Why are there no politicians promising to create more leisure time...and less work or fewer hours of work...in order for people to make enough to allow a family to live a reasonably comfortable, enjoyable life?
Unfortunately, it would be political suicide.
In an appearance on New York’s WABC radio on Friday, President Donald J. Trump told billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis and co-host Rita Cosby: “We just knocked out—I don’t know if you read or you saw—they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”
Officials said Trump was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela. But as Tyler Pager and Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had no comment, and military officials said they had no information to share. Pager and Barnes added: “U.S. officials declined to specify anything about the site the president said was hit, where it was located, how the attack was carried out or what role the facility played in drug trafficking. There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government or any other authorities in the region.”
The reporters also noted that Venezuela is not a major producer of narcotics. It primarily traffics cocaine from Colombia. Meanwhile, Max Bearak, Simón Posada, and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times reported today that in the wreckage left behind by one of the U.S. strikes on what the administration calls “narco-terrorists” were bodies, charred fuel containers, life jackets, and packets, most of which were empty, although a few had “traces of a substance that looked and smelled like marijuana.”
At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump said: “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs. They load up the boats with drugs. So we hit all the boats and now we hit the area, it’s the implementation area. That’s where they implement. And that is no longer around.” Trump declined to say who was responsible for the operation. “I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was,” he said. “But you know it was along the shore.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who usually posts video of military strikes on social media, posted nothing about the strike Trump mentioned, although at 4:01 this afternoon, U.S. Southern Command posted that it had struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, killing another two men. The new strike means that the U.S. military has killed more than 100 individuals in an operation widely condemned as illegal.
Tonight, Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Jim Sciutto of CNN reported that earlier this month, the CIA struck a remote Venezuelan port facility with drones, the first known U.S. attack on targets inside Venezuela. The U.S. says the Tren de Aragua gang was using the dock to store drugs and then to move them onto boats for reshipment. No one was at the facility when it was hit.
Sources told the CNN journalists that U.S. Special Operations Forces provided intelligence for the operation, but a spokesperson for U.S. Special Operations Command denied that allegation. The CIA declined to comment.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “It’s a good commentary on 2025 that the US President announces a major military attack on a foreign country and even the straightest arrows think, 50% chance it’s an attack, 50% chance president is on another cognition bender.”
Saturday morning, the day before Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was scheduled to meet with Trump for talks on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. The missile and drone strikes damaged more than ten residential buildings, killed at least one person who burned to death, and wounded 27 more, including two children.
When Zelensky arrived in Miami for his trip to Mar-a-Lago, there were no U.S. officials on hand to greet the plane. This was a deliberate snub, especially when compared to the literal red carpet Trump had U.S. military personnel roll out for Putin when he arrived on U.S. soil in August, followed by Trump greeting him while clapping, a military flyover, and a ride with Trump in the presidential limousine.
Trump’s preference for Putin was evident yesterday, too, when he posted on social media: “I just had a good and very productive telephone call with President Putin of Russia prior to my meeting, at 1:00 P.M. today, with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine.” He later told reporters that he and Putin talked for more than two hours.
At the meeting itself, Trump later told reporters, the negotiating teams “covered—somebody would say 95 percent, I don’t know what percent—but we have made a lot of progress on ending that war.” He once again referred to his fictional claims of being a peacemaker, adding: “I’ve settled eight wars, and this is the most difficult one.”
But, as Luke Harding of The Guardian noted, there is no sign that Putin is backing off from his extreme demands, including that Ukraine must give Russia much of its eastern territory. Trump’s negotiators suggest that such a concession would satisfy Putin, but skeptics doubt it. As White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Chris Whipple in August in an interview for Vanity Fair, “The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy.” But, she said: “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country.”
Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has lasted almost four years and, as Russian troops have routinely attacked civilian areas and civilian infrastructure, the damage to the country has been extreme. After meeting with Zelensky, Trump answered a reporter who asked whether Trump had spoken to Putin about the reconstruction of Ukraine: “I did. I did. They’re going to be helping. Russia’s going to be helping. Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. Once—it sounds a little strange but I was explaining to the president, President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity, and other things at very low prices. So a lot of good things came out of that call today.”
Quite literally, Russia invaded Ukraine and continues to smash it. As former Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted on social media: “With all this talk of how to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, and a cease fire, keep this in mind: If Ukraine ceases firing, Ukraine will cease to exist. If Russia ceases firing, the war will cease to exist.”
In his comments to reporters, one passage perhaps shed more light on events than Trump intended. Defending the idea that Putin, who is bombing Ukraine in an unprovoked assault, wants peace, Trump said: “I saw a very interesting President Putin today. I mean, he—he wants to see it happen, he wants to see it. He told me, very strongly. I believe him. Don’t forget, we went through the Russia Russia Russia hoax together. And he’d call me, I’d call him, I’d say, ‘Can you believe the stuff that they’re making up?’ And it turned out we were right. They made it all up, and despite that, we didn’t get into wars, or we didn’t get into problems, but we weren’t able to trade very much or any of that, which was a shame, because, you know, a lot of success could have been had by trading with Russia. They have great land, great minerals and other things, and we have things that they want very badly, but the Russia Russia Russia hoax, which was a terrible made-up fictional thing by crooked Hillary and by Adam Shifty Schiff and bad people, sick people. They made it up. It was all a made up hoax.”
But, of course, the idea that Russian operatives worked to put Trump into the White House in 2016 wasn’t a hoax.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by a Republican, unanimously concluded that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” Further, Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s close relationship with “Russia-aligned oligarchs in Ukraine” meant that his “proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services…represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
In 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would not consider lifting the sanctions placed on Russia after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea. Although Republicans at the time supported those sanctions, it was not clear that Trump was as firm. Lifting sanctions was part of the story of Russian support for Trump in 2016.
The Senate committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller put more of the story together, explaining that in summer 2016, Manafort and Russian operatives “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.” The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”
“All that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process,” wrote a Russian operative. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.
Trump has continued to pressure Zelensky into accepting that plan, so far without success. But Trump’s statement to reporters also suggests that with Russia’s economy crumpling under the weight of four years of war, Putin is desperate to grab Ukraine’s industrial regions and get rid of the sanctions under which his country has staggered since 2014 and especially since his second invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In late November, Russia began to sell its gold reserves in order to fund its budget.
Trump told reporters he had had another “very good talk” with Putin this morning, after his Sunday meeting with Zelensky.
Whether because of Trump’s or Putin’s weakening position—or both—both Trump and Putin appear to be eager to close the deal.
hightor wrote:
(snip) In reality taxes need to be raised, not lowered. (snip)
Truer words were never spoken. But there are very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very few politicians who would ever mention that on the stump. Unfortunately, it would be political suicide.
The hallmark of the first year of President Donald J. Trump’s second term has been the attempt of the president and his cronies to dismantle the constitutional system set up by the framers of that document when they established the United States of America. It’s not simply that they have broken the laws. They have acted as if the laws, and the Constitution that underpins them, don’t exist.
As soon as the 2024 election results were clear, billionaire Elon Musk, who had supported Trump’s campaign both through his purchase of Twitter—now X—and with $290 million in cash, posted on social media: “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” Latin for “New World Order.” Although he won with less than 50% of the vote, Trump announced that he had an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Musk would head a new “Department of Government Efficiency” that Musk vowed would cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.
Musk and his operatives muscled their way into government offices and gained access to computer systems. With strokes of a keyboard they eliminated jobs and programs, including, as Musk put it, feeding “into the wood chipper” most of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government agency aimed at combating disease and malnutrition around the globe. That dismantling has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, recently concluded that while the Department of Government Efficiency did not actually reduce spending, it did cut almost 10% of federal employees, a key goal of Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025.
And, crucially, it put operatives in virtually all government departments and agencies, where they gained access to privileged information about Americans, including citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants.
Musk and DOGE also established the idea that the unelected officials in the Trump administration could do whatever they wished, without regard to the laws or the Constitution. The Constitution, judicial precedent, and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act all make it very clear that the power of the purse belongs to Congress. As the elected representatives of the American people, only members of the House of Representatives and the Senate can determine how the nation’s money is spent. Then the president must “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Democrats objected to the administration’s dramatic usurpation of the power of Congress, but Republicans did not complain. Most backed the administration’s claims it was eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Although Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, meaning that Trump should have been able to get any legislation he wanted, he continued to try to get around the Constitution by declaring nine “emergencies” that would permit him to act without congressional oversight. This reliance on emergencies reflected the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings were followed by right-wing leaders, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt argued that power belongs to the leader who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law.
Trump asserted this view on August 26, claiming “the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in these cities—I can do it.” As now–Vice President J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”
Under these so-called emergencies, Trump launched a tariff war in April, taking from Congress a right the Constitution reserves to it alone. When lawmakers moved to challenge those tariffs, House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), declared the rest of the session a single day with regard to legislation that could challenge Trump’s declaration of an emergency so that a required number of days could not pass before a vote to end that emergency.
With momentum still seeming to be behind Trump, Republicans delivered an omnibus law in July that put into practice the ideology Republicans had promised for a generation. The measure that Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” extended the 2017 tax cuts that benefited primarily the wealthy and corporations while cutting Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and support for the purchase of healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. By passing it under the terms of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered, the Republicans pushed it through without any Democratic votes. In the Senate, three Republicans voted against the bill, requiring Vance to cast the deciding vote.
Meanwhile, administration policies put money into the pockets of the rich, especially Trump, who leveraged tariff discussions to win permissions to build golf courses, invested in cryptocurrency, and received donations to various projects from people with business before the government. When Congress tried to exercise its duty of oversight, administration officials treated the members with contempt, refusing to appear or declining to answer questions, talking over them, or insulting them.
But despite the administration’s attempt to act extraconstitutionally and outside the law, the law began to assert itself. Beginning in February 2024, long before the election, Democratic attorneys general had begun to write lawsuits challenging the executive orders and policies Trump’s appointees had boasted would be coming. Judges began to decide against the administration in those lawsuits at the same time that Americans vocally objected to the dramatic cuts to the civil service, the breaching of privacy laws by DOGE staffers, and the end of government services they had never imagined losing.
Then, in March, the government rendered more than 230 immigrants, mostly Venezuelans and nearly half with legal status in the U.S., to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador after a federal judge told them not to. Among those sent was Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García, whom a judge had ordered not be returned to El Salvador out of concern for his safety. The administration’s consistent refusal to bring Ábrego García back, despite the orders of a federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court, helped to focus anger at the administration.
The slow pace of the law inspired the American people to speak out against the administration. Protests had begun with “Tesla Takedowns” to weaken Musk, and they continued to grow as people watched their public services and government agencies dismantled. On April 5 a coalition of civil rights organizations, women’s rights’ groups, labor unions, and protesters participated in “Hands Off” rallies around the country.
Meanwhile, sweeping deportation raids illustrated that Trump’s promise to deport “the worst of the worst” criminal undocumented immigrants he insisted were raping and murdering U.S. citizens was a lie. Masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol were arresting foreign students who had spoken out against U.S. policy on Israel/Palestine and all the undocumented immigrants they could find. By definition, this meant they were grabbing people who were well integrated into communities. Few had been charged or convicted of crimes.
Trump’s 79th birthday fell on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army—June 14—and he planned a military parade around that event in Washington, D.C. Protesters organized their own events that day, announcing they wanted “No Kings” in the United States of America. Trump’s popularity was dropping.
In June, Trump sent federalized National Guard troops to Los Angeles along with Marines, against the wishes of Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom, allegedly to protect federal officials and buildings from violence by those protesting deportation raids. In September, Trump deployed National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, and in October, to Chicago.
Support for Trump’s policies continued to drop. And then, over Labor Day weekend, Trump disappeared for several days. Whatever had happened passed, but the president’s deteriorating health, both physical and mental, was an increasingly major story.
The momentum that had appeared to carry the Trump administration forward had stopped. In October, Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich highlighted that Yarvin thought nothing had gone far enough or fast enough and feared that the “second Trump revolution…is failing. It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat.”
On Saturday, October 18, more than seven million people took to the streets in another “No Kings” day to demonstrate their opposition to the Trump administration. On Monday, October 20, Trump began to bulldoze the East Wing of the White House, the People’s House.
With disapproval of the president at near-historic levels, voters in the November elections strongly backed Democrats. They elected Democratic governors in Virginia and New Jersey by double-digit margins, with nearly every district moving away from the Republicans. Voters in New York City and Miami elected Democratic mayors, Miami for the first time in nearly 30 years. They broke Republican supermajorities in the Iowa and Mississippi state senates and, over the entire course of 2025, flipped 21% of the Republican-held seats on ballots during the year.
Meanwhile, the refusal of Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the Epstein files—materials from the FBI’s investigation into the activities of sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein—had created significant pressure on Congress to force the administration’s hand. Many MAGA Republicans had backed Trump in 2024 because of what they thought was a promise to release those files, and yet House speaker Johnson refused to allow the House to vote on a measure requiring their release.
A bipartisan team of representatives launched a discharge petition to bring such a measure to a vote, and they overrode his objection. On November 19, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files to the public no later than December 19. The vote was overwhelming—a significant break of Republicans from Trump.
The administration failed to meet that legal deadline. But even the material that the Department of Justice has released and that has emerged from additional reporting since then offers evidence that Trump was more deeply involved with Epstein and his activities than he has admitted. Just tonight, the Wall Street Journal revealed that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa sent young women to perform massages, manicures, and spa services at Epstein’s nearby house, where Epstein would expose himself and pressure them for sex, and that Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell used the spa to recruit women to give Epstein massages.
On December 22 a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to file a plan to return the men it sent to CECOT or to hold hearings to permit them to challenge their detention, insisting they have the right to due process.
On December 23 the Supreme Court issued a preliminary rejection of Trump’s justification for deploying National Guard troops in Illinois.
As we reach the end of 2025, it appears the law is catching up to an administration that began the year by acting as if the law and the Constitution didn’t exist.
More than that, though, over the course of 2025, the administration’s refusal to recognize the tenets of American democracy has roused the American people to defend that democracy.
It appears that as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when British colonists on the North American continent took the radical step of rejecting the idea not just of King George III but of all kings, and launched the experiment of government based on the rule of law created by the people themselves, the American people are reclaiming that history.
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.
Taxes are unconstitutional.
There was a Taxation without Representation issue early in our formation.
Lash wrote:I know that some people in the USA argue that the imposition, assessment and collection of the federal income tax violates the United States Constitution.Taxes are unconstitutional.
I don't have any in-depth knowledge of the interpretation of the US Constitution and its amendments. I'm sure you know a lot more about that.
But taxes generally? What about Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, Article I, Section 9, Clause 4, Article I, Section 9, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution?
Just after midnight on January 1, in a private ceremony in the long-closed former City Hall subway station in Manhattan, New York Attorney General Letitia James swore Zohran Mamdani into office as mayor of New York on a historic Quran. Hours later, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) swore Mamdani in publicly in a ceremony on the steps of City Hall.
“My fellow New Yorkers—today begins a new era,” Mamdani said.
The new mayor emphasized that he represents the everyday people of New York City, “construction workers in steel-toed boots and halal cart vendors whose knees ache from working all day” and “neighbors who carry a plate of food to the elderly couple down the hall, those in a rush who still lift strangers’ strollers up subway stairs.” “I stand alongside over one million New Yorkers who voted for this day nearly two months ago,” Mamdani said, ”and I stand just as resolutely alongside those who did not…. I promise you this: if you are a New Yorker, I am your Mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.”
Mamdani identified this era as “an opportunity to transform and reinvent.” “A moment like this comes rarely,” he said, and “[r]arer still is it the people themselves whose hands are the ones upon the levers of change.”
“To those who insist that the era of big government is over,” Mamdani said, “hear me when I say this—no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.
“For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public. I cannot blame anyone who has come to question the role of government, whose faith in democracy has been eroded by decades of apathy. We will restore that trust by walking a different path—one where government is no longer solely the final recourse for those struggling, one where excellence is no longer the exception.”
Mamdani recalled past city leaders who called for an end to economic and social inequalities and celebrated the “gorgeous mosaic” that is New York City. Men like Bill de Blasio, David Dinkins, and Fiorello La Guardia believed “that New York could belong to more than just a privileged few,” Mamdani said. “It could belong to those who operate our subways and rake our parks, those who feed us biryani and beef patties, picanha and pastrami on rye” if they used the government “to work hardest for those who work hardest.” He promised to “resurrect that legacy.”
He called for everyday Americans to write a new story for New York City, weaving together the many languages, religions, and countries from which they came to become New Yorkers. He promised that city leaders would not try to divide New Yorkers, but rather would work to bring them together. Rather than using “the good grammar of civility…to mask agendas of cruelty,” he said, they would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
The policies he promised are not simply about lowering costs, he said, but about “the lives we fill with freedom.” For too long, he said, “freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it.” “Here,” he said, “where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.”
Mamdani’s speech was a declaration of a new kind of modern politics that focuses on “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” For decades, the Republican Party has called for dismantling the government, arguing that regulations and taxes were destroying Americans’ freedom from constraints. But for most Americans, government regulation and investments in social welfare like education and infrastructure guarantee freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles, including those imposed by the wealthy and powerful.
The idea of government regulation and a basic social safety net to permit Americans to live their lives to their fullest potential was a key principle of the New Deal launched by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, and Mamdani was right to note that the New Deal was born in New York City.
It was in New York City that turn-of-the-century reformers like Frances Perkins recognized the desperate need of urban workers for laws that would protect them from workplace injuries, provide a safety net for widows and orphans, and guarantee a living wage. Those reformer worked with the Democratic Tammany Hall machine to push such legislation through the legislature, where it picked up support from Republicans. In the first three years after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York passed 36 bipartisan laws regulating factories. Other states, especially those with their own history of progressive reform, quickly followed suit.
FDR came from this political ferment, but reform quickly became bipartisan in New York City, where Republicans had their own history of progressivism under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. In 1933, after a political scandal involving Tammany Hall, New Yorkers elected Republican Fiorello La Guardia to be their mayor after he ran a campaign supporting FDR for president. La Guardia helped to rebuild New York City’s economy during the Great Depression.
By recalling La Guardia and the New Deal, Mamdani was rejecting the modern ideology that demonizes government action rather than celebrating it. He appears to be in good company: an Economist/YouGov poll released on December 30 showed that 80% of Americans believe that “political institutions have been captured by the rich and powerful,” 82% believe that “elites are out of touch with the realities of everyday life,” and 74% believe that “leaders who come from ordinary backgrounds better represent people like me.”
One of Mamdani’s first official acts was designed to restore faith in government by attacking corruption. Mamdami revoked every executive order issued by the previous mayor, Eric Adams, after September 26, 2024. It was on that date that Adams was indicted on five federal charges of public corruption, including bribery, wire fraud, illegal campaign contributions, and conspiracy. After Adams spoke highly of President Donald J. Trump and appeared to agree to cooperate with his immigrant sweeps, the Justice Department in February 2025 moved to drop the charges. The evidence of corruption prompted multiple resignations from the Department of Justice.
In contrast to 34-year-old Mamdani’s inauguration in New York City, the Wall Street Journal on the same day published a story about President Donald Trump’s “signs of aging.” Authors Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw note that at 79, Trump is “the oldest man to assume the presidency” and, “according to people close to him,” “is showing signs of aging in public and private.” He gets little sleep and has been recorded falling asleep at public events, appears to be having trouble hearing, doesn’t exercise regularly, and eats “a diet heavy on salty and fatty foods, such as hamburgers and french fries.” Trump told the journalists that he does not always follow the advice of his doctors because “I have very good genetics.”
After learning that the Wall Street Journal was writing about his health, Trump called the authors to “express…irritation about the public debate over his health.” The authors made it clear that Trump and his doctor say he is in excellent health, and his aides say he keeps a busy schedule.
The Wall Street Journal article was significant not because it acknowledges weaknesses many journalists have already recorded, but because a leading right-leaning media outlet is suggesting that Trump is not up to the task of the presidency.
This, in turn, suggests less about the president’s condition than about the danger for the Republican Party of having Trump at its head going into the 2026 midterm elections. On December 31, Republican polling firm Cygnal reported that in generic polling, 49% of Independents favored Democrats and only 29% opted for Republicans. The Independent’s Washington bureau chief, Eric Michael Garcia, called the poll “a flare gun for Republicans.”
Over Tuesday, December 30, and Wednesday, December 31, U.S. Southern Command announced it struck another five small boats that it claims were being operated by “narco-terrorists.” It killed another 13 people and possibly left some survivors. These latest strikes bring the total to at least 35 and the number of people killed to at least 115.
This morning, at 2:58, Trump’s social media account posted about the ongoing Iranian protests that have been sparked by the skyrocketing cost of living, writing: “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
At 6:56 this morning, Trump posted on social media that “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice president, was willing to take. P.S., I strongly believe that anyone running for President, or Vice President, should be mandatorily forced to take a strong, meaningful, and proven Cognitive Examination. Our great country cannot be run by ‘STUPID’ or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE! President DJT.”
Later in the morning, he posted one image of a dead bird near a windmill with the caption “Eagles going down!” and another with birds near windmills saying: “Killing birds by the millions!” MeidasTouch noted that the first image was a 2010 picture of a red kite in Spain and the other was a 2006 image from Taiwan.
Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark asked: “What does it mean when your doctors keep insisting you redo the cognitive exam?
F*ck.
