode in applause while the other side sat and waved little paper signs of protest.
The thundering braggadocio of the speech came across with all the subtlety of a revving Harley-Davidson on the Vegas Strip, but give Trump this: He promised radical change, and he has overdelivered. Bigly. Too many politicians promise roses and deliver thorns.
Trump is doing what he has always done: go over the top. His biggest win so far has been the southern border, where his policies have brought illegal migration to a crashing halt. Democrats blew that issue and paid the price. With over 100 executive orders and 400 executive actions, public brawls with world leaders, a pivot into the open claws of Vladimir Putin, and the daily grumblings of his imperialist appetite for land expansion, the transition to Trump has been a transformation of Washington. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue looks more like Fury Road in the “Mad Max” series, complete with a chain-saw-wielding sidekick.
Democrats look helpless, trying to choke down one half-digested policy—cancel USAID, cut off US intelligence to Ukraine, buy Gaza — as another one is jammed down their throats. You could give their entire party a political Heimlich maneuver, and they still wouldn’t be able to catch their breath.
Trump’s Deal Chaos
The rapid-fire, jump-cut scenes of Trump interventions — 25% tariffs on everything from Canada … except energy … and wait … not on cars for a month … or agriculture … or now … BREAKING NEWS today with Trump suspending tariffs for Mexico and Canada on anything that falls under the USMCA, but only until April 2 — might as well come with those photosensitivity warnings you see before shows that include flashing lights: Ladies and gentlemen, the barrage of conflicting policy announcements may cause Democratic seizures.
One thing is certain: The volatility is causing seizures in the markets, which are whipsawing up and down.
But if Trump gets to grade himself, maybe it’s time for a more objective report card. Let’s use two criteria: Trump as a dealmaker and Trump as a manager.
The Platonic ideal of Trump, taken from his ghostwritten book, “The Art of the Deal,” is that he is the greatest dealmaker in history. Want to end the war in Ukraine? Easy-peasy. That should take 24 hours. Well, that deal, whatever it was supposed to be, never materialized.
Trump is now trying to hustle a mineral deal out of Ukraine by shaking down President Volodymyr Zelensky in public, falsely claiming that Ukraine started the war and that Zelensky is the dictator. Trump says that he and his pal Vladimir Putin (“We had to go through the Russian hoax together”) are trying to pin Zelensky down for peace. The president claims the US has given $300 billion in aid to Ukraine, when it is actually $175 billion—and much of that going to US companies. Still, he’s demanding a $500 billion rare earth mineral deal as compensation and the key to a peace deal. “And they shall beat their swords into … Promethium, and their spears into Scandium,” to twist the old biblical saying.
In any case, that deal also fell through after he and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelensky in a stunning public press conference last Friday in the Oval Office. But it is the substance of the deal, not just the politics, that is also in question. Does Ukraine really have rare earth materials that could be worth that kind of money? Is there really a big prize here? Not according to expert Javier Blas, who wrote in Bloomberg that “Ukraine has no significant rare earth deposits other than small scandium mines.” He points out that the US Geological Survey also doesn’t confirm that Ukraine has any rare earth reserves. “Simply put, ‘follow the money’ doesn’t work here,” Blas writes. “At best, the value of all the world’s rare earth production rounds to $15 billion a year … That’s equal to the value of just two days of global oil output. Even if Ukraine had gigantic deposits, they wouldn’t be that valuable in geo-economic terms.”
So, even if Trump gets the mineral deal, what’s it worth? It is a political win at best, but at the expense of ditching US allies in Europe, letting down Ukraine, and handing Putin a massive victory.
Is that a good deal?
Trump’s Tariff-ization
What about tariffs? So far, the tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China have proven to be an economic downer, and now Trump is rolling them back, fudging, and shifting as the trade war escalates. States like Kentucky that export to Canada are getting hurt. Prices are going up. The premier of Ontario is threatening to put 25% tariffs on electricity exports to three northern US states. Is this the deal people wanted?
And even if tariffs do bring back some US jobs in the long run, which is very possible, Trump has made the United States an unreliable trading and security partner. Who wants to sign a trade deal with him now, knowing he could rip it up or change his mind at any moment? What company wants to invest in long-term deals if there is no promise of stability? Do NATO countries still trust that the US would be a backstop? A deal today is gone tomorrow.
Perhaps this is all just the grinding gears of change. It’s only been 45 days, after all. Maybe the radical surgery Trump and Elon Musk are performing on the sclerotic body of the US government is needed and will make things more efficient. But so far, that has not been the case.
For now, inflation is back up, prices are up, allies are fleeing, and the markets are down. And this is just the start. It could get worse.
All this got me thinking about Clayton Christensen, the great thinker I had the chance to interview years ago. Back in 1997, he wrote the seminal book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” about how disruption happens, but he may just as well have been writing about what Trump and Musk are doing domestically and internationally today.
“Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies,” Christensen wrote. “That’s not management, that's dealmaking. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it’s a magnificent profession.”
By that measure, we are clearly in the dealmaking phase of the Trump presidency. And the marks on that, so far, are not good. His big win on illegal immigration and Musk’s hacksawing of government must be measured against the chaos around the economy, the tanking markets, and the rise in inflation. Trump’s foreign policy deals have been a calamity for US allies, from the abandonment of Ukraine, the alienation of the EU, and the threats to and tariffs on Canada and Mexico, not to mention the pitch to take over Gaza. Russia is the big winner so far, so if that’s on the scorecard, you get the Cyrillic version of an A. Otlichnyy!
As far as grading the management of the United States? Helping people become better people? The report card on the magnificent profession reads: More work needs to be done. Fast.