Trump Moved Aggressively to Fulfill Some Campaign Promises. Others Are Still Waiting.

President Donald Trump has aggressively pursued fulfilling core 2024 campaign promises during his first year of his second term, from attempting to end birthright citizenship to firing what he called “rogue bureaucrats.”

Many other promises have gone virtually unmentioned, according to a NOTUS review of the 43 campaign videos laying out “Agenda 47,” his early vision for a second term.

The Agenda 47 videos offer a clue to what’s to come as Trump starts the second year of this term — and what he may have sidelined as other priorities, political realities and influences shape his agenda.

The White House said all of the campaign vows remain in play. Vince Haley, director of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, has a list of every campaign promise that the president has made, a senior White House official confirmed. Officials said they intend to follow it.

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When NOTUS asked the official about some harder-to-achieve campaign promises, including “Freedom Cities” or pursuing term limits for members of Congress, they replied, “I don’t know… I’d like to” and that “we intend to do everything we promised.”

They called some of the promised initiatives “low-hanging fruit” that will be easier to do now that the bigger issues, such as tax cuts, are out of the way.

Foreign policy, the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s first year, is already dominating the start of year two after Trump began 2026 by capturing and jailing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

Trump promised in Agenda 47 to declare war on drug cartels, more or less previewing the way the Trump administration has engaged with Venezuela. The Trump administration has used a “war on cartels” as a pretext for striking dozens of boats and killing at least 115 people it claims are trafficking drugs. The videos do not mention ousting Maduro but do say Trump would “impose a full naval embargo” on cartels and deploy military assets to disrupt cartel operations.

Trump has yet to fulfill some other foreign policy promises, including on China. Trump said he would ban any company that outsources to China from having federal contracts, adopt a four-year plan to phase out Chinese imports of “essential goods” and revoke China’s status as a country that benefits from permanent normal trade relations with the United States. Proponents have argued that China’s trade practices and their impact on the U.S. manufacturing sector call for the loss of PNTR. Trump said he’d do it.

To this point, the Trump administration’s China trade policy has instead primarily focused on adjusting the baseline tariff rate through executive order.

Rep. John Moolenaar, a China hawk who chairs the House’s select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, pointed to future negotiations with China when asked about Trump’s promise to revoke China’s most favored nation status.

“I believe the president’s going to have these negotiations with Xi Jinping in the spring, and I think that’s one of the levers on the table that he has to negotiate with,” Moolenaar told NOTUS.

Trump followed through on some of his China-related Agenda 47 plans. He promised to enact aggressive restrictions on Chinese ownership of critical American infrastructure and signed an executive order in February calling for extra scrutiny on investments from China. On Saturday, Trump called for a company owned by a Chinese national to unwind its assets from an American company that manufacturers chips and semiconductors.

Agenda 47 spells out plans for a futuristic “New Quantum Leap to Revolutionize the American Standard of Living.” Many of the proposals were designed to position the United States to compete in technological advancement with China.

One of these proposals was to create “Freedom Cities,” or master-planned municipalities on federal land that could be centers for deregulation and job growth, while easing housing shortages.

Though the Trump administration reportedly showed interest in potential plans earlier in the year and took meetings to set it up, a source familiar with the discussions who spoke to NOTUS on the condition of anonymity said the idea seemed dormant.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center created policy proposals on freedom cities, including where prime locations would be and how they could ease the housing burden. Asked if they’ve been engaging with the White House on the plan, they told NOTUS they’d be happy to see the White House pick up their policy proposal.

“I think the targeted sale of federal lands is by far the most meaningful thing that the federal government can do to ease the housing supply crisis,” Arthur Gailes, a research fellow at AEI Housing Center, told NOTUS.

Trump in December hinted at more housing plans to come, but so far, his administration’s most dramatic housing policy proposal has been the 50-year mortgage.

Other ideas seem to have languished. Trump promised to create a government-run educational institution called the American Academy. He said in a 2023 campaign video that it would “make a truly world-class education available to every American, free of charge, and do it without adding a single dime to the federal debt.”

Instead of creating a government-run institution, the Trump administration has focused on removing the federal government from education. Experts on both sides of the aisle think the American Academy is unlikely to come to fruition.

“Taken literally, no. I wouldn’t say that they’ve moved on this, which is, I think, for the best,” Frederick Hess, director of education policy at AEI, told NOTUS. “And it doesn’t seem likely, although, you know, with these guys, who ever knows for sure.”

Hess theorized that the idea was conceptualized before those who now shape the Trump administration’s education policy joined the team. Instead of offering a government-run educational institution, the Trump administration has attempted bending the ones that exist to its will, threatening enforcement action to pressure universities into shifting their curricula.

“They clearly have a kind of an agenda when it comes to higher education,” said Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at New America, a liberal think tank. “If you read the compact that they try to force upon a bunch of elite universities — none of whom have chosen to take it up — that’s what they want. That document they want you to sign is the Trump higher education agenda. It’s all there, black and white.”

Even when the Trump administration fulfills a campaign promise, there is no guarantee that they will abide by it. In the midst of the Biden administration’s efforts to censor speech on social media platforms, Trump promised an executive order banning government officials from censoring lawful speech.

That executive order was signed on Trump’s first day in office. But free speech experts tell NOTUS the Trump administration has repeatedly violated it, undermining his own campaign promises through efforts to intimidate the media and to pressure companies into censoring speech on social media platforms.

“The breadth of this administration’s attacks on free speech is actually difficult to fully illustrate because the instances of censorship and propaganda and pressure on private parties are so numerous,” Lee Rowland, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, told NOTUS.

Lopez described censorship efforts that stem from beyond the White House, such as the Department of Justice’s efforts to remove “ICE Block,” an app that publicly tracks the location of ICE agents, from the app store.

A number of the president’s Agenda 47 pledges to work with Congress to pass measures including a digital bill of rights, a revision of Section 230, the “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act,” and legislation mandating the death penalty for drug smugglers and human traffickers — a promise mentioned multiple times — have yet to happen. Much of the president’s agenda has been implemented though executive order, bypassing Congress, but it is easy to unwind by another administration.

Many things have come to fruition, such as his pledge to downsize government agencies, “baby bonuses,” speeding up approval for infrastructure projects, beginning the construction of a missile defense shield and undertaking an aggressive deportation operation.

White House spokeswoman Liz Huston did not respond to specific questions from NOTUS but said that the president is fully committed to delivering on every promise he made.

“President Trump has accomplished more in his first year than most presidents do in their entire term, including securing the border, signing the largest middle class tax cuts in history, delivering trillions of dollars in investments to America, and bringing peace to decades-long conflicts around the world,” Huston said. “And this is only the beginning — the best is yet to come!”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote about free speech criticisms. It was from National Coalition Against Censorship executive director Lee Rowland.