This is One Thing, I'm David Reind, and after nearly a year of Trump 2.0, the reviews are in.

It's just kind of a steady drip, drip, drip of things that American people, and even people who are favorable towards Trump, are finding that they don't necessarily like. Stick around.

I spoke to a lot of people this year who've felt the direct impact of having President Donald Trump back in the White House. People like Helen Dew, a National Parks employee, swept up in the chaos of the mass layoffs executed by Elon Musk's Department of Government efficiency.

It wasn't layoff language, it was firing language. You know, they had said that I hadn't performed my job duties. And my supervisor, you know, was like, this is not even true.

People like Benjamin Kibler, a transgender service member who voluntarily separated from the Navy after the Trump administration moved to kick out military personnel with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Do you feel like a valued part of that history of the military as you kind of look back on things?

Um, no, the short answer is no.

And people like Giselle, an undocumented immigrant from Chicago who asked we only use her first name because she was worried about being caught up in Trump's unprecedented and sometimes violent mass deportation push.

I'm not going to just sit here in my house and hide the necks for years. That's not going happen. So I do take some measures to make sure that I'm safe.

But I also heard from people who were less pessimistic about Trump's second term, people like Nevin Scalco from Illinois.

The level of encounters are significantly down and people generally know that it's not an open border.

'Nevin, who was a first-time Trump voter in 2024, liked what he saw along the U.S.-Mexico border. He also saw some positive signs for the economy.

Peak growth remained pretty solid. Consumer spending is held up, hot spike tariffs and markets have generally responded positively.

My opinion, though, is not a majority one. A CNN poll of polls average shows that just 39% of U.S. Adults approve of the job Trump is doing. When you dig into key issues like the economy, things get even worse for Trump. So many Americans are just seeing higher prices across the board, and many hold him responsible. Which is why we saw Trump give a primetime address on Wednesday night, space usually reserved for declarations of war or national emergencies, to insist that he had a handle Thanks.

I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.

But is the public buying that? And with even more issues like the Epstein files and strikes on alleged drug boats near Venezuela dividing Republicans, what will the party's midterm message look like in 2026? Aaron Blake is a CNN senior reporter based in Washington. He's here now. Aaron, you have chronicled just about every twist and turn of this second Trump administration for CNN.com. So as we sit here recording this on December 18th, how are you looking at the big picture of where things stand?

I think we're at a little bit of a pivot point for the second Trump administration. And the reason is because the president has rather quickly over the course of his first 11 months in office seen his political stock drop rather significantly, to the point where he's now about where he was at his low point in his first term. I mean, it basically hasn't been a whole lot worse for him, even arguably after January 6th, 2021. I think what we've seen, and this is the common thread that runs through a whole lot of his first 11 months, is that he has really governed like somebody who believed he had a massive mandate to do drastic things and do whatever he wanted to as president and just try things. And what we're seeing more and more is that as the American people consume that and as we learn more about how they're viewing these things, a lot of those things These are quite unpopular. And I think over time, we've just kind of seen it all come together to hurt his own popularity. And so now I think we're at a time where, really, there is a choice for him and for the Republican Party, where the question is, do they continue down this path, where Trump continues governing like somebody with that massive mandate and tries things and does things that might be unpopular? Or is there somebody who's going to prevail upon him to change course and to do something different and to maybe protect Republicans from not losing too much in the 2026 midterm elections.

So is there a specific issue or example you can think of where the public has kind of chafed on Trump just trying stuff, going too far, like you mentioned?

'I think if there's one issue that really drives it home, it is the immigration issue. This, aside from inflation, was probably the reason that President Trump won the 2024 election. He talked about large-scale deportations. This came after a time where there was an influx on the border that really damaged the Biden administration politically. And what we saw is he really took it very far.

President Donald Trump's deportation plans are starting to take shape after a spate of key policies that were released on Tuesday. They included, for example, a new directive that allows immigration and customs enforcement to arrest people or take enforcement actions in or near what are called sensitive areas. That is, for examples, churches, schools, hospitals.

And farther than I think a lot of people wanted him to.

This is what ICE does. It's okay. This is how these terrorists do to babies. Mommy, you okay? You okay?

And so if you look at the polling, you see Trump has secured the border. And if you ask people about border security, they like that. They think he's done a good job. Yeah, they'd

I love that there are no encounters at the border, no scenes of overflows, anything like that.

Exactly. And think about that. You know, if you had told somebody 10, 15 years ago that we would have a president come along and they would stop the border crossings basically altogether. Not completely, but in large part, this has stopped. And somehow his immigration numbers as a whole are still underwater. I think that speaks to the fact that he has gone farther than a lot of Americans can countenance on this and other issues as well.

April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. It's going to make it wealthy.

Another issue that really spoke to what kind of presidency we were going to get was Trump's big announcements early on about his tariffs. Now, of course, I mentioned the other issue that Trump came into office that really helped him in the 2024 election was inflation. There was high inflation after the COVID pandemic, and that really hurt Biden. And so you had Trump come into office promising to turn around that inflation basically on day one.

In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world. Reciprocal. That means they do it to us and we do it them. Very simple. Can't get any simpler than that.

And what does he do a few months later? He launches these global tariffs. And oh, by the way, tariffs tend to be inflationary. They tend to hurt you on that count. So this is another example of Trump just kind of doing the things that he wanted to, irrespective of how they might play politically or how this might pan out for him. And it hasn't really worked out for them so well. This whole.

Approach they seem to be taking of blame Biden, blame Biden for the inflation, blame Biden and for the high prices. Do we have a sense if people are on board with that? Like that they agree with that assessment?

Yeah, it's a really good question. And I'd say that Trump's approach to affordability has not been what the people around him would necessarily want. It's not been with the Republican party would want.

Good evening, America. 11 months ago, I inherited a mess, and I'm fixing it.

They want somebody who's gonna go out there and feel your pain and talk about what they're gonna do to fix this.

This happened during a Democrat administration, and it's when we first began hearing the word affordability.

Instead, Trump has been much more focused on trying to convince people that it's not that bad, or even that it is great.

One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail. Totally failed. Now, we're the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that's it.

'The problem is that people just don't believe that it's great. It's also a very tough thing, because if you look at the polls, people say by about a two to one margin, that they attribute the current economic conditions to President Trump. So what Trump is essentially trying to do is change people's pre-existing notions about this issue. And that's a very difficult thing to do.

Right, like people have it already in their head.

'Yeah, and it's not just like a 55-45 issue like, oh, yeah, it's more Trump than Biden. It's not a 55 45 issue that the economy is bad instead of being good. These are like two to one, three to one issues. And so you're trying to convince people who might not be predisposed to liking President Trump that you're actually giving them the real story. And it's just not a very easy thing to do.

Well, so you could talk about the issues and how people feel Trump might be performing on those, but what do we know about the kinds of voters out there who feel these things? Like we talked about how Trump made big gains with certain groups in the 2024 election, like black men, Hispanics, has that shifted at all?

Yeah, I'd say one of the stories of the last 11 months has been Trump's inability to lock down the gains that he made with Hispanic voters. If you look at his numbers among Latino voters, they've really fallen off a cliff over the last eleven months. That might be the most pronounced example of one of these groups turning against him, but I think if you look, it's pretty broad based. If look at working class white voters, which are a big part of coalition. They've also soured on him to some degree. If you look at Republicans, there are a number of issues in which Republicans have turned against him. So it's just kind of a steady drip, drip, drip of things that American people and even people who are favorable towards Trump are finding that they don't necessarily like.

Yeah, I want to ask about that because we have seen instances where even Republican lawmakers, you know, have kind of voiced their discontent with Trump or in the example of Indiana Republicans, you know basically saying, you know Mr. President, we're not going to do this redistricting that you want us to do.

Yeah, the scene in Indiana last week was really remarkable. You had the president and top administration officials, other prominent Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson, really applying pressure on the Indiana State Senate to redraw the state's congressional map. A number of these Indiana state senators, more than 10 of them experienced significant threats on their lives like swatting. So there was a lot of pressure built up on these members to do what Trump wanted to do. And historically speaking, that's what Republicans wind up doing. They don't go against the president. But what we saw in this case was a majority of those state senators wound up voting against this new map and against what Trump wanted. There have been a number of other examples in recent weeks and months of Republicans standing up to Trump a little bit more than they did before. I don't think we should oversell this. I don't think that we should say that Donald Trump is now a lame duck and that these Republicans are gonna do whatever they want and not worry about what he thinks. But we are going to see those lawmakers start to consider their own political futures. They're gonna have to think about whether they're risking their careers by following this man and doing things that don't appear to be terribly popular. And so we're starting to see that tension become a little bit more real and we're starting to see these members start to have to make a choice in a way that they didn't necessarily have to over these first 11 months about whether to follow Trump or whether to chart their own course and help themselves politically.

Got to step away. We'll have more with Aaron after the break, concluding why the problem of the Epstein files will be hard to escape in 2026. Stick around. I do want to ask about the Epstein files. We're recording this the day before DOJ is supposed to be required by law to kind of hand over the biggest tranche of these files with redactions, of course, to protect victims and things like that. But even without knowing in this moment what we might see in there, I just can't imagine a world where the public is satisfied with whatever they get.

Yeah, it's a tough thing for the administration certainly because they have fought this so hard and they have created a situation where it looks like they don't want this stuff to come out. Eventually they relented, but that was only because they kind of felt like they had to and they realized which way the wind was blowing. But the problem with these conspiracy theories, it's very hard to extinguish that even when you get full disclosure, because then people wonder, well, could there be something else out there that wasn't turned over? I think it's very unlikely that what we get is going to necessarily satisfy people, but that doesn't mean that it's not gonna be very significant, both when it comes to learning about what happened with Jeffrey Epstein and what happened with some of the powerful people that were around him.

Yeah, and it seems to speak to what Susie Wilde's Chief of Staff told Vanity Fair when she said that Attorney General Pambani whiffed on handling this from the jump. Yeah, that was one of the more striking comments from Susie Wiles.

Interview with Vanity Fair.

What do you make of that Susie Wiles interview? Because in Trump 1.0, there was countless stories of infighting among the administration, cabinet members leaving suddenly, and we really haven't seen that thus far. And even after Susie wiles kind of bad mouthed some cabinet members, they all kind of rushed to her defense.

Yeah, as I was reading the wild story, I kept thinking back to 2017 and people might not remember this but Anthony Scaramucci was the the newly crowned White House communications director And he did an interview where he basically started Ragging on everybody around him Saying awful things about White House chief of staff Reince Priebus And the reaction to that was about what you'd expect. Scaramucci was out very shortly thereafter. People kind of disowned what he had said. The Wiles interview was a much different situation. I think that maybe more than anything is a reflection of the situation that they all recognize where they're kind of damaged politically in the White House. And about the last thing that they need right now is to be dealing with internal tumult and disagreements.

And it's not like there haven't been issues with certain cabinet members. I'm thinking about Signalgate with Pete Hegseth, what's gone on at the FBI and some of the drama around Cash Patel. And as we approach the end of 2025, I just, I'm wondering if Americans appreciate the unprecedentedness of everything that's gone on because there's just been so much of it, right? Even as journalists, it could just be hard to keep up with the constant stream of stuff.

Yeah, it's a really good question. And this is something that I thought about a lot over the course of this year, because I'm somebody who watches the polls pretty closely and I'm watching all these polls and I see how unpopular the things that Trump is doing happen to be. And we didn't necessarily see his overall approval rating drop at the same time. I think what you do see over time is that it takes people a while to really process these things. It takes people a while to decide how they feel about someone. It's not just gonna be one issue that's gonna turn them off completely. And what we also saw, and I don't know if this reflects your conversations with regular people, it seemed like a lot of people just didn't even wanna read about the news. They didn't wanna know what was happening politically. I've talked to people about my work and they're like, yeah, you know, I'm sorry. I just, I can't read this stuff right now. And that has not been kind to President Trump. People didn't necessarily catch on to the idea that this was such a departure from how things have been handled in the past. But over time, as those things kind of multiply and it snowballs, they just kind of get tired of all the drama and it just wears on them over time. And I think that's happened a lot more quickly in his second term because he's done a lot more drastic things very quickly.

Seems like the East Wing, you know, demolition to build a ballroom, it would be an example of something like that, where people are like, wait, a president could

case in point, you know, we use the term unshackled, unchained, unleashed. He certainly came into office in his second term much more willing to do things, just try things out, do whatever he wanted to. And there are fewer people around him that are stopping him from doing those things than there were in his first term. And so that's created a situation where there's been a lot of things that have really tested the American people's patience. And we shouldn't be surprised that maybe these negative views have set in a little bit more quickly than they did last time. I always tell people I gave up doing predictions after the 2016 election when the result was different than pretty much anybody thought it would be. I think it's going to be a really interesting year in the Republican Party where they're going to decide a lot about what the future of their party looks like and whether it's going to continue to look like Donald Trump or whether it is going to look a little bit different. And I think that is. Is a very significant debate that we're gonna be having over the next 11 months here.

Well, Aaron, thanks so much for the perspective. As always, I appreciate it. Thank you, David. In yet another sign of how Trump is putting his stamp on the nation's capital, the board of the Kennedy Center, handpicked by the president, voted on Thursday to rename the arts institution the Trump Kennedy Center. Members of the family quickly condemned the move, and questions remain whether the board has the legal right to rename this center. Quick programming note from us, we will not have an episode on Wednesday, we'll be back on Sunday the 28th as usual. So if you're celebrating the holidays this week, please enjoy. Maybe tell your family or friends to follow the show wherever they listen. We'd appreciate it. Happy holidays and talk to you later.