Greatest Hits of 2025
One of the recurring themes in Year One of Trump II has been resistance vs. capitulation. Early in the Trump administration, leaders who should have known better tried appeasement. It didn’t work.
The appeasers included several college presidents, law firms, and owners of large media organizations with other business interests that a corrupted government could help or hurt. But appeasement only invited more extortion.
A year later, Columbia University’s lovely urban campus is still closed to the neighborhood and is ringed by security. By contrast, Trump’s demands for Harvard were so extreme that Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, who was fairly slavering in his eagerness to settle, was compelled to refuse. Today, Harvard is doing a lot better than Columbia at resisting and restoring some funding.
Where appeasement failed, resistance worked. Public outrage and a boycott compelled Disney/ABC to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. Well-coordinated community disruptions slowed down ICE raids. Despite Trump’s weaponizing of the Justice Department, grand juries kept refusing to indict political targets like New York AG Tish James on bogus charges. The No Kings marches indirectly stimulated an impressive wave election in November. Litigation compelled the restoration of some, but not all, government funding.
Resistance demonstrated just where American democracy was still alive and well. It helped that Trump kept embarrassing himself. A more strategic and less narcissistic tyrant could have done even more damage. All of this will come to a head in the 2026 elections, where it will be a contest, as I wrote, between mobilization and suppression.
A recurring question: Is Trump a lame duck yet? Increasingly, it looks that way. The long- awaited splits in the conservative coalition and the Republican Party are finally upon us. I’ve been keeping a diary. In just two weeks, we’ve seen:
- Key Republicans openly fighting over the post-Trump succession, with JD Vance hoping to be the candidate of the far-right Trumpers and Mike Pence appealing to traditional conservatives
- The Heritage Foundation cracking in half, over the current president’s defense of neo-Nazis and his abandonment of traditional conservative views such as free trade, strong national defense, and limited government
- The gerrymander efforts backfiring, with Republican legislators in Indiana viewing resistance to Trump’s demands as not only ethical but as a personal political plus
- Republican defectors in Congress forcing a January vote on the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, undermining House Speaker Mike Johnson and marginalizing Trump
- Open criticism by national-security Republicans of Trump’s incoherent China policy
- Widespread expressions of disgust over Trump’s narcissistic glee at the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele
- Republican dismay at Trump’s failure to get though a scripted speech on the economy, and more dismay at how the issue of affordability is killing Republicans
By the time this article is posted, there will be more such schisms, and they will only continue in the new year. All that said, if American democracy does survive Trump, to revive and regenerate, it will have been, as the Duke of Wellington said of his victory over Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, a close-run thing.
THE SURVIVAL OF DEMOCRACY IS THE SUBTEXT for much of what I’ve been writing about all year, most recently in this piece taking stock of detailed administration plans to take control of all elections, and purge voter files.
Will We Have Free and Fair Elections in 2026?
Ultimately, the courts will have to resolve this and other key questions about Trump’s incipient dictatorship. On the whole, the Roberts Court has served as Trump’s enabler. But even this Court may have its limits. As I’ve observed, there are three key decisions where the high court could well overrule Trump based on oral arguments and previous decisions:
Can Trump fire a term appointee of the Federal Reserve? No. Can he use supposed emergency powers to raise and lower tariffs at will? No. Can he overturn birthright citizenship? No. Restraints on Trump’s power, from whatever quarter, will encourage other restraints.
As this article was being edited, on December 23 the Court rendered another momentous decision. By a 6-3 majority, with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh voting with the Court’s three liberals, the high court refused to overturn a lower-court ruling blocking Trump’s attempt to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago. Other district courts in other states have ordered similar injunctions. This could be the harbinger of a 6-3 majority restraining Trump’s attempted dictatorship.
That said, the Democrats have often been a feeble opposition, divided between economic progressives who could be channeling popular frustrations, and corporate Democrats who are often Trump’s enablers. At best, these divisions blur the message.
I covered the often inept strategy of Democrats in Congress. Their Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, tacked back and forth between openly supporting Trump’s budget and faking opposition, as I wrote in this piece.
Why Does Schumer Keep Trying to Cave?
Despite Schumer, Democrats backed into a winning strategy, in which Republicans found themselves on the wrong side of public outrage against rising health insurance costs.
I wrote several pieces following the pratfalls of a longtime nemesis, Larry Summers. As I’ve written, Summers has been wrong about every major piece of policy advice, going back four decades, from his pressure on post-Soviet Russia to conduct what turned out to be a fire sale of valuable state assets that ended up going to oligarchs, to his crusade for the financial deregulation that caused the 2008 financial collapse, to his lowballing the stimulus needed to recover from that collapse, and his disgrace as president of Harvard.
Yet Summers kept being treated as a seer. Even after he trashed Joe Biden, who unlike Summers got the scale of the post-COVID stimulus about right, Summers was welcome in Democratic think tanks. It took his pitiful and juvenile emails with Jeffrey Epstein to finally being Summers down. The American Economic Association even ordered a lifetime ban.
Former Economist Larry Summers
Why did Summers have nine lives? It tells you something about the nature of power in America. As I wrote, “If you are the American oligarchy, Larry Summers is exactly who you want making economic policy for Democrats.”
They kick you out of the AEA for being a sexual creep, not for getting the economy wrong. For mainstream economists, getting the economy wrong is almost a professional requirement.
ONE TOPIC I’VE ADDRESSED IN SEVERAL PIECES, which has gotten too little attention elsewhere, is Trump’s war on DEI and his closely connected pose as defender of the Jews. Though Trump and his minions pretend that the target is “woke” rhetoric and DEI excess, his attacks have become the pretext for removing one superbly qualified African American or female appointee after another, on the premise that they must have been a diversity hire.
Trump has basically shut down civil rights offices at multiple agencies or reprogrammed them to go after alleged discrimination against white people. Merely considering race or gender is now defined as racist. As I wrote, “The insidious nature of the attack on DEI is not just that it targets minorities and women, but that it undermines ordinary civil rights enforcement … All federal agencies have civil rights offices that enforce basic laws against discrimination. If they are doing their jobs, they can’t avoid talking about race and gender.”
Trump’s Simple Racism
The flip side of Trump’s evisceration of basic civil rights enforcement for Black Americans, the descendants of slaves, is his love bombing of the Jews. The supposed failure of universities to protect the rights of Jews against antisemitic incidents becomes the pretext for Trump’s efforts to put universities into receivership. This from a man who intermittently finds it convenient to make alliances with neo-Nazis.
Antisemitism never entirely dies, but on the whole Jews have thrived in America. Two things that have energized real antisemitism are Trump’s premise that all Jews are supposed to be Zionists and that criticism of the genocide in Gaza is tantamount to antisemitism, and the perception nurtured by Trump that Jews, more than other minorities, are entitled to special treatment.
Antisemitism Real and Fake
AS A JOURNALIST, I LOVE BEING ABLE to mix the short commentaries of the thrice-weekly On TAP newsletter items with longer, deeply reported pieces. Each energizes the other. There is no shortage of material. It’s a joy to have such brilliant and dedicated colleagues. Having founded the Prospect’s Writing Fellows program, I love working with younger writers.
Along with my On TAP comrade Harold Meyerson, I prize wordplay and puns. My favorite title in 2025 was a two-fer, for this piece about the plane that Qatar gave Trump: “Air Farce One: When Gift Becomes Grift.”
One of the oddities of the Trump era is that while many mainstream media, from The Washington Post to CBS, bend to Trump’s will, independent media like ours survive, and are more important than ever.
Thank you for reading, and for supporting our magazine. We look forward to brighter prospects in the new year.
The post Greatest Hits of 2025 appeared first on The American Prospect.