2025 REVIEW
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HCR
, you have a lot of questions today, but I'm going to do something different today, and that is talk a little bit
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about where we are as a country and where we have been over the course of this year because it is December 30th of
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2025 and the United States of America and also the world has gone through quite a
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lot thanks to the United States of America in the last year. And of that,
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I'm not going to talk about foreign affairs tonight. um simply because I there's not enough time. I got a half
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hour here, but I think it's worth doing a wrapup of what this year looks like to
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a historian. So, why don't we start with um what happened uh in November of 2024.
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And that is um with the election of Donald Trump for the second time
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um we got a very different kind of country than I think a lot of people thought they were voting for. So, one of
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the the things that jumps out from the beginning of Trump's election is that although he won less than 50% of the
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vote, he insisted from the beginning that he had what he called an unprecedented and powerful mandate to
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change the United States of America. Now, a lot of people when they voted for him did not think they were voting for a
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change in the country, despite the fact that a lot of people, including me, had been out there trying to tell them that
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Project 2025 was real, that in fact Trump intended to sweep up all
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undocumented immigrants, not just those he called um the worst of the worst, the rapists and the murderers. Um, but
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people didn't hear that. A lot of people thought that they were voting for lower prices or were simply tired of the
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incumbent or weren't paying that much attention or liked the fact that Trump did, as I said at the time, promise
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everything to everybody, both lower prices and tariffs. You can't have that um protection for IVF, but uh increased
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anti-abortion legislation and so on. He promised a lot of stuff to a lot of people that was contradictory. But what
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that did is it put him into power. And that's what he really cared about was being in power. And once in power, Trump
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and the people around him seemed to have instituted a series of policies that
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were designed to be anticonstitutional, if you will. They were designed to go around the US Constitution. They didn't
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only break laws. They acted as if laws didn't exist. And that's a very
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different thing. thing and it's a very important thing because in a way what they were doing was erasing the whole
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concept of the United States of America and its reliance on a body of on a
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constitution that supports a body of laws um that are not religious that are
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not hereditary but that are based in the idea that individuals have a right to have a say in their government and they
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will be able to elect representatives who will put together laws that will be good and if they're not they'll get rid
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of those laws. They treated all that as if it had never happened, which itself was really
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interesting. And I think one of the reasons people had a hard time grappling with this administration at first is
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because we are very accustomed to living within that set of laws and saying, "Oh, I don't like what you did. I'm going to
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sue you. Here's the law." Well, what do you do if somebody just doesn't pay any attention to the law at all? And what I
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mean by that is as soon as Trump was elected, um, and I spent a lot of the
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day reading through a lot of what I wrote over the course of the last year, um, if you don't know, I write, um,
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every night what happened during that day to keep a record of America in this moment. And it's funny because you
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always ask me how I can stay cheerful and even keeled when I write this stuff.
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And the truth is, for me, understanding means I can face anything. It's when I
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don't understand that I'm lost and frightened. As long as I understand, I feel like I can make a plan to move
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forward. But reading the last year, I actually didn't do it. I read a number of months and I'm like, "This is horrible. I don't know how anybody can
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read this." So, I stopped reading it and then just did it from memory and what I thought were the most important events
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of the last year. But uh and one of the things that jumped out when I read through uh the beginning years or the
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beginning weeks of this um this administration after Trump got elected is totally forgotten now, but on the day
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after the election, after Trump had been reelected, they had a Trump family portrait taken and Melania Trump was not
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in it. But do you know who was Elon Musk? Which again now now you think
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about the fact Musk has become persona nongrada you kind of forgot that but I remember at the time everybody being
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like wait a minute Musk is taking Melania Trump's place um very odd thing but the reason I mentioned that is
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because uh Elon Musk is a billionaire and he has supported Trump's
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election with the purchase of what was then Twitter now X which supported him
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and has become just a a right-wing cesspool but also with about $190 million of support for Trump's campaign.
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And it was interesting because from the beginning, it seemed as if Trump essentially was going to make Musk the
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the person to run the administration. Trump had shown signs of both mental and
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physical disability. And it seemed pretty clear he wasn't really interested in governing, that he was interested in
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getting away from the federal cases against him and in making money again. And we know now from some of the work of
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people like Zack Everson um at uh for Forbes um that the that Trump was in
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fact in really dire straits for money before his second term. Um and it seemed pretty clear that he was going to hand
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stuff over to Trump uh to Musk. And as soon as Trump was elected in November of
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2024, and by the way, I won't go at this pace through the entire uh year because we would still be here tomorrow morning.
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But I wanted to set this up because the first thing that Trump did is he posted on social media Novas Ordo Cllorum um
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which is Latin for a new world order. And uh the first thing that Trump did is
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he put Musk, who was not elected, in charge of what may or may not have been
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a legal something called the Department of Government Efficiency. And that Department of Government Efficiency,
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according to Musk, would go ahead and cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. But what it did was it it did a number
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of things. First of all, it slashed through workers uh in the federal government. It slashed through programs
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like the US Agency for International Development, the destruction of which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives
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according to um researchers. Uh because what it did is it protected people in
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developing countries from the spread of disease and from malnutrition and they're simply dying now. Um but it
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didn't ever save any money. Um the libertarian Kato Institute recently uh
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evaluated the work of the department of government efficiency and said that while it didn't save any money what it
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did do was it cut the federal government by about 9% the employees of the federal
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government. So the money didn't go down but the people went down. But the other thing that it did there are two other
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major things it did. One was that um staffers for the Department of Government Efficiency went into most of
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the federal agencies and stripped their databases of the private information of
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Americans in order to create a federal database that could be used for a number
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of things. One of which would be the rounding up of undocumented immigrants.
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That's a complicated story but a very important story because uh and there
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have been a huge number of lawsuits over it because a lot of uh private information got stripped by these people
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who were unclear. It was really unclear who they were. Um, you know, they were
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operating for Musk, not for and and apparently to create this database, not for the American people. And they still,
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many of them still are in those agencies. But to whom they report remains unclear because the status of
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the Department of Government Efficiency was never clear, nor was who was in charge of it. And that was, as I say,
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part of this extra constitutional effort of the the uh the administration
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to make it impossible to pin down who was doing what. But that's really what
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in my view, you know, in what I'm going to argue today, what was key about the
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Department of Government Efficiency and the role of Elon Musk in it was that he
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was not elected. It was not clear the department of government efficiency was anything legal, but it went through the
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US government and it tore apart the laws and the appropriations that the US
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Congress had made to uh manage the country for the American people. Now,
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central to our system has always been that the people elected representatives
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in both the House of Representatives and and in the Senate. And they were the ones who had what we call the power of
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the purse. That is they decided how our money was going to be spent.
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both the Constitution, legal precedent, more than both uh Constitution, legal
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precedent and the 1974 empoundment control act all said that the president
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has no say in that. If Congress says you're going to spend a million dollars
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or a hundred million dollars planting apple trees and the president is allergic to apples, it's there's nothing
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he can do about it. He's got to go ahead and plant those apple trees. Obviously, I made that up. We don't have a law about that. But the president should
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have no say in that. The president simply has a duty according to the Constitution to make sure that the laws
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I'm sorry to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
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But because of the Department of Government Efficiency um and Elon Musk working together with the director of
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the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vote, who was one of the key writers of Project 2025,
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the executive branch under Trump grabbed that power. They took that power away from Congress. And this to me was the
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first and major shock of this administration that the Republicans in the Senate, I didn't expect a lot out of
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the Republicans in the House of Representatives for a number of reasons, but I was surprised that the Republicans in the Senate didn't say, "Whoa,
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doggies, hang on there. You you may not have the power of the purse because that's all the power they have really."
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So, they're setting up here or they were setting up here this attempt to go around, not even to go around the
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Constitution, to pretend the Constitution didn't really exist. But it didn't stop there. Um, think about the
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fact that Trump controlled the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate and the White House. When
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you have a trifecta like that, it means that the president theoretically should
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be able to pass whatever he wanted, right? But Trump never tried to pass
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legislation that he wanted. He simply did something new and that was to
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declare national emergencies. Trump during between um the time he took
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office and I want to say mid November,
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don't quote me on that, declared nine emergencies. And the trick
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to emergencies is that declaring an emergency often gives the president extraordinary power. And that makes
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sense, right? If there is an attack, if there is a disaster, if something happens, you don't want the president to
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have to to drag everybody into Congress and debate a law, you want the president
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to be able to do something very quickly. And so we have written in our laws these places where the president can do things
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very quickly. But rather than try and get anything through Congress, Trump just went ahead and declared emergencies
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that would enable him to do whatever he wanted. And you saw this really dramatically beginning in April when
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Trump declared that we had an emergency. And because of that, he instituted his
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tariff wars beginning with what he called liberation day. Remember, I think it was April 2nd. And the idea there was
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that he could just do whatever he wanted because he had declared an emergency. Well, the constitution explicitly gives
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to Congress the right to levy tariffs. That's in the constitution. There is an
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emergency act that enables the president to do things in an emergency. But there
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was no emergency. He simply declared that there was emer an emergency. And then crucially,
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there is a way to challenge emergencies. The Congress has to say, "Hang on a second there. We want to have a vote on
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whether or not there's really an emergency." But between the time they do that and the time they take on a vote, a vote on it, 15 days have to elapse. 15
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working days have to elapse. Well, what happened was the House of Representatives under uh House Speaker
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Mike Johnson declared that for the purposes of that law, for the rest of
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the congressional session, no days would pass. And I couldn't believe that that didn't get more attention because that
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is bonkers. The idea that the the the the uh Congress can just say, "Oh, days
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are not going to pass because we don't want our president to be challenged." Well, what's going on there is
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interesting because what's going on there is that this harks back to a
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political theory that was popular in Nazi Germany. It was articulated by a
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political theorist named Carl Schmidt and he said a number of things that I'm not going to go into now. But in terms
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of the power in a government, what he said was that the true power in a
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government flows not to whatever the constitution says, but to those people
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who can exploit emergencies in order to create exceptions to the constitution so
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that they could exercise power without regard to the law. And you saw this in
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um in um in August of this year when Trump said, "I have the right to do
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anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States. If I think our
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country is in danger, and it is in danger in the cities in that case, I can do it." Um that's straight out of
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Schmidt. And actually JD Vance is a follower of Schmidt. He once said um he described JD uh Schmidt's ideas as
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saying there's no law, there's just power. And these ideas of Carl Schmidt
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are um circulating pretty widely on the American right including with a thinker
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so so-called um uh named uh Curtis Jarvin. And Curtis Jarvin is one of the
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people who's behind the Dark Enlightenment, the attempt to destroy American democracy and replace it with
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dictatorships. And um he's the sort of guy who would just have been, sorry about what it's called, but would pretty
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much have been a poster except for the fact that he drew the attention of Peter Teal, who is a billionaire um tech
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bro who really loves this idea that you could get rid of the federal government, which is um in in people in the mind of
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people like him uh creating regulations and taxes that make it impossible for
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people like him to um improve society as quickly as he feels that he would able
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to do. Musk thinks this way as well, but Peter Teal is really the one who is most closely aligned with Kurtish Yarvin. So,
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you see this in the the the government in this idea of just getting rid of of
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democracy, getting rid of our constitution, getting rid of our laws and working outside that. All right. So,
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um, we have the tariff wars and then, um, you're you're increasingly seeing
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this idea that Trump's got this momentum, nobody can stop him. And I think you really see that in July. It's
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building up through June and into July when Congress passes what the Republicans began to call the One Big
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Beautiful Bill Act or zero BBBA. um which they're trying to change the name
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of now for this simple reason that what the OBBBA did was it put into place the
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ideology that the Republican party had articulated since at least the 1990s but
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but back into the 1980s. um that they could create a great nation
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if only they got rid of regulations and taxation and got rid of the basic social safety net that we have enjoyed since
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- And you saw this in the one big beautiful bill act. It uh the primary
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thing it did was it extended the 2017 tax cuts for the from under the first Trump administration which
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overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations. But it also slashed Medicaid and the supplemental nutrition
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assistance program and they let it expire the supports for purchasing
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affordable um uh health care insurance under the Affordable Care Act. They cut
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through a whole bunch of things that would benefit ordinary Americans in order to benefit the wealthy and corporations. Now, crucially,
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there were no Democratic votes for those bills. And that I say is one of the reasons that it's caused a lot of
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trouble since then because the Republicans are trying to get the Democrats to look as if they had
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something to do with that act because they passed it in July and the world has changed a lot since July. So you're also
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seeing in that same period the first half of 2025 increasing attempts on the part of Trump and his cronies to line
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their own pockets. I mean, they basically have just done everything they can to put billions of dollars into
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their own pockets, through leveraging tariffs, through cryptocurrency, through buying uh or through selling pardons,
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through doing everything they possibly can. So, you had all this going on in that first half of the year. And a lot
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of people, especially in the mainstream media, who were watching this, either got on board or sort of stood back in
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horror and seemed to go, I guess we better go along with this. But I'd like to argue today that with this attempt to
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destroy American democracy and to work outside of our laws and our constitution
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in a way that in many ways reflected the world before the creation of the United
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States of America that something else happened. Now that something else
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happened really from the minute Trump took office and that was beginning in February of 2024 before the election. a
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number of Democratic attorneys general had gotten together and said, "Listen, we might have ourselves a problem if
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Trump is reelected. We don't want to be flatfooted when he comes in here because we know he's already he and his people
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are already boasting about all these executive orders and project 2025 and all the stuff they're going to do. We
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better be ready." So, they started meeting and dividing up what they thought uh would be the major policies
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of the Trump administration that they as a group would want to push back against. So, as soon as Trump starts throwing out
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executive orders, now a lot of people didn't pay attention to this, but it was really important. The Democratic attorneys general in different states
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started to sue those things. Uh, those cases began to go into first the the local courts, but
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then quickly into the federal courts where the federal courts began to side to to to decide against the Trump
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administration. They started slowing things down. Now, that's wasn't the case in the Supreme Court where the Supreme
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Court overwhelmingly has sided in favor of the Trump administration. Not always, but a lot. But in the lower courts, the
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administration starts to get caught a little bit in the legal system that it had been trying to get away from. Um,
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now you see that really dramatically beginning in March. In March, when the
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administration sends more than 200
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undocumented immigrants to the Secott terrorist prison in El Salvador
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after a federal judge has said, "Don't do it." And they do it anyway. Remember
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that? There there was this moment where it sure feels like they think they can do anything they want, but they can't.
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the judge, Judge Boseberg, starts to pick at them, starts to stop them,
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starts to to say, "What's going on here? You weren't supposed to do that. Who made these decisions?" And so on. And he
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hasn't let up. At the same time, it turned out that one of the people that they they didn't deport um I guess
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technically they might have deported in a sense ago Garcia, but these are renditions. These are not for the most
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part sending people back to the countries they came from. They're sending them to third countries. That's known as a rendition. And they are
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sending them there um in this case without any kind of trial, without any kind of sentencing. They simply sent
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them for incarceration to a prison that was notorious for torture, which is what happened to the men that the United
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States, including you and me, sent to the Secott prison. That's on us because we elected the people who did that.
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One of the people that they sent was a man from Maryland, a man named Kilmargo Garcia. And ago Garcia had been before a
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federal court before where a judge had said um might have been an immigration
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court. Those are different. So he'd been before a judge before who had said he could not be returned to El Salvador
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because there was real uh real a real real chance that he would lose his life there. And nonetheless, the
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administration sent him there. Now they could simply have said, "Oopsy, our bad.
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We'll bring him back." Because at first they admitted it was an administrative error. They sent him there, but then they doubled down on the idea they were
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going to leave him there. And that became really important because the judge in charge of that case, a woman
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named Paula Zenis, kept saying, you know, you got to bring these guys back. You have to do this. And they kept being
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cutesy. I mean, if you remember reading about this, they were there just that sort of that smarmy we don't have to do
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what you say thing was a hallmark of this administration. But eventually it ended up before the
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Supreme Court and the Supreme Court also said you got to bring these guys back. That was the first really ma this guy
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not these guys um the first really major hit for the Trump administration. Now it
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still didn't do it. It ended up sort of dragging its heels and saying, "Now, God, they remind me of two-year-olds.
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Don't you don't they remind you that way?" They finally brought him back after um the uh they had uh that
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Tennessee had indicted um Briga Garcia for transporting migrants and that's
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just been thrown out as well as of today. But um but that helped to focus
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people on the idea that the administration didn't care what the laws
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were. They just didn't care. So, a lot of people who were willing to look the other way when Musk was doing his thing
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with the idea he was combating waste, fraud, and abuse are looking at what's happening to Kilmargo Garcia and being
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like, "Wait a minute here. The courts said to bring him back and you won't. What are you doing?" And I think that's
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when it really hit people what was going on in this administration. And that happened in March into April. So, one of
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the things you saw in April is uh a number of protests have been going on
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against the Trump administration, primarily the Tesla takedowns, which were going after Musk. But on April 5th,
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you saw the hands-off rallies around the country, and that's going to start this
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snowballing effect of more and more public protests. Now the public protests
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are crucially important as are all of the protests that people have been engaging in the economic protests, the
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uh the the me media, the journalism, the letter writing, the calling people. But one of the things that the public
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protests have done is that they have reiterated who owns
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this government. So by April, you're starting to see a real push back about
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is this government uh government of extra constitutionality
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or is it still our government? Now, you're also seeing by that a number of
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sweeping deportation efforts um from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and
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the US Border Patrol under um Greg Bavino in which they are having these very public sweeps that by definition
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tend to get people who are living in communities who do not have criminal
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references out for them. Because again, by definition, you see this all over indigenous history in US indigenous
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history. Whenever there's a fight and somebody says, "Hey, let's go let's go out and get, you know, the our
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indigenous enemies." Um, they always go for women, children, and elderly because
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they're easy. They're lowhanging fruit. And you're seeing the exact same thing here now. You know, of course, they're
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not going after actual gang members. Actual gang members are dangerous. They're going after the guy who runs the
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the the food stand on the corner and the the nurse and the mom dropping her kids
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off at school because they're easy. They're not armed. They're vulnerable. Um this is
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this is a little bit of a rabbit hole for me, but this the abuse of power of the powerful against the least powerful
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people in our society never ceases to absolutely infuriate me. like major
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rule. You punch up all you want in life. You never punch down. Okay, rabbit rabbit hole. I'll stop. But this always
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gets me. Like by definition, they're going to go after um the the the weakest
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um the weakest members of society. And and there's been some wonderful work do done on that that a lot of this is
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cosplay because these are people who want to pretend that they could be really powerful had they been deployed
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to Fallujah, but they didn't dare to go to Fallujah. So instead, they're going to suburban Chicago. Okay, I'll stop.
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Um, but when you're seeing this whole sweep of all the the um the undocumented
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Americans, um this is really starting to hit home in a lot of places where people who had
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thought that Trump really meant just to go after murderers and criminals, who by the way were already being deported,
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that the in fact that that was wrong. He's going to go after everybody, which is after all what he said he would do.
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and what Steven Miller said he would do. I don't know where everybody thought they were going to find 20 million criminals and murderers and rapists in
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the United States. I that, you know, I actually had this argument with somebody, but anyway, they were they went ahead and did that and it's
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starting to dawn on people that this is going to tear apart families. It's going to tear apart communities. It's going to
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tear apart hospitals. It's going to tear apart child care and so on. So, as this
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is going on now, if you remember, we're into June, and I promise I'll speed this up. We're into June, and Trump's 79th
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birthday fell on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. Um, that was June 14th, and Trump
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planned a parade for the army, right? But pretty much everybody knew he was
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doing it for himself. And when that happened, more people organized and they
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organized an event on that day to stand against kings. That was our first
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articulated, not first, there were actually a number of them before them, but that was the first really big articulated no kings day. And that was a
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really big deal um for not only because of the numbers, but because of the language, no kings. We've gone from a
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period when we have uh a a group of people in the administration working around the idea of a constitution and
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laws, which is what the United States government is all about. Now, on June 14th, you have people calling it out. No
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kings. We are a nation of laws, a nation of people.
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from that you're seeing um uh Trump increasingly frustrated and more and
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more uh attempts to send federalized National Guard troops and even Marines
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in the case of Los Angeles into Democratic dominated cities. So you're going to see um National Guard troops in
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Los Angeles, in Portland, Oregon, in Chicago, in um Nashville, in in places
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around the country. And that while it was intended to strike fear in the hearts of the cities, it didn't do that.
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Rather than striking fear in the cities, what it really did was it hardened opposition to the idea of a government
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that could willy-nilly send in armed people um to those cities. And and there
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is also I hope anyway um horror that we lost two of well one of our National
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Guard troops and bad had another badly injured for this performance that Trump
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was putting on in Washington DC. Um those people shouldn't have been there. They didn't want to be there and um and
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we lost two of them and that um you know that's that's not okay. People don't like that, especially our National Guard
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troops. And I will not go down the National Guard troop rabbit hole right now, but National Guard troops are a
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really important part of our American system for a number of reasons. So
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that's happening in the summer and then into the fall as it's heading into the
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fall. And then if you remember, Trump disappeared for several days over Labor Day. Now Trump had been showing a lot of
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weakness both mentally and physically. really for a long time now, but he disappeared for a number of days over
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Labor Day. It was weird, remember? And then uh he appeared back again. Lots of
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speculation about what happened, but especially since then, he has shown dramatically weakened ability to
30:35
concentrate, to stay awake in meetings. He is um he's bonkers. Bottom line,
30:41
that's my my scientific um phrase for it. uh you know if you try and write
30:47
down literally I quote him often because I think it's important to actually get his words on paper but I don't I no
30:54
longer try to transcribe it listening to it I actually use a recorder that does that because there's no rhyme or reason
31:00
to a lot of the sentences so for example if you give me a speech of virtually anybody else you got a pretty good sense
31:07
what the next word's going to be it's not going to suddenly be orangutang you got no sense what's going
31:14
to come next out of out of um Trump's mouth. So, he's starting, you can see
31:20
the increasing ill health and of course the bruising on his hands now on both of his hands, not just on one of his hands,
31:26
begins really to take off and start to get noticed. Still not as much as I think it should have in September.
31:34
And then something interesting happens. Uh you can start to feel everything
31:39
slowing down. Like everything's slowing down. And there's of course a lot of stuff I'm not talking about here, but in
31:46
October there's an interesting moment when Curtis Charvin, the guy who was behind this whole smash it all, you
31:52
know, break it and and rebuild later, um he actually writes a post in his um the
31:59
the place where he writes and he says it's all going too slowly. They're not
32:05
going to win. It's it's been stopped. In order to
32:10
make the destruction of democracy happen, in order to have this extra constitutional movement, it had to be
32:17
lightning fast. And in fact, he described it as a moment from Star Wars
32:22
in which you um you take a starship, if you know your um your starship
32:28
literature, um if you take a starship that's that's floating dead,
32:33
you can smash it into full into full power,
32:38
but either that's going to make it go uh faster than the speed of light and do
32:44
something phenomenal, or it's going to blow up the ship. And that's what he always said that he envisioned this
32:50
moment as. But in fact, what happened was that the the system of of doing that
32:58
jumpstart um didn't work. The more that
33:04
the administration tried to work outside the law, the more the law caught up. But
33:09
more importantly, not that the law is not important, it's very important. But more importantly, the people caught up.
33:18
So in October, the beginning of October, Curtis Yaran says, "Uh, it's not going fast enough. I'm thinking about leaving
33:25
the United States." And then on October 18th, we have the
33:31
big No Day. And that no kings day, that second one was at least seven million,
33:38
possibly eight million people who were counted, that doesn't count all the
33:43
sympathizers um that were not counted. And that no kings day was a really important moment
33:52
in 2025 and I would argue in American history because that's the moment when
33:57
it really became obvious from what was happening in the streets
34:02
that the American people had woken up and that the momentum had shifted away from the administration and to the
34:09
American people. Now I'm not at all convinced it wasn't there before that. One of the things that I keep saying is that there's a lot of organizing going
34:16
on that a lot of people don't know about, don't see, that people like me see. And um and I'll just shout out here
34:23
the visibility bro brigade, the card campaign and the um and liberal rocks.
34:29
All of which are associated with me. I retweet them and I try and help when I can. Um and those are, you know,
34:36
thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And I could be wrong, but I don't think any of them have ever made it into the New York
34:42
Times. I could be wrong. Um, there's a lot of that going on. And that's not that's not some of the Now I could sit
34:48
here and I could list another three and then another three and then another three. So, I'm not saying it hadn't happened before, but No King's Day made
34:56
it visible. You know how it made be how you know it made a big difference? You know what
35:01
happened? A couple days, not a couple, a few days after No King's Day. Could not have been more symbolic. Trump knocked
35:08
down the White House. Trump knocked down the east wing of the White House just after No King's Day. And it was pretty
35:14
clear he didn't have permits. He didn't have any kind of environmental um statements about what might have been in
35:20
that building, which you have to do before you tear anything down to see if you're spreading any kind of contaminants. Um he clearly had no plan
35:27
for what to put up next because we don't even have a plan yet now. Um three
35:32
months later, October was December, January. Yeah. Two months later, he was
35:37
clearly so angry he was going to hurt somebody. And how do you hurt the American people? You take a bulldozer to
35:44
the White House. And that's when we lost the East Wing of the White House.
35:49
But we're not done yet. The knocking down of the East Wing of the White House was a really big deal. And you have seen
35:56
uh frustration from that and continued frustration with Trump's more and more desperate attempts to say, "Hey, I'm
36:03
important." the idea of the um what is he called the the arct triumph which
36:11
mixes both French and English together which he intends to place between the
36:17
Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC. I'm not holding my
36:23
breath to see that one happen because it's a bad idea on any number of levels. But you're also seeing it in the paving
36:29
over of the rose garden in the fact that he tried to repaint the Eisenhower um
36:36
office complex, the giant uh complex from the 1880s that is beside the White
36:42
House. It's gray gray uh granite. He wanted to repaint it white and that got stopped dead in its tracks. um he um
36:50
because people sued ahead of time um because of what had happened to the White House and you see it in the fact
36:56
that he reworked the the Kennedy Center and now has renamed the Kennedy Center
37:01
um completely illegally. I mean that's like like you and I could go put our names on it and it would be just as
37:07
legal. It is still legally the Kennedy Center. And this sort of desperate attempt to say, "Hey, look at me. Look
37:13
at me. I matter." And nowhere is that more obvious in his attempt in the White
37:18
House to put his own version of White House presidencies in plaques on the
37:24
walls under the portraits of other presidents. I mean, it's just so freaking childish that he did that. Um,
37:31
and it's also just so desperate. I mean, who who does that? Um, someday I hope to have time to write about what he has
37:38
done to American history, but a lot of stuff's going on. So, while he is doing that, tearing down
37:44
the White House, of course, the Epstein files issue is heating up again, and I'm
37:49
not going to do the whole history of the Epstein files here, but remember that he
37:55
was trying and his people were trying desperately to hide the Epstein files. and um Thomas Massie and uh uh Roana, a
38:03
Republican from Kentucky and a Democrat from California were working to get a discharge petition to force um uh
38:11
Speaker Johnson to permit a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. And they
38:16
got the votes they needed in mid November. And on November 19th, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed
38:23
the House of Representatives and then it passed the h it passed the Senate. Overwhelmingly, it was clear at that
38:31
point that even a number of Republicans had had enough. Not just because they were mad at the fact that Trump had
38:37
tanked the economy and had infuriated people with the deportations and had torn down the White House and so on, but
38:44
also because the issue of the raping of children was one of the things that a number that motivated a number of MAGA
38:51
voters. And for Trump to say, "No, there's nothing there and we're going to hide it was destroying their own
38:57
popularity among their MAGA base." So, they turned on him with that. And that was a really big deal because in
39:04
addition to the fact it required that the Epstein files be uh released by December 19th
39:11
um 30 days. It also said the law is catching up. The law is catching up to
39:17
you. And it's interesting because Trump recently referred to the release of the Epstein files as something that would
39:23
embarrass people. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's the sort of thing that will put
39:29
people in jail. And that is the I mean, it's interesting. It's almost like he's
39:35
trying to say, "Oh, it's only going to embarrass people." Because the stuff that appears anyway to be in there, is
39:42
not about embarrassment. The stuff that's in there is about the law and the advantage that certain privileged men
39:49
and women, primarily men, but also some women, um, used against society's most
39:56
vulnerable. In this case, the sexual abuse of children. That is um
40:04
really the story of where we are right now with Trump's mental health and physical health breaking down. um the
40:10
Epstein files hanging over everything, his declining popularity and his desperate desperate attempt to hang on
40:19
to something to to get the deal for Putin that he seems to have promised in
40:24
2016 to get his name on something to to somehow say yes, I matter. I remain
40:31
important. And and I I don't want to say for a minute that he doesn't remain extraordinarily dangerous as does the
40:37
MAGA movement. But the what I wanted to lay out today is that in many ways 2025
40:44
looks to me like uh u a replay if you will or maybe proof of
40:54
the concept of American democracy. That is we began in January with a group of
41:02
extraordinarily powerful and wealthy people saying we don't have to pay attention to laws. we don't have to pay
41:08
attention to a constitution which by the way they were taking advantages of the American people that parliament and king
41:15
George III would never have considered bound as they were by things like the Magna Carta. So there, you know, Trump
41:21
was doing stuff that King George never would have
41:27
tried. But that idea that they didn't have to answer to anything or to anybody
41:33
is very much the mindset that gave rise to an opposition in the 1750s and the
41:40
1760 1760s really in the 1770s in their colonies that said, "Hey, wait a minute.
41:47
We do have rights. We're not revolutionaries in the sense that we want to destroy the world. We
41:55
are revolutionaries in the sense that we want to go back to a system in which we enjoy the rights in their case of
42:02
Englishmen. And that's what Americans began to say beginning here in about March. Hey, wait
42:10
a minute. We're not looking to create a revolution that goes, you know, does
42:15
something wild and crazy the way you keep screaming about. We want the rights that are guaranteed to us by our
42:22
Constitution. We want the right of due process, which Kilmar Orbrego Garcia never got. We want the right to have our
42:29
representatives spend our money, which is what the Constitution says they're supposed to
42:35
do. We want our representatives to decide our foreign trade policies, which
42:41
is what the Constitution says they do. We want to make sure that troops can't
42:48
come and arrest us on the streets, which is what our laws say. We have the right
42:54
to be protected from. What Americans began to say in the spring and the
42:59
summer of 2025 is we stand firm on our
43:04
Constitution and the rule of law. And more and more people began to look at
43:10
that. And yeah, some of them come in from one direction, some of them come in from another. Some of them just don't like Trump. Some of them are mad that
43:17
that food is more expensive and that housing is out of reach. But what they're saying at the end of the day is
43:24
you can't operate however you want. You must operate according to the law and
43:31
according to the will of the people. and the law began really to to sink in its
43:36
teeth in the middle of the year over the course of the spring and the summer and into the fall. But what really begins to
43:44
matter at least by the summer is that as our
43:49
political leaders, and I hate to say it, many of them failed us. They were not pushing back to the degree they wanted.
43:55
They were not speaking up for us. They were not stopping Trump. As that
44:01
happened, the American people said, "Wait a minute here. This is our
44:06
government. This is not, you know, we don't want representatives who aren't going to represent us, whether they're
44:12
Republicans or Democrats or independents or whatever." No, we need people who will stand up and defend the American
44:18
people. And that's just what
44:24
the leaders of the American Revolution said. We need to be represented. What we care
44:32
about needs to be represented. So where does that leave us in December
44:40
of 2025 where we are now? I keep saying that I think the next
44:47
several months are going to be bad. They're going to be brutal. Trump and the MAGA Republicans are not going to
44:53
give up power easily. They're going to be worse and worse than they ever have been. So don't think for a minute that
44:59
this is going to be a cakewalk. They could still win. They could still impose a dictatorship on us.
45:06
But that's not what I see. I look at where we are and I see that the momentum
45:11
has shifted to we the American people. And that takes me back actually to the
45:17
framers of the Constitution and the founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence
45:23
who began to argue in the period in which they lived that it was only by
45:29
seeing what a dictatorship meant that people really could appreciate the
45:35
benefits of liberty. The only way you could really appreciate a democracy was
45:41
recognizing what you were losing as somebody tried to take it away. So for
45:47
me, I look at this moment and I see 2025 first of all as horrific. I I don't want
45:53
to downplay that at all. We are all exhausted. Nobody likes where we are. Even the people who seem to be calling
45:58
all the shots, they seem like miserable people. I mean like emotionally miserable people. They never smile. They
46:05
don't seem to have any friends. Rabbit hole. Sorry.
46:10
It has been a horrible year. But what I see is the attempt to get rid of the
46:16
government under which Americans have lived for almost 250 years and replace it with a strong man who will usher in
46:25
white Christian nationalism, a theocracy that will force all of us to live under
46:30
a rule that is favored by only about 4% of the American people. And as that really hit home, you know,
46:37
when people like me said that in July of last year, you know, people were like, "Oh, you're exaggerating. That's never
46:44
going to happen. They're not going to take away our rights." Now that it is happening across the
46:51
board, more and more people are waking up and seeing it, and they're pushing back. And as they push back, it will
46:58
become harder and harder for our elected representatives to continue to side with the MAGA Republicans.
47:06
As that support erodess, especially if it erod
47:12
continues to erode over Epstein, you're going to see more retirements on
47:18
the part of MAGA Republicans or Republicans who don't want to be in the minority in the House of Representatives. But you're also going
47:24
to see the rise of new leaders in the Democratic and the
47:30
Republican parties and independents and with luck third parties who will
47:36
articulate and embrace new policies and that uh one of the reasons that
47:42
people like Representative Jamie Rascin of Maryland support um rank choice voting is that that would
47:49
be very conducive to that. But so I see this as a moment when we are reclaiming
47:55
American democracy because it is under attack and we could still lose.
48:01
But if we win, here's what we need to do to make that
48:07
create a better society. We must going into 2026
48:14
articulate what we would like this country to look like. My version is not
48:20
going to be your version. That's fine. The more people, us and leaders who
48:28
articulate new policies, the more they will be tested, the more people will either like them or dislike them. Some
48:34
of them will rise, some of them will fall. That is how we will create a new ideology to take the country into the
48:42
21st century. Now, just today on on Talking Points memo, Josh Marshall, who's a great thinker, um
48:51
said, you know, he's he was looking at the numbers and he said, you know, it's really shocking how much Americans hate
48:57
AI. We hate it. And yet, it's being forced down our throats by the tech bros who seem to think that it's going to
49:03
make them a gazillion dollars. Um, that's the sort of thing that needs to be on the table. What do we want about I
49:11
AI? I I can't imagine there's not some good stuff about it, but it seems to me to need regulation. Maybe you disagree.
49:17
We need to hash that out. And going into to to 2026, think about what your main
49:23
issues are. Education, health care. Maybe you're really concerned about opportunity, housing. Maybe you think
49:30
that there are too many regulations. Maybe you think that there are too few. Now is the time to be speaking up with
49:36
people at the local level, at the state level, and at the national level to
49:41
articulate what sort of values we want to have going forward. And as we do that, some of them will rise to become
49:50
enormously important in 2026 and 2028 and going forward. Others will fall away
49:56
and become less important. And that's going to frustrate a lot of us. I can tell you right now, some of the things I want are not going forward. But that's
50:03
how this system works. And one of the things about the empowerment of American people through the course of 2025 and
50:11
their realization that they have agency is that it's incumbent on us then to
50:16
articulate what it is we really want. So where I feel like we are now at the
50:23
end of 2025 is that we have survived this year which is no small thing
50:30
but that it has set us up to move into a reorientation of the United States of
50:38
America in a new world because what Trump has done in foreign policy has dramatically changed the rest of the
50:45
world. It has made it terribly, terribly, terribly dangerous. Uh, one of
50:50
the things that I think we must do is manage to make sure there is not a World War III, which Trump is setting us up to
50:57
to stumble into, but we must figure out how the United
51:02
States of America can fit into a world going forward. And for all the fact that
51:08
that's going to be so much damn work, it's also an astonishing thing to live
51:16
in the moment where you get to look at the destruction of a world that, you know, people like me did not want to see
51:22
happen, right? You know, I kept saying this might be good for the country, but I don't want it to happen, but it did
51:27
happen. We have watched one world begin to pass
51:33
away and now it's up to us to build the next one. And if you think about it that
51:39
way, it's a pretty cool place to be at the end of 2025.
51:48
I want to thank you all for being here this year. Uh it feels like we finally have a schedule down for these talks.
51:53
We'll see what happens in the new year. I have no real changes planned except that I had a huge breakthrough on my
51:59
book over the weekend. Weekend, I guess. Yeah, over the weekend. So, I hope to finish that book over the course of this
52:05
year. Otherwise, I will be here writing every night. Um, doing these talks. Got a bunch of great
52:12
interviews lined up. I talk with Joanne Freeman on Saturday mornings and um and
52:18
we'll just see what 2026 brings us. In any case, I couldn't be doing it all without you, and I'm just so honored to
52:26
be part of your community. Thanks for being here, and best of luck to everybody in 2026.
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tpm video
Best Scandal — General Interest
The Nominees: Trump’s $300 Million White House Ballroom, Kristi Noem’s Ghoulish Photo Ops, Podcaster Dan Bongino’s Conspiracy Theory Fail, Eric Adams’ Entire Mayoral Administration.
The Winner:Trump’s $300 Million White House Ballroom takes the cake for, as one reader put it, the most visually “on the nose” corruption of Trump’s second term and the “raw indulgence of the gold plated ballroom funded by shady crypto guys.” Trump’s ballroom won with 62% of the vote.
Runners Up: They were virtually tied with Noem’s Ghoulish Photo Ops winning 17.3% of the vote to Eric Adams’ corrupt run as NYC mayor with 17.2% of the vote.
“Not everyone can have good taste.”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
Kate: “I mean, Trump is a good choice in terms of the size of the scandal. I think in terms of like raw dollars, that’s going to be the biggest. And it’s funny because Noem’s is like, not really what I think you would think of as a scandal in normal terms. It’s more just like … “*
*Josh: “A hideous spectacle.”
Meritorious Achievement in Grifting
The Nominees: Winnie Greco Let the Chips Fall Where They May, Relaxium’s Very Own Mike Huckabee, Tom ‘Cashbag’ Homan, The Trump Family’s Shady Memecoin.
The Winner:The Trump Family’s Shady Memecoin won with 60% of the vote. The blatantness of the crimeing is what made this a top choice for readers. As TPM reporter Layla A. Jones put it in her nomination, “a big chunk of the$800 million his sons raked in this year for the family business conglomerate has 1) come from the sale of memecoins actually called $TRUMP to 2) foreign investors, several of whom told Reuters they were hoping to curry favor with the president, as 3) Trump has openly sought to deregulate crypto at hyperspeed. It’s just a ridiculous out-in-the-open grift.”
Runner Up: Tom “Cashbag” Homan with 30% of the vote. As a reader put it in their nomination, Homan’s “simple-yet-brazen approach — old school bag and only 50k *in cash* — was a reminder of days gone by.”
“Grifty, but stupid and weird.”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
*Josh, on the inevitability of a Trump win in this category: “It’s sort of like … if you’re doing the acting awards at your high school. And Robert De Niro somehow was in the play, like, okay he’s going to win. I mean, come on. You need to focus on runner up at that point, right? Because it’s De Niro and that’s that.”
Best Supporting Hatchet Man
The Nominees: Bill Pulte, Housing Henchman, DOJ Weaponization Czar Ed Martin, Perplexed Prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, Trumponomics Enabler Scott Bessent.
The Winner:With 29.8% of the vote, Bill Pulte — “the 37-year-old scion of a major homebuilding family ensconced as the head honcho simultaneously at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, where he’s free to rifle through the personal mortgage records of prominent Democrats,” as David Kurtz put it — wins.
Runners Up:This was the closest category by far. Second place goes to Ed Martin (28%), followed by Scott Bessent (21.5%) with Lindsey Halligan in last (20.7%).
“There’s a kind of respect for the hustle here.”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
Kate: “It’s just, like, it’s a little bit funny to have this rabid pit bull who — the best assignment he could get is in this random little housing office. And he’s like, ‘don’t worry, sir, I will weaponize everything at my disposal.’ And that involves just having these poor schlubs sift through mortgage paperwork, looking for errors. It’s all a little comical.”*
*Josh: “Right, it’s so striving. … Like you find yourself in different places in life and you do the best you can in your station in life, and you try to do more than people thought you could do.”
“A lot of these Trump appointees, because they have inner darkness, it must make them age prematurely.”
Josh Marshall
Biggest Journalism Fail
The Nominees: SignalGate, Olivia Nuzzi Goes Hiking the Appalachian Trail, The New York Times vs. Zohran Mamdani, Lindsey Halligan Fails to Go Off the Record.
The Winner: NYT vs. Zohran wins with 37.2% of the vote.
Runner up: SignalGate came in close second with 34.3% of the vote.
“Left at the altar more than one way here.”
Josh Marshall
The Takes*:
Kate: “Okay. And the winner is. Oh NYT vs. Zohran. What! What! What!”
Josh: “What!”
Kate: “With a whopping 37.2% of the vote? What?”
Josh: “What?”
Most Egregious Ring-Kissing
The Nominees: Mike Braun Bends the Knee, Columbia Accepts Trump’s Terms of Engagement, Tim Cook and His Golden Idol, Bill Cassidy Believing Bullshit.
The Winner:Columbia won with 43.6% of the vote. As TPM reader Elizabeth described it in her submission, Columbia should receive its due recognition because it demonstrated “the worst capitulation to nonsense and the most grotesque pandering from an institution of higher learning.”
Runner up:Bill Cassidy “for his haplessness, cowardice, and self-debasement that would be comical were the consequences not so grave,” as TPM reader BW put it.
“Columbia. What the fuck?”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
*Kate: “Columbia … the poster child for university capitulation and getting absolutely nothing in return.”
---