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Jay Shackford
Donald Trump’s
Golden Age of Awful
A damage assessment of the President’s first year back in office
By Susan Glasser/The New Yorker/Dec. 30, 2025
No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be.
Did we anticipate that Trump would come back to office wanting to rule as a king, consumed by revenge and retribution, and encouraged by sycophants and yes-men who would insure that he faced few of the constraints that hampered him in his first term? Yes, but now we know that bracing for the worst did not make the inevitable any less painful. In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.
A partial catalogue of the horrors of 2025 that not even the most prescient Trump-watcher could claim to have fully predicted: gutting cancer research in the name of expurgating diversity programs from the nation’s universities. Shutting the door to refugees—except for white Afrikaners, from South Africa. Empowering the world’s richest man to cut off funding for the world’s poorest children. Welcoming Vladimir Putin on a red carpet at an American Air Force base. Razing the East Wing of the White House, without warning, on an October morning. Alienating pretty much the entirety of Canada.
Your list might be different from mine. There is so much from which to choose. And that is the point.
Yet the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen. Trump has always been a mirror for other people’s souls, an X-ray revealing America’s dysfunction. If this was a test, there were more failing grades than we could have imagined.
On the first day of his second term, the President pardoned more than fifteen hundred violent rioters who sacked their own U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a vain effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat. Even his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, had said that this was something that “obviously” shouldn’t happen; Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, later admitted that she had lobbied him not to go that far. But Trump didn’t listen. He was putting America on notice. The first outrage was a sneak preview of those to come: if there was a choice to be made, he would invariably opt for the most shocking, destructive, or corrupt option. And who was going to stop him?
This is why any obituary for 2025 requires a special shout-out to those whose craven folding to Trump might well have proved to be among the biggest bad surprises of the year—the law-firm managing partners and corporate executives and technology tycoons who decided to pay protection money to the President rather than stand up for the rule of law that enabled their great success in the first place. Eight long years ago, the story of the first year of Trump’s first term was the rearguard struggle over control of the Republican Party; this time, with Trump having long ago won the battle for the G.O.P., he has extended his hostile takeover far beyond the realm of partisan politics, advancing a vision of breathtaking personal power in which the President claims the right to determine everything from what appears on the nightly news to the place names on our maps to which laws passed by Congress should be followed and which can be ignored.
Just a year ago, it was still possible to envision a different course for Trump’s second term—to imagine that, while the President himself might really mean to carry through with his most radical plans, there remained strong forces in society to resist him. Republican leaders in Congress and the Trump-appointed conservative majority on the Supreme Court may yet prove to be something other than the willing handmaidens of democracy’s demise, but they have so far failed to do so. This past year’s disruptions are as much their work as Trump’s; without their acquiescence, as passive or unwilling as it has been at times, many of Trump’s most extreme acts would not have been possible. Just think about Senator Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, a medical doctor who made much of the “assurances” he extracted from Trump’s vaccine-denying nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy won his confirmation vote, then broke the pledges he had made to get it. Cassidy has, in the tradition of the Senate, been deeply concerned ever since.
And so Trump sits in the White House, largely unchecked, live-streaming his manic attack on the Deep State for hours a day, an archetypal mad emperor whose courtiers will keep praising him no matter how fat, ugly, or naked he turns out to be. He has become our national micromanager-in-chief, renovating the world economy with a theological belief in the magic of tariffs one minute, renaming the Kennedy Center for himself the next; he is everywhere all at once, ordering up prosecutions of his political enemies on his social-media feed, personally demanding tribute from C.E.O.s and princes, waging unceasing war on wind farms and low-water-pressure showerheads. Who knew, when he spoke of a new “golden age” in his Inaugural Address back in January, that he meant it literally, as a preview of his plans for redecorating the White House? Whatever he does, he can count on the flattery of followers who assure him, as his golf buddy turned international peace negotiator Steve Witkoff did this fall, that he is “the greatest President in American history.”
My colleague Jane Mayer recently made an observation that sums up why it’s been so difficult to write, or even think, about what’s happening in Washington this year: it’s hard to be so angry all of the time. Most of us are simply not used to being this frequently upset, enraged, infuriated, or just plain disgusted by public occurrences. And yet that was the essential condition of engaging with the state of Trump’s America in 2025. Whenever one tuned into the day’s events, there was sure to be another grotesque act of personal aggrandizement or self-enrichment on the part of the President, another billionaire sucking up to him, another brazen act of lawlessness from those who are charged with executing our laws. The year’s signature social-media experience was being confronted by all those videos of poor souls being dragged out of their cars and beaten by masked thugs acting in the name of the government. To watch or not—that was the question. It was all so inescapable and emotionally manipulative: upsetting by design.
The shock videos are just part of it. Remember the gay Venezuelan makeup artist who was sent to El Salvador’s most infamous prison because he had made the mistake of seeking asylum in the U.S.? Or the countless U.S. citizens, some of them small children, who have been caught up by Stephen Miller’s goon squads? Is it better or worse to know that Trump wanted to do even more to fulfill his campaign-trail vow of “mass deportations now,” with his Administration admitting earlier this month that it had fallen far short of its stated goal of a million people shipped out of the country? The more than six hundred thousand deportations in 2025 announced by his Department of Homeland Security is still, by far, the largest number ever.
This is true of many of his other radical plans as well. For all the shock and awe of Elon Musk’s campaign to slash government spending, the federal government will end 2025 with pretty much the same enormous budget deficit that it had before—a far cry from the two trillion dollars in savings Musk initially promised. Yet what he accomplished in the few months before his inevitable falling out with Trump was an unspeakable amount of human trauma, reducing the government workforce by some two hundred and fifty thousand employees, slashing foreign aid to needy children and starving families, ending programs and careers with little regard for who or what or why.
The problem here is that taking stock of all that Trump has done in 2025 means confronting the new reality of an America where the raw and arbitrary exercise of power for its own sake is both possible and permissible. It can happen here, we now know, because it is happening here.
As wretched as this year has been, many of the President’s critics have decided that it is at least ending on a positive note. They discern a whiff of impending irrelevance in our lame-duck septuagenarian President. And there is no doubt that Trump today faces a set of positively Biden-esque problems, from persistent inflation to sagging approval ratings. Some sixty per cent of Americans now disapprove of his Presidency. Prospects for the 2026 midterms look bad for him and his party.
But that is next year’s story. For now, I’m still stuck on the damage assessment from what Trump has already wrought since his return to the Presidency in 2025. If ever there were a year whose end could not come soon enough, this was it. I’d like to dance on its grave and drink buckets of champagne in honor of its demise. Happy New Year. Finally, there is something to celebrate. ♦
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😲 to Europe. How was that a threat to the US? 
