CNN: Let’s Face It, Trump Is the Most Influential President This Century — And More

And it’s not just on tariffs, although that’s where Harry Enten starts with his data analytics. After just six months of his second non-consecutive term, Donald Trump has changed the direction of the US in several ways, and tariffs may actually be the least important.

One could say that Trump has fundamentally transformed America … or more accurately, fundamentally transformed it back:

🚨 WOW! CNN has finally admitted it: Donald Trump is the “most influential president this century.”

Tariffs. A historic net migration decline. And a ton of executive orders.

“Trump’s remaking the United States of America.”

“We can start there with tariffs. What are we talking… pic.twitter.com/eqGf3DiDVs

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 3, 2025

Eric Daugherty provided a lengthy transcript of Enten’s remarks in his X post. Let’s parse through them, from the weakest argument to the strongest:

• “Already, 180 executive orders signed by Donald Trump this year. You have to go all the way back to the FDR administration once again to find a year in which there were as many executive orders signed as we have this year. To give you an idea, Biden during his first year signed 77. That’s the entire year. We’re only a little bit more than halfway through this year.”

Is this a good way to highlight influence? Don’t get me wrong — Trump came back to office far more prepared to take action, and this is a good measure of that preparation. However, EOs are simply directives on how to use executive authority, to the extent that they operate within those legitimate bounds. A far better measure of influence would be the successes Trump has had in taking back that executive authority to pare down the bureaucracy and to fire people who exercise executive authority under the absurd guise of “independent agencies.” 

Trump’s string of successes on those efforts are a far better measure, and are hugely consequential — and will make him the most influential president since FDR in real terms. And maybe the most influential since Woodrow Wilson, depending on how far he goes with those successes. 

Next up — tariffs:

• “We can start there with tariffs. What are we talking about? No TACO for Trump. The effective tariff rate, get this, 18%. It is the highest, the highest since the 1930s up from, get this, just 2% last year…I can’t think of a more influential president during this century and it starts here with tariffs! He said he was going to raise tariffs and despite the claims otherwise, he is in fact doing that.”

This one gets an incomplete, in my opinion, until the legal challenges play out. There is still a very real question of how far presidents can go to regulate trade, a power explicitly reserved for Congress in Article I Section 8. Congress ceded some power under the guise of “emergency” action, but Trump is stretching the term “emergency” with these tariffs. Courts may eventually decide that this is a political question for the other two branches to resolve, but until that happens, the tariffs are at best temporary. 

Enten is on solid ground with immigration, however:

• “The other big thing that Trump ran on was immigration. How about net migration? It’s gonna be down at least 60%! We may be dealing with, get this,  negative NET MIGRATION to the United States in 2025. That would be the first time there is negative net migration in this country in at least 50 YEARS! We’re talking about down from 2.8 million in 2024.” 

That switch has plenty of consequences for the future. It could force an end to the provocative games played by tin-pot dictators in Latin America to force the US to subsidize their regimes as an answer to illegal immigration. (Recall  that Biden and Kamala Harris kept insisting on providing increased subsidies to these regimes as a ‘solution.’) 

More to the point on influence, Trump has broken through the bleeding-heart media and connected with the vast majority of Americans who are tired of having their charitable impulses exploited by traffickers and grifters. One can argue that Trump sensed the shift and embraced it for political reasons, but Trump has refused to back down under tremendous pressure on immigration, and this kind of a shift would not have been possible under any other president. Not only has Trump followed through on his promises, he’s doing so at full bore, and Americans are still responding positively to it. That’s influence.

However, I’d say that Enten’s data-driven analysis is incomplete as well. Trump has proven both influential and consequential in other ways. Even on tariffs, the point isn’t so much about the effective percentage rate as it is that Trump exposed the entire “free trade” system as a sham. Why else would all of our trading partners accept non-reciprocal treatment on tariffs? Trump also has made American military power a real issue for our enemies to reckon with for the first time since the Iraq War. Iran gave Trump an opening to demonstrate that the US would not hesitate to use military force for our national security, and that demonstration likely has forced recalculations across the board. 

And here at home, Trump’s efforts to end racial and ethnic discrimination once and for all might reset the US back to true equality. Trump has made it a mission to dismantle DEI systems in both the public and private sectors, and to force Academia to play ball. Those efforts don’t lend themselves to metrics, which is Enten’s understandable focus a as a data analyst, but ‘influence’ is about far more than data. It’s about changing the context in the political and social contexts, and the old Obama-era contexts are collapsing in all of these areas. We may not be able to measure that kind of influence, but it’s obvious on observation, and the scope of it has been breathtaking.

Of course, we still have 41 months to go. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves; this is not the time for handing out awards. But even Trump’s biggest admirers couldn’t have expected this much progress in so little time. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.

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