Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHGSR Analysis · Presidential Report Card
A fact-anchored audit of Donald J. Trump’s accomplishments and failures across his first and second terms, the measurable effects on New Hampshire households, the broader American public, and the rest of the world — and where his comprehensive grade lands him on the historians’ all-time list.
Correction, Sept. 22, 2026, 9:04 a.m. EDT: This article said the C-SPAN Presidential Historians Survey ranked Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower as the top five in every iteration. C-SPAN’s 2000 and 2009 surveys placed Harry Truman fifth; Eisenhower entered the top five in 2017 and held fifth place in 2021. The article also said the administration captured Nicolás Maduro in late 2025; U.S. forces captured him on Jan. 3, 2026. It also called Trump’s 2024 New Hampshire result a first-term result. The article now states the survey history, the date of the capture and the 2024 result accurately.
Presidential greatness is not a vibe. It is a record. Donald J. Trump is the only American president to hold the office in two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, the only one to have been impeached twice in a first term, the only one to return after a felony conviction, and, sixteen months into his second term in May 2026, the only modern president whose own Supreme Court majority has been forced to publicly reel him back in. That is a record. The job of this newspaper is to grade it honestly.
This article does not pretend to be neutral about facts. It pretends to be neutral about people. Trump’s defenders point to real accomplishments; his critics point to real damage. Both groups are correct about parts of the record, and both are wrong when they refuse to look at the parts that embarrass them. What follows is the audit — first term, second term, effects here in New Hampshire, effects on the country, effects on the world — followed by a category-by-category grade and a final GPA placed in the historians’ all-time ranking.
Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.
Part I: First Term (2017–2021) — What Got Done
Strip away the noise of the Twitter feed and the cable-news outrage cycle and the first term has a real ledger. Both sides should be able to look at it.
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017): The largest tax overhaul since 1986. Corporate rate dropped from 35% to 21%. Standard deduction doubled. Child tax credit increased. Brookings called it the biggest tax rewrite in three decades. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities documented that it skewed heavily toward the top end — both things are true.
First Step Act (2018): Bipartisan criminal justice reform that reduced certain federal mandatory minimums and expanded re-entry programs. Consequential, signed with both parties in the room.
Operation Warp Speed (2020): A federal-private partnership that compressed vaccine development to under a year. Whatever else can be said about Trump’s pandemic response, the vaccine timeline itself was a logistical achievement.
Abraham Accords (2020): Diplomatic normalization between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. A real Middle East policy win, recognized across the foreign-policy establishment.
Judicial appointments: Three Supreme Court justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett) and roughly 230 lower-court judges. A generational reshaping of the federal judiciary. Supporters celebrate it; critics call it the most consequential piece of his presidency. Both descriptions are accurate.
USMCA (2020): Replaced NAFTA with a renegotiated North American trade agreement that passed the Senate 89–10. Whatever one thinks of the substance, that vote count is the definition of bipartisan.
Pre-pandemic economy: Unemployment hit a 50-year low of 3.5% by early 2020. Markets reached record highs. The economy he inherited continued a long expansion until COVID broke it.
COVID-19 response: Roughly 400,000 Americans dead by Inauguration Day 2021. Public messaging contradicted his own scientists for months. Operation Warp Speed delivered the vaccine; the federal communications operation did not deliver a coherent public-health message.
Two impeachments: First over the Ukraine call (acquitted). Second over the January 6 attack on the Capitol (acquitted). No previous president had been impeached twice.
January 6, 2021: A mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol after a rally at which he told them to “fight like hell.” Five people died in connection with the riot. The peaceful transfer of power — the single defining feature of American constitutional government — was not peaceful for the first time since 1861.
Family separations: The 2018 zero-tolerance border policy separated thousands of children from parents. The administration had no system to reunite them. That is not a partisan claim; it is the finding of the DHS Inspector General.
Deficits: National debt rose by roughly $7.8 trillion across the first term. Pandemic spending accounts for a large share, but the 2017 tax cuts contributed structurally and on a bipartisan basis the math was never going to close.
Trade war (Phase I): First-term China tariffs cost American consumers and farmers tens of billions in agricultural bailouts. Soybean exports never fully recovered.
Part II: Second Term (2025–Present) — The Pace, the Power, the Pushback
The second term is operating at a different tempo. By April 2026, Trump had signed 254 executive orders, 59 memoranda, and 136 proclamations — far outpacing every modern predecessor’s first year. CBS News, the Federal Register, and Ballotpedia all confirm the volume. Volume is not the same thing as success. Here is what the volume has produced.
Border crossings: Encounters at the southwest border collapsed in 2025 after the January 20 national emergency declaration and military deployment. Whatever one’s view of the methods, the numbers moved.
Energy production: Federal oil, gas, and advanced-nuclear permitting expanded. The administration cites record domestic production.
Federal workforce reduction: Pew Research documented a 10.3% federal workforce drop — nearly 238,000 jobs — in calendar year 2025. Supporters frame it as right-sizing; critics frame it as institutional gutting. Both are describing the same number.
Gaza ceasefire framework: A fragile three-phase ceasefire deal was brokered in 2025. It has not held cleanly, but the framework existed.
NATO defense spending: European allies moved toward higher defense-spending commitments under sustained U.S. pressure. Trump claims credit; the underlying shift is real.
Maduro removal from Venezuela: U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, 2026 — an outcome no previous administration achieved. Public opinion on the means is divided; the outcome itself is not.
Tariffs struck down: On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that roughly 70% of Trump’s tariffs — imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — exceeded his statutory authority. The Tax Foundation calculated the 2025 tariffs as the largest U.S. tax increase as a percentage of GDP since 1993, averaging $1,000 per household. Brookings noted the resulting effective tariff rate hit an 80-year high.
Defiance of court orders: A Washington Post analysis found that in roughly 35% of the lawsuits the second-term administration has lost, judges or plaintiffs identified actions that violated or obstructed court orders. That is unprecedented in modern American governance.
National Guard deployments blocked: Federal courts and the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempts to federalize National Guard troops in Chicago, Portland, and Illinois for domestic enforcement. He withdrew the deployments at the end of 2025.
USAID dismantled: Pew Research documented USAID staff dropping from approximately 4,900 to 370 — a 92.4% reduction. A Lancet study forecast roughly 14 million additional global deaths by 2030 attributable to the shutdown, including 4.5 million children under five. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs reports child mortality rose globally in 2025 for the first time this century.
“One Big Beautiful Bill”: Signed July 2025. CBO projects 10.9 million Americans will lose health coverage through Medicaid and ACA marketplace effects. SNAP cut by approximately $186 billion — the largest in the program’s history — with an estimated 4.7 million Americans removed from enrollment.
Ukraine and Russia: The administration’s November 2025 peace-deal attempt crossed multiple Ukrainian and European red lines, per the Council on Foreign Relations. PRIO projects 2026 will be among the deadliest years on record for the Ukraine conflict. The U.S. formally withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords.
Qatar jet: 61% of New Hampshire residents called Trump’s acceptance of a Qatari luxury jet for Air Force One inappropriate. Senator Jeanne Shaheen flagged it as raising constitutional and ethical concerns.
Retributive prosecutions: The Department of Justice opened criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both were tossed by judges. The administration has signaled it will continue.
A presidency that signs 254 executive orders in fifteen months is moving fast. A presidency that has 35% of its lost lawsuits flagged as court-order defiance is breaking something while it moves.
Part III: What This Has Done to New Hampshire
This is a New Hampshire newspaper, and the question that matters here is: what does any of this do to a Granite Stater’s life? The answer, in numbers, is unambiguous.
The Numbers Granite Staters Are Living Inside
Approval collapse: The April 2026 UNH Survey Center Granite State Poll — the most-respected NH instrument — found 60% of NH residents disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance. Emerson polling in March 2026 put him at 41% approve / 55% disapprove statewide. Among independents, 59% disapprove.
Heating costs: More than 350,000 NH households heat with oil, propane, or wood. Congressman Chris Pappas warned in March 2025 that the first round of tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports would directly raise those costs. Heating-fuel imports from Canada are a structural feature of the NH energy mix, not a political talking point.
Housing crisis worsened: NH needs an estimated 90,000 additional housing units by 2040. The National Association of Home Builders estimated tariff-driven increases would add $7,500–$10,000 to per-unit construction costs. More than 70% of NH softwood lumber and gypsum imports come from Canada or Mexico. The math is not partisan.
Forest products industry hit: NH’s forest products sector contributes over $2 billion in annual economic output and employs roughly 7,500 workers. NH exports represent the highest share of state GDP in New England (~7%), making the state structurally more vulnerable to retaliatory tariffs than any of its neighbors.
NH manufacturers: A Senate Joint Economic Committee report released in April 2026 specifically documented a New Hampshire aerospace and medical-equipment components manufacturer whose sales fell more than 20% in 2025 compared to 2024.
Medicaid expansion at risk: KFF identified New Hampshire as one of nine states with a “trigger law” that would automatically end Medicaid expansion if federal funding falls. The One Big Beautiful Bill changed that funding landscape directly.
Trump’s 2024 Granite State result — losing the state by 2.8 points after a 7.3-point loss in 2020 — was the closest a Republican has come to flipping NH in a generation. The second-term policy record has now turned that closeness back into a steep underwater approval. That is not a polling oddity. It is what happens when the state’s economic structure runs through Canadian lumber, Canadian heating fuel, an export-heavy GDP, and an aging Medicaid-expansion population.
Part IV: What This Has Done to the United States
National data converges with the NH numbers and goes further.
- Inflation approval: Fox News polling (May 15–18, 2026) recorded Trump at 24% approve / 76% disapprove on inflation — the lowest approval on any single issue of his presidency. Verasight tracking polling has shown his inflation rating decline every single month of 2026.
- Economic approval: CNN’s April–May 2026 SSRS poll registered −40 net approval on the economy — the lowest of his career. 77% of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — reported in CNN’s data that Trump’s policies have increased their cost of living.
- Tariff cost: Tax Foundation calculation: $1,000 per household in 2025; projected additional $700 per household in 2026 from Section 232 and Section 122 tariffs after the IEEPA loss. JPMorgan estimates business absorption of tariff costs will fall from 80% to 20% during 2026 — meaning consumers pick up the rest.
- Small business jobs: The Joint Economic Committee minority report (May 2026) documented that the smallest U.S. businesses lost 4.5× more jobs in 2025 than during the pandemic in 2020. April 2026 marked 13 consecutive months of job losses at firms with fewer than 10 employees. Construction businesses under 10 employees saw revenue decline an estimated 18%. Leisure and hospitality, 15.2%.
- Manufacturing jobs: The JEC reported a loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs more than a year into the second term — the opposite of the inauguration-day pledge to make America “a manufacturing nation once again.”
- Federal workforce: 238,000 federal jobs eliminated in 2025. Education Department staff cut 42.6%. USAID cut 92.4%. VA reportedly slated for an additional 35,000 cuts.
- Healthcare coverage: 10.9 million Americans projected to lose Medicaid or ACA coverage under the One Big Beautiful Bill; 5.1 million additional likely to lose marketplace coverage when enhanced premium tax credits expired at the end of 2025. Combined potential: 16 million additional uninsured by 2034.
Part V: What This Has Done to the World
The international ledger is colder and easier to count.
- USAID shutdown: Lancet-projected 14 million additional deaths by 2030. Hundreds of thousands of deaths already attributed. First measured global increase in child mortality this century.
- WHO and Paris Accord withdrawal: Formal U.S. exit from both institutions in 2025.
- NATO destabilization: The 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly opposes NATO’s open-door policy. Vice President Vance’s Munich Security Conference remarks reframed the alliance relationship as adversarial on values.
- Ukraine: PRIO forecasting projects 2026 will be the deadliest year of the war. The November 2025 U.S. peace plan was rejected by Ukraine and European partners as ceding too much to Moscow. Trump’s August 2025 Anchorage summit with Putin produced no enforceable concession from Russia.
- Iran and Venezuela: The administration has executed military strikes in both theaters. Polls (CNN, Saint Anselm) show majorities disapprove of the Iran action specifically.
- State-based armed conflicts: Per the Peace Research Institute Oslo, more state-based armed conflicts in 2024–2025 than at any point in the past seven decades. The administration ran on ending wars; the global conflict count has risen.
- Trade order: 2025 U.S. effective tariff rate — 9.6% — was the highest since 1947. The U.S. trade-policy posture has been described by Brookings as more restrictive, by some measures, than at any point in 110 years.
Part VI: The Report Card
What follows applies the C-SPAN ten-category historians’ framework to Trump’s combined two-term record, with a letter grade and a brief justification in each category. The grades reflect the documented record, not the rhetorical claims of either side.
| Category | Grade | Justification |
|---|---|---|
| Public Persuasion | B− | Two electoral victories, including the first non-consecutive comeback since 1892. Persuasion of his base is unrivaled. Persuasion of the country at large is consistently underwater. C-SPAN 2021 ranked first-term Trump 32nd of 44. |
| Crisis Leadership | D | COVID first-term communication failures cost American lives. Vaccine delivery was a logistical win; messaging was a sustained failure. Second-term tariff rollout produced market chaos and a 6–3 Supreme Court rebuke. |
| Economic Management | D | Pre-COVID first-term economy was strong but inherited a long expansion. 2017 tax cuts boosted growth at the cost of debt. Second-term tariffs registered as the largest tax-percent-of-GDP increase since 1993 and produced 13 straight months of small-business job losses. Inflation approval at 24% (Fox News May 2026). |
| Moral Authority | F | C-SPAN historians ranked Trump dead last on moral authority of all 44 presidents in 2021. Two impeachments. 34-count felony conviction. January 6. Documented court-order defiance in 35% of lost lawsuits. Acceptance of a foreign sovereign’s luxury jet during office. |
| International Relations | D+ | Abraham Accords and NATO defense-spending shift are real wins. USAID dismantling, WHO/Paris withdrawal, alienation of NATO allies, Ukraine policy failure, and an 80-year high tariff rate are real losses. The losses outweigh the wins on measurable global outcomes. |
| Administrative Skills | F | C-SPAN historians ranked Trump dead last in administrative skills among 44 presidents in 2021. Second-term administration ran 254 executive orders through April 2026, with roughly 35% of lost lawsuits involving court-order defiance. Volume is not skill. |
| Relations with Congress | C | 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, First Step Act, USMCA, and the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill are real legislative outputs. Reliance on executive orders for major policy reflects Congressional weakness as much as executive strength — but his pattern of governing around Congress when possible is a structural mark against this category. |
| Vision / Setting an Agenda | B | Voters knew exactly what they were voting for both times. The agenda has been clear, consistent, and substantially executed — whether one approves of the execution or not. Vision is not the same as wisdom, but Trump has it. |
| Pursued Equal Justice for All | F | Family separations, retributive DOJ prosecutions, attempted birthright citizenship rollback, deportation policies struck down repeatedly in court, dismantling of DEI programs in ways that have drawn ongoing civil-rights litigation. This category has historically been Trump’s lowest, and the second term has not improved it. |
| Performance Within Context of Times | D− | Inherited a post-pandemic recovering economy and an intact international order. Leaves (so far) an economy with collapsing small-business employment and consumer confidence, an international order with NATO frayed and child mortality rising for the first time this century, and a constitutional order with court-order defiance institutionalized. The trajectory is downward on the metrics historians weight. |
Calculating the GPA
Converting those grades on a 4.0 scale: B− = 2.7, D = 1.0, D = 1.0, F = 0.0, D+ = 1.3, F = 0.0, C = 2.0, B = 3.0, F = 0.0, D− = 0.7.
Sum: 11.7. Divided by 10 categories: 1.17 GPA.
That is a D average. Specifically, a D+. Not the bottom of the historians’ chart, but solidly in the lower tier and well below the modern post-WWII average of roughly C+ / B−.
Comprehensive Two-Term Grade
D+
GPA: 1.17 / 4.00 · Rank tier: bottom 10%
Part VII: Where That Lands Him on the All-Time List
Historians’ surveys have remarkable stability at the top and the bottom of the rankings. Lincoln, Washington, FDR, and Teddy Roosevelt have held top-five spots in all four iterations of the C-SPAN survey; Eisenhower replaced Truman at fifth in 2017. The bottom five — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Pierce, and the post-impeachment cluster — have been almost as stable.
Trump’s first-term C-SPAN rank: 41st of 44. Ahead only of Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan. The second-term record — tariffs struck down by his own Court, USAID dismantled with global mortality consequences, Medicaid and SNAP cuts of historic scale, manufacturing job losses despite a manufacturing-revival pledge, and the institutionalization of court-order defiance — will not lift that rank. On most categories it lowers it.
Where a 1.17 GPA places Trump in comparative context:
| Tier | Approximate GPA | Representative Presidents |
|---|---|---|
| Top tier (A− to A) | 3.7–4.0 | Lincoln, Washington, FDR, T. Roosevelt |
| High tier (B to A−) | 3.0–3.7 | Eisenhower, Truman, Jefferson, Kennedy, Reagan, Obama |
| Middle tier (C+ to B−) | 2.3–3.0 | Clinton, G.H.W. Bush, Madison, Monroe, LBJ |
| Lower-middle (C− to C+) | 1.7–2.3 | G.W. Bush, Carter, Ford, Biden (provisional) |
| Bottom tier (D to D+) | 1.0–1.7 | Trump (1.17), Harding, Hoover, Tyler |
| Worst tier (F to D−) | 0.0–1.0 | Buchanan, A. Johnson, Pierce |
The honest reading: Trump is not the worst president in American history. James Buchanan walked the country into the Civil War; Andrew Johnson sabotaged Reconstruction; Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and let the union fracture. Those are floor cases. But Trump is comfortably in the bottom tier, and on current trajectory the second-term record is dragging him toward the floor, not away from it.
A D+ is a grade you can graduate with. It is not a grade anyone should celebrate. The question is whether the country — and New Hampshire in particular — can afford the cost of one more term’s worth of D-grade governance after the bill comes due.
Part VIII: The Verdict
The defenders are right that Trump has done specific, real things: tax cuts, judges, criminal-justice reform, Operation Warp Speed, Abraham Accords, a border collapse in encounters in 2025, NATO spending pressure, Maduro’s removal. Those are accomplishments and they are on the ledger.
The critics are right that Trump has done specific, real damage: two impeachments and a felony conviction, January 6, family separations, tariff policy struck down by his own Court, manufacturing job losses despite the pledge, the largest Medicaid and SNAP cuts in program history, USAID dismantled with measurable mortality consequences abroad, court-order defiance in roughly a third of his lost lawsuits, and an approval collapse on the issue — the economy — he was elected to fix.
Both ledgers are real. The question for the report card is which weighs more, and the historians’ framework gives a clean answer: the categories Trump fails — moral authority, administrative skills, equal justice, performance in context — are the categories that distinguish great presidents from forgettable ones, and they are weighted heavily by every serious survey instrument.
The grade stands: D+. The bottom tier. Not the floor, but well below the average modern president. And the trajectory in May 2026, sixteen months into the second term, pointed down, not up.
New Hampshire voters are already living that grade. The April 2026 UNH numbers, the Emerson numbers, the Saint Anselm numbers all show the same trajectory: Granite Staters narrowed the gap on Trump in 2024, then opened it back up wider as the actual cost showed up in their heating bills, their housing, their healthcare, and their small businesses’ export orders.
The record is the record. The grade is the grade. The bill, in NH and nationally, is still being written.
Sources and methodology: Grades follow the ten-category C-SPAN Presidential Historians Survey framework first used in 2000 and most recently published in 2021, converted to a 4.0 GPA scale.
Key data sources: C-SPAN Presidential Historians Survey 2021; Siena College Research Institute 2022 ranking; Pew Research Center (federal workforce, March 2026); Tax Foundation tariff tracker (2026); Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (March 2026); CBO budget projections (2025 reconciliation bill); UNH Survey Center Granite State Polls (April 2026); Emerson College NH Poll (March 2026); Saint Anselm College Survey Center (March 2026); Fox News national poll (May 2026); CNN/SSRS national poll (May 2026); Joint Economic Committee minority reports (April and May 2026); KFF Health News Medicaid analysis (2024–2025); Commonwealth Fund Medicaid/SNAP analysis (June 2025); Pew Research USAID staffing (March 2026); The Lancet USAID mortality projection (2025); Peace Research Institute Oslo conflict tracker; Council on Foreign Relations 2026 SOTU policy guide; Washington Post court-defiance analysis (July 2025); Ballotpedia executive-action tracker; CBS News first-year-of-second-term review (January 2026); Britannica shadow docket compilation (April 2026); Congressman Chris Pappas (NH-01) press releases on tariffs (March and April 2025).
All figures and historian rankings as of May 2026. Granite Staters with corrections or context: granitestatereport@gmail.com.
