I was going to attempt a rather detailed, memory-jogging roundup of the year, but why bother when conservative pundit and erstwhile Republican Charlie Sykes already did it so succinctly:
I do like this new-fangled present participle “enshittifying”, and its variants across the parts of speech (enshittify, enshittified, enshittification, all delightful). What better concept to characterize a whole year bookended by Donald renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and then renaming the Kennedy Center (purportedly, that is; he had no more authority to do either than he has to pardon Thanksgiving turkeys every year). What with everything in between, some of it hilarious (stacking Zs at cabinet meetings while his sycophants continued to heap praise at his drooling, unconscious corpus), and a lot of it terrifying (roving gangs of masked men kidnapping people off of streets, troops deployed to major cities, and too many other things to mention), I think it’s fair to say that Trump’s first year was even worse than those of us supposedly afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome** were predicting. Were I to pick one signal atrocity that best combined farce with tragedy, and really summed up the year, it would be the whole DOGE episode, with Musk gulping ketamine while his mob of 20-something incels dismantled the federal bureaucracy while stealing terabytes of government data, all of it illegal, and all supposedly to lop a whopping two trillion dollars from the federal budget, which has nevertheless continued its upward trend (that’s right – not only was no money saved, but the budget still went up). It would be funny, really, except that truly terrible harm was done, not just to Americans, but to the former recipients of foreign assistance from USAID, several hundred thousand of whom have already died as a result – which sounds incredible, but is, as near as I can tell, the legitimate estimate, supported by numerous reputable sources, e.g.:
Pause on that for a second. Elon Musk’s merry wielding of his public policy chainsaw has led directly to several hundred thousand deaths.
On the sparsely populated lighter side, I reckon the purest moment of harmless hilarity was Donald’s eager acceptance of the FIFA Peace Prize, I mean, well done FIFA. They propelled Donald into transports of ecstasy while simultaneously exposing him as a slavering idiot, grasping his meaningless trophy like a Second Grade underachiever on Everybody Gets a Prize Day at Doofus Elementary. Delicious.
Anyway, that’s all sewage under the bridge. What can we expect/dread from Year 2 of the Mad King’s reign of terror? Well, my crystal ball remains as foggy as ever, but there are a few key things to watch for, and we can at least lay them out. I’ll even toss in the odd prediction.
Will Trump even survive 2026? I don’t mean politically; I mean, quite literally, will he drop dead before the year’s over? From the look of him, I’m thinking he’s already teetered into “don’t buy any green bananas” territory. Honestly, he’s ghastly, even worse than I am, wobbly on his feet, semi-narcoleptic, incoherent, slobbering, slurring, swelling at the ankles, filling his diaper, and sporting fresh sets of IV bruises, now on both hands, that no amount of concealer can mask. My bet is he doesn’t make it. God only knows who manages to assume the MAGA mantle over the long haul, but I doubt that it’ll be the widely-despised J.D. Vance, whose tenure as replacement President bids fair to be disastrous enough to spur a primary challenge free-for-all come 2027 (supposing they don’t manage to pull off a Weekend at Bernie’s maneuver just to keep Vance out of the big chair). Everybody will be grasping for the prize, from Donald Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Green to Kristi Noem and Vivek Ramiswamy (as previously stated, my dough is on Tucker Carlson). In other words, Donald’s overdue departure may not do much to improve matters.
Fine, but let’s suppose, going forward, that Trump somehow remains on this side of the lawn. What then? Very well. If we must. In no particular order:
Will he be reined in by the Mid-Terms? It sure looks that way, but November is a long, long way down the political road, and Trump and his various enablers haven’t even begun to exhaust their options for rigging the election. I know that right now, MAGA is starting to look like a spent force, with the various sub-cults of right wing extremists at each others’ throats, Donald at a particularly low ebb in personal popularity, the economy in the crapper, and sizeable majorities opposing every one of his policy initiatives, even on immigration. Yet electorally, the GOP holds all the structural advantages. No matter what happens from here on out the States are already so gerrymandered that the Dems have to win by a landslide to gain significant ground. At the same time the Constitution has, in effect, gerrymandered the Senate without the Republicans having to do anything, and will be that much harder to flip. Thus while it’s still quite possible, on present trends, that the Dems take the House, I’m not at all sanguine about the Senate no matter how much people continue to despise Donald, anyone who supports him, and the horse he rode in on. A coming Blue Wave? I’m saying don’t count on it, brace yourself for a GOP resurgence, and at a minimum banish any dreamy dreams of the Dems taking both chambers and mustering the necessary majorities to impeach and then convict the bastard. Never gonna happen.
Mid-Terms Aside, will the 25th Amendment come Into play? As Trump deteriorates, he’ll become more and more incoherent, impulsive, and prone to fits of rage. He may become so frightening, even to his lick-spittle retainers, that they see no choice but to yank the plug and hand him over to the professionals. Maybe. I don’t know. This Cabinet? They’re more likely to try to distract him with building ballrooms and triumphal arches, and keep on pretending everything’s fine while privately hoping against hope that he doesn’t do anything to kill the lot of us. I doubt this C-Team squad of brainstems and career squirrels has the collective stones to invoke the 25th, no matter what happens. They’ll let him punch in the launch codes first.
Will SCOTUS finally draw a line and strike down Donald’s Tariffs? I really think they will. Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to impose his tariff scheme is transparently, flagrantly, egregiously unconstitutional, and if those f’ing morons on the Court let him get away with this, there’s nothing left of the Article 1 branch of government. They’ve got to slap him down. Now, since this is coming from the guy who told you the cretins would never grant Trump immunity, take that with a grain of salt, but the real questions are whether it matters, and what if it does. Trump may just go ahead and defy them, or find some other pretence to impose his tariffs, and then another, running out the clock for years to come. If, on the other hand, Trump accedes meekly to their authority, I’m not even sure I’m happy, since they may be saving his mid-term bacon in the process. The only thing turning Donald’s mouth-breathing base against him is the shitty economy, and the shitty economy is in large part a product of his boneheaded tariffs. If the economy improves, they may all get happy again, and then we’re back to watching Speaker Johnson arse around mismanaging his unruly caucus while Trump continues to govern without Congress.
Doesn’t the Epstein business change the political calculus? I don’t think so, not if the economy gets better. I know, I know, his enablers are certainly behaving as if there’s something explosive in the Epstein files, but I wonder what we’re really going to learn that isn’t already baked in. We already know he’s a pig and a sexual predator, and we already know of his fondness for young girls – we have him ogling his own teenaged daughter, for the love of Christ. We know he was all palsy-walsy with Epstein for years, and that he visited both the famous island as well as Epstein’s NY and Palm Beach homes on several occasions. We may learn particulars, but unless it’s something like video of Donald, naked and screaming, chasing a young girl around Epstein’s pool, I don’t see what we can find out that should make a material difference. I’ve given up on people coming to their senses based on Donald’s sick character alone. Seems to me we’ll need solid proof of criminal sexual conduct, and I’ll be most pleasantly surprised if any exists and gets disclosed.
Will Donald Start a pointless war of choice with Venezuela? Yup.
O.K., what sort of war? Ah, there’s the rub. In a way it’s already going on, and it might just be more of the same with added intensity, striking at boats, seizing shipping, bombing targets ashore, maybe special forces incursions. Even now, I can’t believe that Trump will try to land an army and launch a full-scale, according-to-Hoyle war without Congress, and surely to God Congress won’t vote to let him, right? – right? – but Trump wants regime change, everything he’s doing to Venezuela is already illegal so why stop now, and who the hell knows where it all ends? Beware mission creep as this useless mess evolves.
Will Trump finally side with Putin to the point that Ukraine knuckles under? NEVER. NEVER!!!! That is to say, logically yes, but my heart won’t let me go there. Even having seen Trump, a couple of days back, spout Putin’s talking points with Zelinsky standing right next to him (President Putin wants Ukraine to succeed, said Donald, can you believe that shit?), I’m telling myself that Trump has gone back and forth on Ukraine so often that his final betrayal is never a done deal, and anyway, the EU will step up to plug a lot of the gaps that America leaves them to fill. What Donald does next always depends on what he heard from the last person to sweet-talk him, so as Putin continues to romance him, we’ll do the same, and keep the orange dummy on board long enough for the inevitable Russian collapse to decide things our way (which inevitable collapse has, admittedly, been imminent for at least a year, but c’mon, it has to happen). That’s what I tell myself.
Will China invade Taiwan? They very well might. If US forces are preoccupied in Venezuela and, say, Iran, Xi might sense his golden opportunity and go for it. Most analysts think that the Chinese military isn’t yet ready, and think we still have a couple of years to go before Xi even thinks of pulling the trigger, but I’m worried. He might try a blockade, or he might go all in, before the year is out.
Will Trump intervene militarily if China takes the plunge on Taiwan? I doubt it. Even if US forces aren’t preoccupied in Venezuela and/or Iran, my gut says that Trump is indifferent to Taiwan, on account of what seems to be his adoption of what amounts to a 19th Century imperialist philosophy of spheres of influence. Russia can have Ukraine; China can have Taiwan; over here, Murrica can revive the Monroe Doctrine and take Venezuela, and maybe take back the Panama Canal too, while they’re at it. And Greenland. And oh yeah, Canada. On the other hand, who knows with this guy? The Pentagon Brass will be urging him to get into it, and maybe Xi will have looked at him sideways at some point and hurt his little feelings, thus provoking all out war.
What’s the counterfactual? So, Trump is losing his grip, MAGA is at war with itself, GOP congresspersons are quitting in droves, this Epstein stuff might just be slow to sink in and may be worse than we can imagine, and the Republicans could entirely lose their grip on Congress, both chambers, in the mid-terms, even as the rump of the party turns on the orange freak in an effort to gain back popular support for 2028. Meanwhile, doing something stupid like pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell could accelerate the collapse, and don’t forget that for most Americans, health insurance costs are about to balloon under the terms of the Big Beautiful Bill, which won’t do much to improve the public mood. The era of Trump and Trumpism may already be drawing to a close, and we just can’t see it yet. It could happen! It could!! I’m telling you it could. On the other hand…
Will the rise of A.I. make everything moot when the machines take over and kill all but the few of us they keep as pets? Look, I’m not gonna lie to you. For 2026 the odds of that are 50/50, and they get worse for us every year after that.
Anyway, happy New Year!!! Just don’t count on it.
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**There’s no such thing. Being driven to rage and despair by Trump is no symptom of a dysfunctional syndrome. It’s the only sane reaction.
the needlefish 