PREVIEW: The Friday Edition. - Trump’s first year: a nonpartisan scorecard.

16 snips

Jan 23, 2026

A data-driven look at the first year of a presidency using objective benchmarks like economic indicators, promises kept, and public sentiment. Topics include gas and housing trends, market performance, GDP and employment stats, inflation and interest rate moves, consumer sentiment collapse, oil production records, and rising national debt. The team previews their methodology and promise-tracking approach.

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ADVICE

Compare Objective Data With Discussion

The hosts promise to remain dispassionate and data-driven while offering reflections at the end.
They recommend checking a subjective follow-up episode for interpretive analysis and surprises.

INSIGHT

Savings Drop as Debt Rises

Household savings fell while overall household debt and credit card balances rose.
Personal savings dropped from 4.77% to 3.73% and credit card balances rose to $1.23 trillion.

INSIGHT

GDP Strengthened Over The Year

GDP growth accelerated with a strong Q3 2025 showing and a higher annualized total.
Annualized GDP rose to $31.1 trillion with Q3 growing at a 4.4% annual rate.

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12 months ago, we laid the groundwork to evaluate President Donald Trump’s second term as objectively as possible.

Our goal was to take a few objective metrics to judge a president’s success: Things like economic data, promises kept, and the sentiment of American citizens. Given how much analysis and opinion we engage with every day, we thought we could refer back to these benchmarks periodically as a nearly unimpeachable way to judge the president’s performance.

When I think back to this time 12 months ago, one big detail stands out: I wasn’t here. In fact, with the timing of a true troll, my son was born on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Just days before, we had published the set of metrics we’d use to evaluate the president. It was the last major piece we published before I stepped away from Tanglefor a month.

Now, here we are. Trump’s second term is now one year old (just like my son), and I’m back in the driver’s seat, ready to use the metrics we developed last year to evaluate the Trump administration. Before we get started, I want to give a quick note about our process. The benchmarks we chose to track are mostly hard metrics, but with a few qualitative assessments. We wanted to include things that are easy to measure (like gas prices) as well as some things that take a little more effort to evaluate (like whether the administration has kept a promise or not).

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Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.

This podcast was hosted by: Isaac Saul and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.

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