Yesterday I pretty blithely sidestepped the opportunity to be specific about what I think has been so awful about the first year of the second iteration of TFG’s presidency (“Without getting into the gory details (again), my millimeter-deep analysis…”).  Today I discovered that Susan Glasser at The New Yorker has done the work far better than I could have.  And so, you may ask – well, Pat, could you cite a few examples of just what it was that was so bad about the first year of the second Trump Administration?

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?

(snip)

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.

(snip)

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.

There are more examples, of course…always more.  For what it’s worth.

A better, and happier, New Year to us all.