Evaluating President Trump's First Six Months
No Time For Black Pilling
Today's guest post is excerpted from one of the most astute--and influential--analysts on the right, the pseudonymous former book publisher Mystery Grove. As I've mentioned here before, Mystery Grove single-handedly shoved a formerly out-of-print memoir of a White Russian general, Baron Pyotr Wrangel, into the discourse to the point where Tucker Carlson spoke about it.
Mystery Grove is back to give his assessment of President Trump's first six months in office. Before we get to it, two quick market notes.
- With President Trump threatening 100% "secondary sanctions" on countries buying Russian oil within the next two weeks, you may want to consider hedging. I'm hopeful this doesn't happen, but if it does, I don't think markets will take it well. As a reminder, you can use the Portfolio Armor iPhone app to scan for the optimal hedge based on your time frame and risk tolerance.
- Dip buyers may be interested in a few healthcare names we added in the Portfolio Armor Substack today.
Taking advantage of today’s drop sparked by $UNH and $NVO reports to add three bullish bets on the healthcare sector.https://t.co/sgCZ2je4gk
— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) July 29, 2025
Now, on to Mystery Grove's report card for President Trump's first six months.
Excerpted from Mystery Grove at Conundrum Cluster
Wake in Fright: Evaluating President Trump's remarkable first 6 months
"There is great chaos under heaven - the situation is excellent"
We made it! It’s been a very long six months since Donald Trump took the oath of office. Lots of people, including myself, have lots of thoughts about where we are and where we’re going next. I recommend that you listen to this using the Substack App’s excellent text-to-speech feature because it’s going to be a long one.
I won’t bury the lead: Trump’s first 6 months represent, without a doubt, the most positive momentum that the American Right has seen in my lifetime. Problems that seemed unsolvable before Trump are now being solved. The unthinkable is being thought at a wide scale and expressed in public policy. The unmitigated decline and threats of total annihilation that defined the Biden years are now a distant memory, so distant a memory, in fact, that many rightwingers have already lost sight of just how far we’ve come.
First, the failures. As happy as I am, it hasn’t all been roses for Trump and team.
[Mystery Grove goes on to cite his three Trump "failures": bombing Iran, mishandling the Epstein files, and letting government communications by departments like Homeland Security be "too online" rather than dignifiied/professional]
Never forget how far we’ve come. Think about (if you were around back then) what conservatism was like in 2015 before the rise of Trump. Think about the confusion and total resistance that Trump faced during the chaotic early days of his first term. Think about how close we came to the brink after 2020. Think about how bleak most important trends were and how impossible progress on important issues seemed.
When you compare the situation back then to that of today, not just what is happening in government, but what modern conservatives (or even Americans more generally) think is important or acceptable, it is obvious that we have experienced a huge positive sea change since the start of the Trump Era. Only the most cynical, dishonest, or delusional could (and do) ignore how much better a place we are in.
The second Trump administration is taking full advantage of the vastly improved climate that Trump has created for conservatives. This goes deeper than pure policy: More than it was at any point in the first term, the Trump administration today seems energetic and creative. It is taking bold action, fighting on unfriendly territory, and not falling apart when it encounters resistance. This is something that can last.
Of course, there have been plenty of missteps, mistakes, and even blunders (I’ve heard a great problem in every department is finding ideologically reliable, experienced, and/or competent personnel), but the wily and determined Trump Admin 2 seems like an actual political force capable of moving the situation in America in a positive direction over the long term. Only a movement that believes in itself in this way, to not just go through the motions but rather fight and fight hard in pursuit of its goals, can lead and convince others to follow.
The centerpiece of Trump’s second first 6 months is the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill (BBB). The bill contained a historic funding increase for immigration enforcement, granting ICE a larger budget than the Marine Corps. It is hard to believe that Trump would have gone to such great lengths to secure such a titanic increase in funding if he was planning on backing away from mass deportations, his most important policy.
This new funding means 10,000 new ICE agents to make arrests, along with desperately needed new space to hold arrestees and new prosecutors to handle deportation cases. The huge funding increases are important. Attracting high quality people to these roles requires high pay and opportunities for advancement, things that are often missing from government work. Although the Biden regime spent years dismantling America’s internal immigration enforcement infrastructure, the Trump administration seems committed to rebuilding it better than ever.
Trump also deserves enormous praise for successfully securing America’s border after decades of claims from liberals and conservatives alike that this was impossible. Illegal border crossings are currently down by more than 99% from their height during the worst days of the Biden years.
The most revealing aspect of this achievement is that Trump did not just turn the light switch back on and resume normal operations after Biden’s open borders officials were kicked out of office. He used new tools to bring the crisis to a close, deploying actual military combat units to the border and working with friendly state governments to shore up problem areas, and didn’t stop in victory, pursuing funding for an actual border wall to make the already difficult process of illegally crossing the border even harder.
Trump has visibly strengthened the power behind US internal immigration enforcement, even if the pace of removals still needs to increase by a great deal. In the absence of the resources needed to achieve the truly large-scale deportations we need. Trump’s immigration officials have wisely decided to stage pitched “battles,” high visibility enforcement actions guaranteed to have a wider impact on the immigration discourse than any direct deportations that might result from them.
A great example of these set pieces can be found in a joint ICE and Marine Corps raid on an agricultural area in Camarillo, CA earlier this month. The immigration raid was conducted with military precision, seizing dozens of illegal immigrants in the fields where they worked. When a large mob confronted the immigration officers, the Marines and ICE not only stood their ground but also called in a show of force, landing a Blackhawk helicopter in the middle of the farm to “deliver water.”
The images that came out of the event were great: Uniformed Marines standing against an angry mob of foreigners waving foreign flags. One of the Mexicans was even caught on video firing a gun at the raiders as he was running away (fortunately no one was injured). It was impossible to characterize the mob as anything other than foreign invaders, against whom a swift and severe response was obviously justified.
However, the real cherry on top for ICE came after the raid had been completed. California Governor Gavin Newsom and many other prominent Democrats began to condemn ICE, claiming it was targeting helpless farm workers picking strawberries. Several hours later, it was revealed that the farm was actually a marijuana grow operation and that nearly a dozen children had been captured working on the farm, most of them unaccompanied by their parents.
The ICE raid was really an operation to shut down a drug farm, guarded by armed men, that used child labor. This kind of arrangement is commonplace with illegals and indefensible in the eyes of the public. People just don’t hear about these things; the situation was so bad it sounds like a joke. ICE managed to not just stop the operation but also to bait various major Democrats into defending it.
In general, the Trump administration has done a good job generating uncertainty in the lives of illegal immigrants. They are increasingly cut off from state-provided resources and services. Illicit employment at otherwise above-board institutions has become a lot more complicated. Their fake exemptions from deportation are being tossed out administratively.
Although the courts and open borders lawyers are fighting Trump on immigration at every turn, they now have to fight constantly (expensive and attention-consuming), and fight with the knowledge that the Trump team is in it for the long haul and thinking outside the box. It is much easier to convince illegal immigrants to self deport, the easiest and cheapest way to get these people out of the country, if they are far poorer, more isolated, and know that going outside carries the non-zero risk that they might be subjected to a Byzantine multi-month sequence of events that ends with them being shipped to South Sudan.
[...]
There are hundreds, even thousands, of other achievements outside of immigration that Trump’s victory has delivered. These wins touch nearly every aspect of American life. It’s hard to think of a quality of life metric for Americans that has not been improved by Trump winning and Kamala losing. I think people will be surprised what another 3 and a half years of this kind of progress will bring. I will name only a few of my favorites below:
Freeing the January 6 hostages on the evening of the inauguration, and blanket ending all pending prosecutions related to January 6 in response to the pervasive prosecutorial and judicial abuse that had surrounded these cases
Gutting the Department of Justice’s activist Civil Rights Division and closing its Community Relations Service, which encouraged white parents to make pathetic calls for unity after their children were targeted with anti-white racial violence
Shuttering USAID, which distributed hundreds of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments to liberal activist groups domestically and abroad
Proposing a new rule to remove pseudoscientific and permanently disfiguring transgender procedures and drugs from Medicaid coverage, greatly reducing their availability
Aggressively targeting universities and businesses for systemically discriminating against white people, especially white men, through DEI and affirmative action programs, severely curtailing these practices nationwide
Dismantling the Department of Education, which had become irrecoverably politicized in recent decades, returning responsibility for education to the states and dramatically reducing funding to various liberal activism NGOs
Firing or forcing out thousands of government employees in the State Department and other important agencies in order to decrease institutional resistance to the implementation of Trump’s lawful policies
Ending numerous “agreements” between the Department of Justice and various police departments targeted by liberal federal prosecutors that prevented local police from doing their jobs
Condemning the South African government for policies that target South Africa’s white minority population, which amount to an ethnic cleansing campaign
Achieving a historically abnormal budget surplus from tariff revenues, with the promise that government revenues will be increasingly reliant on tariffs rather than taxation of normal Americans
Depoliticizing the military by both ending leftist ideological indoctrination programs and removing the compromised officers who pushed them (I was sent an extremely entertaining description of this process taking place at a service academy, it can best be described as “shock and awe” targeting activist professors and staff)
Very revealing moment for me: Towards the end of this article, in the section where I provide recommendations for future actions, I had written that Trump should use the federal government to rid America of its growing and obviously mismanaged homeless problem in order to reduce national stress levels and encourage better decision-making.
As I was finishing this article (it’s been in progress on and off for about 3 weeks) Trump announced a new Executive Order stripping funds from ineffective homeless advocacy programs, which perpetuate the problem they nominally exist to solve, and removing various federal restrictions and consent decrees that prohibited arresting or forcibly institutionalizing the homeless.
We are in BasedWorld now. We have the opportunity to fix our problems. The moment has come.
