Trump’s New Year’s resolutions

Thankfully, the nation does not depend on whether we ever live up to our goals as we enter a new year. However, presidents — and especially this president — do not have that luxury. As we stare down the barrel of 2026, President Donald Trump and his administration are not scribbling in a brand-new leather-bound planner from Aunt Bessie about their plan to “drink more water.” They are, we hope, outlining policy.

As we enter a midterm election year, three resolutions should be front and center, not as wishful thinking, but as acts of political necessity. If followed, they could define and protect Trump’s legacy, but if ignored, they could hand his enemies exactly what they want.

First: Don’t give up a single inch on illegal immigration

If there is one area where Trump has not only been rhetorically correct but also substantively vindicated, it is the border. Illegal immigration is no longer a policy crutch referenced by feckless Republicans. It has become the defining domestic success of the Trump era. It was the reason he came down that escalator, it was the matter every “serious person” told him to soften, and it is the matter on which he has been right all along.

Let’s not forget that the Biden-Harris administration treated the border like it was a Latinx version of The Purge. Millions of immigrants crossed illegally, interior enforcement evaporated, and even the idea that a nation has the right to decide who enters was condemned as racist. The result was predictable chaos, with overwhelmed cities, social services stretched beyond recognition, and working-class Americans told, once again, to accept the consequences of elite moral posturing. 

This year, Trump solved this problem.

But now, the task goes beyond fixing the border to resetting the national baseline, by both undoing the damage and making sure the damage stays undone. Enforcement must remain, deportations must continue, and asylum cases must be adjudicated carefully and strictly. The threat of foreign actors, whether through overt violence or soft cultural infiltration, must be addressed. But beneath it all, the message must be unmistakable: The era of lawlessness is over.

These remaining years must be spent locking these border policies in place to make it as difficult as possible for the next Democratic president to undo Trump’s victories with a flick of their pen.

Second: Exercise restraint and constitutional humility in foreign policy

Trump’s supporters are right to note that his first year back has been relatively successful on the foreign policy front. Several smaller conflicts have ended, or at the very least cooled. The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza reached a fragile and uneasy pause, but a pause nonetheless, while the world appears less eager to test American resolve than it did under Biden’s combination of weakness and incoherence.

Something to do with stealth bombers over Iran that did not lead to World War III, despite Tucker Carlson’s warnings.

But foreign policy success is not measured only by outcomes. It is measured by process, credibility, and sustainability. The war in Ukraine grinds on, seemingly immune to resolution. Meanwhile, supposedly noninterventionist wings of the Right invert reality and present Ukraine as the roadblock to peace for daring to defend itself. Meanwhile, Trump is openly posturing toward Venezuela, while authorizing strikes against so-called “narco-terrorists” in international waters.

Now, it’s important to recognize that (for example) striking “narco-terrorists” is not inherently wrong. Personally, I’m not losing any sleep over the evisceration of international drug dealers who are delivering products that are destroying our society. No, the problem, as it so often is with Trump, is not what he is doing, but how he is doing it.

The presidency is powerful, but it is not monarchical, and Congress is not decorative. If Trump wants lasting foreign policy victories, ones that survive legal scrutiny and political backlash, he needs to involve the legislative branch. Not because it feels good, not because CNN demands it, but because unilateralism breeds resistance, and resistance metastasizes into chaos.

Ironically, Trump’s greatest foreign policy strength has always been unpredictability. But unpredictability works best when anchored to legitimacy. Of course, this may be the most unrealistic resolution of all, given that Trump hates procedure and loves wielding unilateral power over everything under the sun. But that does not change the fact that process still matters.

Third, and most crucial: Do not lose the midterm elections

Let’s be honest: everything hinges on this. The midterm elections will determine whether Trump’s final two years are productive or paralyzed, whether he’s a lame duck with claws or a lame duck passed out in the corner on a morphine drip. A friendly Congress means confirmations, budgets, and momentum, while even a slightly hostile one means subpoenas, investigations, and a presidency spending its remaining days playing defense.

If Republicans lose the House, impeachments will follow, and with the Trump family raking in millions (if not billions) of dollars from cryptocurrency scams and business schemes with nations such as Qatar, there will be plenty of targets. And right now, Trump is handing Democrats the one thing they desperately need: a simple, emotionally resonant message that prices are too high.

Thanks to an entirely voluntary bout of economic shakiness driven by tariffs and the contradictory, often patronizing, messaging surrounding them, Trump has given Democrats a national platform. They don’t need good policy, or honesty, or strategy. They just need to point to your grocery receipt, energy bill, or savings account and say, “This is Trump’s fault.”

And honestly, it is Trump’s fault.

Let’s not pretend that Democrats will actually bring costs down. New York Gov.-elect Zohran Mamdani is more likely to French kiss Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Times Square than deliver his brand of jihadist affordability to New York City. But that did not stop him from winning on a message of affordability.

Why? Because elections are won by successfully comparing a gleaming hypothetical future to the gritty reality of the present.

Tariffs are immediate, visible, disastrous, and therefore easily weaponized.

For the love of all things gold-plated, Trump needs to let tariffs go, unleash the economy, and stop trying to market them to Americans with a level of patronizing shamelessness that would make John Kerry blush.

Trump does not need to win every policy argument before the midterm elections. He just needs to avoid losing the political war, and a booming economy does that automatically. A sluggish one, especially when self-inflicted, does not.

THE OBJECTIVE OF TRUMP’S DRIP-DRIP VENEZUELA STRATEGY

Trump’s New Year’s resolutions are not about reinvention. They are about discipline. Hold the line, slow down, and cut off the fat. Above all, do not deliver Congress to Democrats on a silver platter.

If he can manage that — if he can resist his own worst instincts just long enough — his final years in office could be hugely consequential. If not, we may be looking at a presidency that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and doomed us to whatever comes next.

Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist. Follow him on X (@ighaworth) or Substack.