AI Declares Trump The Most Successful Since Roosevelt

Newsweek reports,

The first six months of Donald Trump's second presidency have been the most "successful" of any American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to an analysis conducted by Newsweek using AI.

But it isn't Newsweek at all, it's ChatGPT.

Newsweek asked ChatGPT to rank the accomplishments of 20th and 21st century U.S. presidents in their first six months, taking account of the level of support they enjoyed in Congress.

The model gave Trump an overall score of "very high," thanks to legislation such as the One Big Beautiful Bill and Laken Riley Acts.

But aren't legislative accompliahments just one side of the story? He was also fighting rogue district judges who tried to impose restraining orders on the whole country. Congress had nothing to do with it. And even with Congress, in his first term, he seldom could get Mitch McConnell's cooperation as Senate Majority Leader, much less Paul Ryan's as Speaker. To get to his current level of success, he had to get control of the Republican Party during his interregnum.

The only real help he got from Mitch McConnell during his first term was confirmation of his three Supreme Court nominations, which he could finally exploit during his second term. And his second-term cleanup of several Cabinet departments was undertaken using his Article II executive authority, no Congressional action needed.

Most prominently, he's gone a good way to cleaning out the State, Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense Departments, although these efforts are continuing. If anything, Newsweek is damning Trump with faint praise. It's a little like Tucker Carlson focusing on one accomplishment, getting men out of women's sports, and calling it an "appetizer", as though he hadn't done much else. But Trump isn't stopping at six months.

It looks like he's taken up a new agenda item in the last few weeks, the Federal Reserve. It looks like he wants to force the Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, out before his term expires nezt year. For now, it seems likely that Trump and his allies can force him out based on scandals connected with the Fed's headquarters remodeling:

I am criminally referring Jerome Powell to the DOJ to investigate perjury regarding his crazy $2.5BN building.

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) July 17, 2025

But that will be just the start:

.@SecScottBessent: "What we need to do is examine the entire Federal Reserve institution and whether they have been successful... All of these Ph.D.s over there, I don't know what they do... This is like Universal Basic Income for academic economists." pic.twitter.com/ITzSwQKpjS

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 21, 2025

In a longer post on X, Bessent went into detail:

While I have no knowledge or opinion on the legal basis for the massive building renovations being undertaken on Constitution Avenue, a review of the decision to undertake such a project by an institution reporting operating losses of more than $100 billion per year should be conducted.

The Fed does regular reviews of its monetary policy framework. I would urge Fed leadership to similarly undertake, publish and implement a comprehensive institutional review across its entire mission to buttress its credibility. It will go a long way towards strengthening the Fed’s credibility with the American people on its core mission of guiding our nation’s monetary policy.

Inevitably,

Mohamed El-Erian on Tuesday called for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to voluntarily relinquish his position in order to ensure the central bank’s independence, making the chief economic advisor at Allianz one of the first prominent economists to publicly take such a position.

“If Chair Powell’s objective is to safeguard the Fed’s operational autonomy (which I deem vital), then he should resign,” El-Erian said in a morning post on X.

This is a polite way of telling him he'll be fired if he doesn't resign. In effect, Trump is holding the Fed's independence hostage; if he has to fire Powell, it will set a bad precedent, but Powell has to go. And he almost certainly will.

Then there's the whole question of the criminal referrals for Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Rice, and even Obama himself for an allegedly "treasonous" coup attempt against Trump in 2016-17. The thing to keep in mind is that Trump is proving himself not to be a creature of empty bombast. As I've been noting over the past several days, Trump seems to have been fully aware of what was going on as it happened over his 2016-17 transition period, and any allegations that emerge from these referrals have almost certainly been throroughly substantiated. This is also a serious agenda item, and it's a mistake to minimize or discount it.

And then we have the California agenda. As we saw with the stunt Sen Padilla tried to pull, charging Secretary Noem without wearing his Senate ID, it seems as if he was trying to provoke her security into an overreaction that he could use to make some kind of point. Trump appears to be aware of threats from California politicians and is clearly working to forestall them, most recently Sen Adam Schiff:

Adam Schiff said that his primary residence was in MARYLAND to get a cheaper mortgage and rip off America, when he must LIVE in CALIFORNIA because he was a Congressman from CALIFORNIA. I always knew Adam Schiff was a Crook. The FRAUD began with the refinance of his Maryland property on February 6, 2009, and continued through multiple transactions until the Maryland property was correctly designated as a second home on October 13, 2020.

Trump's strategy appears to be to provoke California politicians like Schiff, Padilla, Newsom, and Bass into various forms of overt aggression or resistance, at which point he either retaliates with federal law enforcement or cuts another form of federal aid to the state, as he recently did with funding for its high speed rail program. In many cases, he'll invoke the Supremacy Clause in Article VI, Paragraph 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes that federal laws and treaties are the supreme law of the land.

His overall objective will be to destroy the California urban Democrat machine. It's a major miscalculation to underestimate Trump or characterize him as ego-driven or narcissistic. He has a big agenda, but he's working very hard on it, and he's so far been remarkably successful.