By Selwyn Duke

Is the cynical quip that “sooner or later you must pay for every good deed” actually true? One could wonder with how President Donald Trump’s first year accomplishments are routinely ignored. In fact, there’s an obvious theory as to why there’s incessant (and biased) reporting on the Epstein files.

If the Democrats and their legacy-media PR team focus on actual policy and results, they can’t win the midterms.

As one commentator has put it, people who are in touch with the policy realities but still want to scuttle Trump’s efforts just must be “tired of winning.”

In fact, asserts Jeffrey Folks, in

just one year, President Trump has scored so many wins that it would be difficult to list all of them in a brief article….

But let’s start with the obvious and anodyne.

• The January jobs report surprised most observers, exceeding expectations with 130,000 positions added last month. And the official unemployment number remained steady at 4.4 percent.
• The consumer price index (CPI, aka inflation) just declined to 2.4 percent, aided by falling gasoline prices. The average CPI for Joe Biden’s four years was 4.95-5.0 percent, and the cumulative CPI was 21.5 percent.
• The average gas price per gallon now stands at $2.94. The average for Biden’s entire term was $3.50-$3.60.
• The GDP growth for 2025’s third quarter was a robust 4.3 percent.
• Blue-collar wage growth had its highest increase in nearly six decades (relevant tweet below).

Furthermore, Jeffrey Folks believes we could experience successive quarters of five-percent growth. That remains to be seen, of course, and many factors beyond presidential actions influence the economy. Nonetheless, Trump would get the blame for waning fortunes, so he should get some credit for waxing ones.

It Gets Better

Yet man, and his nations, does not live on bread alone. One existential matter is the invasion of our country euphemistically called “illegal migration.” The Biden administration threw open the border and flooded our shores with 5 to 13 million additional illegal aliens. (It’s hard ascertaining an exact figure, as is often the case with illegal activity.) Trump has completely reversed this. Consider:

• Border crossings are down 95 percent relative to the Biden years’ average.
• “Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border are at their lowest level in more than 50 years,” reports Pew Research Center.
• Our country had negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in 50 years.
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 600,000 illegals in 2025 despite left-wing judges’ interference and our illegal-migration-facilitating laws. Additionally, approximately two million noncitizens have “self-deported,” the New York Post informs.
• While precise numbers are again elusive, up to 100,000 of these illegals have felony convictions. This includes for crimes such as rape, murder, assault, armed robbery, and child molestation.
• From May 2025 onward, the number of illegals released into the American interior was zero. In contrast, the figure for May 2024 alone under Biden was 62,000.
• More than 13,000 missing migrant children (lost under the prior administration) were located. Remember, too, that missing kids can be and often are sex-trafficked.

As mentioned, this is an existential matter. Absorbing massive numbers of often unassimilable foreigners balkanizes and destabilizes the country. Demography is destiny. A civilization thus can’t control its destiny without controlling its demography.

Energy

Nothing in this world, from a simple organism to a complex economy, functions without energy. For this reason, energy prices influence the cost of all goods and services. The U.S. has been setting some energy-production records, too. As Joseph Ford Cotto wrote last month in “Trump kept his promises in 2025. Do Americans see it in 2026?”:

The United States now produces 24.2 million barrels of oil per day, more than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. Natural gas production reached 108 billion cubic feet per day, matching Russia, Iran, and China combined. Trump’s administration lifted the export ban on liquefied natural gas. It approved record export capacity and eliminated 47 costly regulations, saving an estimated $11 billion. It also issued emergency orders that prevented grid failures and blackouts.

Culture

While the Biden administration was enabling corruptive “wokism,” Trump has forcefully combated it. He has, for example:

• Ended radical and wasteful executive-branch DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs and preferences. And DEI is, do note, officially sanctioned discrimination.
• Combated “gender” ideology in schools and elsewhere, prohibiting federal funding promoting it. Trump also, among other measures, instituted a federal policy recognizing only our two actual sexes.
• Restored the earlier, common-sense-oriented, long-standing norm of banning “transgenders” from military service.
• Protected women’s sports; Trump withholds federal funds from schools that allow males masquerading as females to compete in girls’/women’s athletics.
• Prohibited federal funding or support for sexual-distortion treatments (“trans” procedures) for minors — aka child abuse.
• Prevented the use of “woke AI” in the federal government.
• Blocked funding to foreign entities that promote DEI or “gender” ideology.
• Eliminated DEI from the military and banned the teaching of (mythical) “systemic racism/sexism” and “gender” lunacy in military education.
• Moved to tackle our time’s prevalent anti-white bias. The administration has, for instance, encouraged white men who’ve been discriminated against to file official claims.

Let’s add that 2025 murder rates are at an almost historic low — possibly the lowest recorded since at least 1900. It’s logical concluding, too, that criminal aliens’ removal, having National Guard troops in D.C., and setting a general law-and-order-oriented tone contribute to this.

Note as well that the above accomplishments are a mere short list.

Perspective

Of course, we can always point to the glass’s half-full status. Our central government still routinely exceeds its constitutional bounds (this has been a problem for at least a century). Our federal budget is still gargantuan, and our debt still burgeons. But here’s the perspective.

Being best epitomized as the embodiment of Mayberry Meets the Middle Ages, I never get close to my desired government. I still accept, however, German leader Otto von Bismarck’s observation that “politics is the art of the possible.” It’s not the art of “You get exactly what you want, right now, no questions asked” — but of the possible. And in our time what’s possible is Trump’s MAGA movement, the GOPe, or the Democrats. There is no viable fourth option (presently).

This is why some find the gratuitous focus on the Epstein files troubling. In fact, it’s why I believe that to an extent it’s agitprop. Example:

Just the other day, someone on Facebook quoted Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“If we prosecute everyone in the Epstein files,” the statement goes, “the whole system collapses!”

The problem is that Bondi never said that.

This is one of many fabricated quotations being disseminated; some are attributed to Trump himself.

This is a classic agitprop technique, too.

The idea is to demoralize the MAGA constituency so as to deliver midterm victory to radical and increasingly socialist Democrats. They can’t win on their policies and merits, after all.

Will enough Americans fall for this?

It’s tragic when voting decisions are made based on fiction and not fact, on propaganda, not policy. But this is why under a representative system, people get the government they deserve. “Fool me once, shame on you,” the saying goes — “fool me twice, shame on me.”

This article was originally published at The New American.