The Trump administration’s recent release of “365 Wins in 365 Days” offers an intriguing empirical ledger of its first year back in power, cataloguing a “New Era of Success, Prosperity” (The White House 2026). At first glance, the document appears to be a standard bureaucratic report that offers a dense list of statistical achievements ranging from “negative net migration for the first time in 50 years” to “trillions in reshored investments” and the “largest homicide drop on record”. However, a closer reading reveals that this text functions less as a neutral policy review and more as a sophisticated messaging template designed to mobilize and project a specific political reality. Research on security discourse suggests that external dynamics often have no intrinsic quality that fixes their meaning as political events (Buzan et al. 1998). Instead, political leaders rely on narratives to make them intelligible. The “365 Wins” document performs precisely this function. Through the narrative practices of framing and mapping, it transforms bureaucratic data points into a causally related sequence with a clear moral arc. It simplifies the complexities of governance into a rigid moral story with heroes and villains, with rescue and recovery (Stone 1989, 299). This aligns with the structural definition of a policy narrative that includes a specific setting, a plot, characters, and a preferred policy outcome (Shanahan et al. 2011, 539). By framing almost every statistic within a dramatic ‘us versus them’ narrative, the White House turns policy outcomes into a domestic referendum on moral legitimacy (Mudde 2004, 544).

In the field of International Relations, the concept of strategic narrative illustrates how politicians mobilize support by imposing a coherent structure on complex events. Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle (2013, 5) define strategic narratives as communicative tools with a “shared meaning of the past, present, and future” to shape the behaviour of domestic and international actors. Narratives that organize unconnected phenomena around themes, causality, arcs, and temporality often assign roles such as hero or villain to political actors to make sense of the political system (Miskimmon et al. 2013, 7). Olivier Schmitt (2018, 2) argues that the efficacy of a narrative depends on how it resonates with the established political beliefs of a political community. The “365 Wins” document exemplifies a narrative device by anchoring specific policy claims within a resonant domestic context of national emergency and necessary restoration in the US.

The text relies heavily on strategic contrast, with dozens of references to former President Joe Biden. These references establish a pervasive backdrop of supposed pre-Trumpian chaos in US politics. Against this constructed timeline of decline, these references provide a foundational frame for Trump’s role as a saviour of the US. For observers, citizens, and analysts alike, identifying this narrative mask is a crucial task. It is a governance tool that seeks to predetermine how voters interpret reality. By establishing a cognitive frame where the previous administration of Biden represents “invasion” and “non-enforcement”, and the current executive represents “urgency” and “strength”, the document attempts to render detailed policy critique irrelevant. Critically, the stakes of this type of document extend far beyond the specific claims it makes; it seeks to cement a worldview in which accountability is replaced by allegiance to a saviour narrative. This makes the “365 Wins” an extraordinary case study in how political power is consolidated through storytelling and narratives.

Constructing the Villain: “Biden-Era” as an Adjective for Failure

While a standard government report might rightfully reference a predecessor’s tenure to establish a statistical baseline, the “365 Wins” deploys the name Biden as a rhetorical weapon. The text invokes multiple variants such as “Biden”, the “Biden Administration”, or the “Biden-era” 39 times. The volume of repetition throughout transforms the former presidency into a persistent condition of failure. By contrast, references to other past presidents and politicians, such as Obama (2 times) and [Hillary] Clinton (1 times), are almost non-existent. This signals that the........

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