Top Leading Stories on U.S. Policy Changes Covered by Misbar in 2025

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump once again took the oath of office as President of the United States, beginning his second term. In his inaugural speech, he emphasized themes that would define America’s approach to global affairs over the coming years. Immigration, national security, and energy dominated his remarks, forming the core of what became one of the longest inaugural addresses in recent history.

Throughout his first year back in office, Trump issued more than 220 executive orders spanning areas like immigration, energy, federal oversight. By mid-December 2025, he had issued more executive orders in this period than he did throughout his entire first term, according to The Washington Post. 

Moreover, Trump’s presence on his social media platform, Truth Social, was unusually intense; his posts covered everything from domestic policy statements to sharp attacks on the media and his political rivals.

The United States also witnessed a broad wave of protests over the past year, with the most prominent being the “No Kings” demonstrations in June and October 2025. 

In 2025, the United States enacted a series of significant policy changes, introducing broad reforms across domestic affairs, economic strategy, foreign aid, and regulatory frameworks.

In this blog, we highlight the most significant U.S. policy changes in 2025, as covered by Misbar.

Trump’s Trade War

On January 20, the day of his second inauguration, Trump returned to the Oval Office to announce his "America First" trade policy. He declared that rather than burdening Americans with taxes to benefit other countries, the United States would levy tariffs and duties on foreign nations to advantage its own citizens. 

He then sharply raised tariffs to exceptional levels, breaking international agreements and effectively undermining the Republican Party’s long-standing commitment to free trade.

The tariffs imposed by Trump on America’s trading partners in 2025 triggered a tumultuous year for global trade. Import duties climbed to unprecedented levels, disrupted financial markets, and prompted numerous rounds of negotiations over trade and investment agreements. 

Canada–U.S. Relations Hit a Breaking Point in 2025

In October, President Donald Trump canceled trade negotiations with Canada in response to what he described as an anti-tariff advertisement delivered by former President Ronald Reagan.

In response, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said he apologized to Donald Trump for the advertisement that angered the U.S. president and disrupted trade negotiations between the two countries.

Over the past year, U.S.-Canada relations have worsened as a result of Trump’s global tariff campaign, during which he imposed heavy duties on America’s northern neighbor.

It’s not just trade disputes, the U.S. president also cast doubt on Canada’s viability as a nation, suggesting that it could become the 51st American state, and deriding the former Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as a “governor.”

Russia’s War against Ukraine

Trump appeared to shift U.S. strategic policy toward Russia-Ukraine war, he has consistently opposed maintaining the same level of U.S. military aid to Ukraine that former president Joe Biden provided, asserting that his primary goal is to bring an end to the conflict. 

Trump went so far as to question the origins of the war and repeatedly accused Ukraine of being responsible for provoking the conflict with Russia. He and his senior officials have repeatedly accused European nations of underinvesting in their own defense and depending excessively on U.S. support.

In 2025, Trump met with the presidents of Russia and Ukraine to conduct negotiations. However, the talks failed to establish a definitive route toward resolving the conflict, as Russia persists in its assaults on Ukraine.

Foreign Aid Cut

The U.S. has slashed tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid and development support in 2025, including over $268 million allocated to support independent media and the free flow of information, in what the United Nations described as the sharpest funding cuts to international humanitarian efforts in history. Trump dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) over claims of wasteful spending.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the elimination of the agency’s entire international workforce, placing oversight of foreign assistance programs directly under the State Department. 

U.S. Formally Withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement

On his first day in office, the president signed executive orders to pull out of the U.S. of the Paris Climate Agreement and any related agreements or pacts under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reiterating his "America First" stance on energy and international pacts.

U.S. Resumes Nuclear Testing

President Donald Trump has urged U.S. military leaders to resume nuclear weapons testing to keep pace with nations like Russia and China.

On October 30, 2025, Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he had directed the Pentagon to immediately begin nuclear weapons testing, “on an equal basis with nuclear powers like China and Russia.”

The Trump administration has pledged a "nuclear energy renaissance," supporting initiatives to construct a fleet of new power plants and reopen at least three recently closed facilities. Trump aims to quadruple the United States’ nuclear power capacity by 2050.

The United States halted nuclear explosive testing in 1992 after conducting more than 1,050 tests, including atmospheric and underwater detonations. 

Trump Signed to Put TikTok Under the Majority Control of U.S. Allies

In September, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order guaranteeing that American investors would hold majority ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations, while China-based parent company ByteDance would retain less than a 20% stake.

According to a White House official, the new deal will involve running and overseeing a duplicate of the algorithm. "It's going to be continuously monitored as it operates to ensure that it's behaving appropriately, that it's not being used for any kind of malicious purpose, and that it's not being unduly influenced," the White House official said.

When asked about the fate of TikTok’s algorithm, Trump responded: "TikTok has tremendous value. The United States has that value in its hand since we're the ones that have to approve it."

Reshaping U.S. Immigration Policy with Radical Changes

Since his first day in office, President Donald Trump has issued several executive orders introducing major changes to U.S. immigration policy.  

Many previous policies were reinstated or expanded, such as halting refugee admissions, tightening asylum rules, increasing deportations, and limiting public benefits for undocumented immigrants, while new, more extreme measures—including ending birthright citizenship and creating immigrant registration systems—further signaled a comprehensive and aggressive overhaul of U.S. immigration policy.

Moreover, the Trump administration announced increased vetting of applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, with an internal State Department memo saying that anyone involved in "censorship" of free speech be considered for rejection.

U.S. consular officers are ordered to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants — and family members who would be traveling with them — to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others. 

However, the policy is expected to have a variety of potentially harmful consequences. H-1B visas, which enable U.S. employers to hire foreign specialists, are vital for tech companies that recruit extensively from countries like India and China. Moreover, rather than safeguarding free expression, these rules could weaken the very mechanisms designed to identify and combat false information.

U.S. Revokes Visas for Foreign Students Protesting Israeli Genocide in Gaza

During his first week in office, Trump vowed to deport students who participated in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, which had spread across U.S. university campuses last year.

He also warned that he would cut off federal funding to schools, colleges and universities that permit what he termed “illegal protests.” 

In addition, the U.S. State Department decided to use artificial intelligence to revoke the visas of foreign students who are perceived as supporters of Hamas. 

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had launched “Catch and Revoke,” AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts. The initiative will utilize AI to review student visa holders' social media accounts for expressions of sympathy toward Hamas following Israel's war on Gaza. 

Officials also plan to examine internal databases, such as the Student Exchange Visitor System, as well as news reports and lawsuits filed by Jewish students, to determine whether any visa holders were arrested in connection with anti-Semitic or allegedly pro-terrorist campus protests.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist at Columbia University, was arrested in March and detained in Louisiana until his release in June. Trump has written on social media that Khalil’s was “the first arrest of many”.

In September, shortly after his release, a U.S. immigration judge ordered Khalil to be deported to either Algeria or Syria over alleged omissions on his green card application.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and law enforcement officials repeatedly characterized Khalil’s peaceful activism as anti-Jewish and pro-Hamas, yet offered no evidence to substantiate their claims.

NYC Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani, the City’s First Muslim Officeholder

In November, 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York, becoming the first Muslim to hold the position.

Mamdani’s campaign focused on making the United States’ most expensive city more affordable for its residents—not just in terms of housing, but across all aspects of daily life. His bold, progressive agenda centered on wealth redistribution, expanding public services, and reimagining urban life.

In addition, Mamdani has stated that he believes Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza, operates as an apartheid state, and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should face arrest.

However, Mamdani was targeted by an Islamophobic disinformation campaign that depicted him as a “Muslim invader and a threat to American culture,”

Several Republican officials from 18 U.S. states, along with foreign politicians, were involved in spreading hate-driven narratives. Meanwhile, the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) launched the “Mamdani Monitor,” a public tracker designed to scrutinize Mamdani’s policies, which the ADL considered a threat to Jewish Security.

Emerging U.S. Right Wing Factions Split Over Support for Israel

The U.S. right-wing has faced major internal divisions, evident at recent conservative events such as Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest. These gatherings exposed sharp ideological conflicts over Trumpism, policy priorities—particularly regarding Israel—the role of the media, and the influence of far-right figures like Nick Fuentes. 

A Jewish civil rights group has labeled political commentator and journalist Tucker Carlson “Anti-Semite of the Year,” citing his criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza and his 2025 interviews with several controversial figures, including white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

The disputes have sparked internal accusations and fractures within key organizations, including the Heritage Foundation which has faced an internal rift over the Anti-Semitism controversy.

U.S. Officials Push to Ban Sharia Law in the United States

Last November, Texas Governor Greg Abbott Abbott issued an executive order designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country — as a “foreign terrorist organization” (FTO).

Abbott signed legislation in September aimed at tightening property protections in response to a controversial Islamic residential development proposed for Collin County called Epic City.

The goal, Abbott said, is to prevent "bad actors" from using religious freedom to impose "segregation," as he singled out Epic City in his comments, claiming it could become a "Sharia zone."

"I signed laws that ban Sharia law and Sharia compounds in Texas. No business and no individual should fear fools like this," Abbott said.

In addition, U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) introduced the “No Sharia Act” in October, aiming to ban the enforcement of Sharia law within the United States.

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