DAVID MARCUS: From borders to bombs, 5 times Trump defied experts in Year 1
Donald Trump’s second first year in the presidency will go down in history as one of the most eventful in our nation’s first 250 years, largely because time and again he made experts who doubted his methods look like fools.
For decades, at least since the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we have seen presidents as caretakers of our democracy, not as drivers of it, but Trump, seeing the caustic caution of a Congress which couldn’t pass a bill to decide where to have lunch, has acted.
These actions have paid dividends, loath though the legacy media is to admit it, and they are reasons to be excited about what his next three years may hold.
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I’ll give you five examples where the experts said Trump was out of his mind, but, in reality, it all worked out fine.
Prior to Trump taking office, Democrats had assured the American people that the border could not be closed without congressional action, and the experts gravely agreed.
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"A president doesn't have the unilateral authority to shut down the border," insisted Alberto Benitez, director of the Immigration Clinic at George Washington University Law School, in 2024, for example.
That has simply, and objectively turned out to be false. According to Customs and Border Protection, there have been seven straight months of zero illegal immigrants being released into the country, not 1,000, not 100, but zero.
The border is shut. It's actually incredible, but too often when an incredible thing happens we just accept it as the norm, as if it's always been. No. Trump made that happen.
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On "Liberation Day," as Trump dubbed it, in the spring of last year, tariffs went through the roof on almost every nation and the stock market tanked immediately, with pundits predicting the president’s approval ratings would tank just as quickly.
On every TV network and in every serious financial journal we were told that soon stock brokers would be selling apples on the street corner from carts in black-and-white photographs.
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"This is a disaster, and anyone who says otherwise is lying," the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee posted on X, back then.
In fact, Trump’s "yuge" tariffs were an opening position, and about four gazillion trade deals have been accomplished as a result. Like those deals or not, the stock market today is at record highs, and everyone on Wall Street is still in color.
Critics of Trump, from both the left and the right, warned that if he were to attack Iran, it could unleash unrest in the Middle East and perhaps even World War III!
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Ryan Crocker, a distinguished chair in diplomacy and security at RAND, said prior to the strike, "…it is unlikely that air power alone will eliminate Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons," adding, "Perhaps the U.S. force would persuade Iran to agree to such restrictions. If not, it will broaden the conflict and deepen Iranian determination to acquire nuclear weapons, whatever the cost."
Once again, Trump was right and the experts were wrong.
What actually happened was that the U.S. military, under the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, neutralized that very nuclear program that Barack Obama and his buddies wanted to contain through appeasement.
Now, Iran’s murderous regime is on the brink of destruction because Trump refused to listen to the experts.
The murder rate in Washington, D.C. dropped 40% last year, second only to Denver at 41%. For almost half of that year, President Trump had the National Guard deployed to protect the city and its citizens.
But what did the experts say at the time about the use of the National Guard?
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David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, had this to say, "When communities don’t feel they’re being policed properly, they stop helping. It’s very common for what’s seen as illegitimate policing to result in spikes of violence. And I’m very concerned about that in this instance."
The experts insisted that the Guard wasn't even in the areas where most crime occurred, but Trump who witnessed former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s miraculous anti-crime transformation of Gotham in the 1990s knew better.
According to The Trace, improvement was immediate, "From August 11 to October 11 — the first two months of Trump’s takeover — 41 people were shot in Washington, 10 of them fatally. That’s a 62 percent drop in the number of shootings over the same period last year."
The Trump administration’s broken-windows policing is working. And everybody knows it.
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Whether it was Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sean Duffy, or Pam Bondi, almost all of Trump's cabinet picks, save maybe Marco Rubio, because everyone likes Rubio, were viewed by critics on the left as sycophantic wannabes who had no business in their roles.
Jonathan Hanson, a political scientist and lecturer in statistics at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, said a year ago, "We're in untested waters," going on to say, "It's true that people's standards have shifted, but the question is, when does it really cross a line?"
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In practice, Trump’s Cabinet has been one of the most effective and cohesive cabinets in modern history and has delivered on several successes for the president, as listed above. Not only that, but televised, hours-long, cabinet meetings have kept Americans quite informed about what they are actually doing.
The expert class demanded that those of their own fill these coveted slots and basically make sure that nothing changes very much, even if they use big words to pretend it will.
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That’s not how Trump rolls, at least not in his second term.
The American people must hope that the Trump administration continues to confound the expert class, and the Davos conglomerates of too skinny billionaires.
The experts are on tap for Trump as they should be, but they are not on top. Instead, on top are the interests of America, and time and again, on that score, he always seems to prove the experts wrong.