U.S. President Trump has now completed one year since returning to the White House. His governance style is characterized by a highly personalized and aggressive approach. He employs intensive executive orders, tariff policies, and high-pressure diplomatic tactics to swiftly reshape America’s domestic and international landscape. However, while policy pronouncements remain prominent, they have failed to effectively translate into stable domestic support, and polling performance has not shown a corresponding significant improvement.
Da-Nien Liu, Director of the Regional Development Study Center at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER), notes that in economic and trade policy, the Trump administration treats tariffs as instruments of national security and diplomatic negotiation. Reciprocal tariffs, Section 232 provisions, and industry exemptions operate in parallel, compelling allies to make concessions regarding investment and procurement. While the amounts of related commitments appear impressive on the surface, most remain at the planning stage, with limited substantive repatriation benefits.
On the diplomatic front, Trump has reshaped alliances through a highly transactional approach, focusing cooperation conditions on investment scale, industrial concessions, and policy compliance. While this approach may facilitate short-term negotiations, it also undermines existing institutional frameworks and erodes the foundational trust among allies. It can lead to increased unease and potential backlash on the international stage, ultimately rendering U.S. foreign relations more fragile.
In industrial policy, the administration has accelerated supply chain restructuring, designating semiconductors, energy, AI, and defense industries as strategic priorities. Through executive orders, resources have been concentrated within U.S. territory. This has facilitated demonstration of policy achievements in the short term, though it has yet to drive broad-based wage growth. Industrial development exhibits K-shaped divergence, with rising risks of social inequality.
Director Liu believes that the key challenge at the one-year mark of Trump’s governance lies in the failure of policy implementation speed and internal and external support to accumulate synchronously. If internal and external imbalances continue to expand, this may become a significant variable affecting future political and economic stability.
Author: CIER Editorial Team
Date: January 30, 2026