President Trump is a con man who governs incompetently based on emotion, prejudice, self-interest, impulse, ignorance and lies. He has intentionally broken many of his campaign promises and gravely damaged America's economic and national security.
Trump faces few restraints. He has filled top posts in his administration with unqualified sycophants who say "yes, sir" to whatever he proposes, no matter how harmful to our country. Feckless Republican majorities in the House and Senate have abdicated their constitutional duty to act as a check and balance on his flagrant abuses of power.
The president is guilty of malfeasance for breaking his campaign promise to make America more affordable, launching a war of choice against Iran despite his promise to end old wars and not start new ones, and carrying out mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants -- falsely claiming many of them are violent criminals. In fact, a study found that such immigrants are arrested for violent and drug crimes at less than half the rate of people born in the U.S.
Trump's abysmal performance accounts for the fact that about 56 percent of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing, according to the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls.
On the economy, candidate Trump promised in 2024 to "end inflation" and quickly lower "the price of everything." But inflation has continued at a rate of 2.4 percent from February 2025 to February this year, driven in part by gratuitous tariffs Trump imposed.
And yes, this is his economy now -- please stop blaming former President Joe Biden for problems Trump has caused.
Although Trump falsely claims tariffs are paid by foreign countries, they are paid by U.S. companies that import products and are largely passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Trump's tariffs have hurt U.S. businesses that import parts to manufacture products in America, U.S. retailers that sell imported goods, and farmers and other American exporters that have lost foreign sales after being hit with retaliatory tariffs.
Moreover, the president's tariffs have frequently changed in unpredictable ways, making it hard for businesses to plan for the future. Many of the tariffs have been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court because they weren't approved by Congress, but Trump is outrageously seeking to continue collecting them under a different legal justification.
Trump has claimed his tariffs will revitalize American manufacturing and create jobs, but the U.S. lost 98,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025, partly because of tariffs. Trump's cure for our economic ills is worse than the disease.
Adding to the pain of tariffs, the prices of gasoline, diesel, other transportation fuels, home heating oil and electricity have skyrocketed since the U.S. and Israel chose to attack Iran on Feb. 28. This means that in addition to making it more expensive for us to travel, it costs more to transport food and other products, manufacture goods, and construct homes and other buildings. This raises many of the prices we pay.
We should expect more price increases if the war with Iran drags on.
Trump's tariffs, the Iran war, reduced support for Ukraine, the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, threats to seize Cuba and Greenland, threats to withdraw from NATO, and ugly insults to U.S. allies have also weakened our national security. Leaders of many countries now regard Trump as an unpredictable, unreliable, unstable and untrustworthy ally.
On top of the economic damage caused by tariffs and the Iran war, Trump's obsession with carrying out what he has said will be the largest mass deportation program of unauthorized immigrants in American history also endangers our economy.
About 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants held jobs in the U.S. as of 2022, representing nearly 5 percent of our nation's workforce the Pew Research Center found at the time.
If all these immigrants and their families are deported, employers would have a hard time finding enough workers to grow and harvest our food, work in construction jobs and factories, and hold other jobs that are labor-intensive and relatively low-paying.
All in all, Trump's time in office has turned out to be a disaster for our country and the world. If more Americans had realized in 2024 how bad a president he would be in his second term, Kamala Harris would likely be our president today. With nearly three years left in his term, it's frightening to think how much more harm Trump will cause.
The most effective way to protect our country from the reign of errors of our mercurial president will be for Americans to elect more Democrats, independents and courageous Republicans to the House and Senate in November who are willing to stand up to Trump.
We need to elect lawmakers unwilling to give the president a blank check to continue ignoring laws and the Constitution and harming our nation. To paraphrase the old saying, now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country.
A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor, former chair of the Washington, D.C. Democratic Party and a former New York state prosecutor.