Episode 21C - End of 2025 Recap Special

This end-of-year episode examines key US news events from the year 2025 and tries to put them into historical context. Issues discussed include: tariffs & their economic impact, mass deportations by ICE, the DOGE budget cuts, the "MAHA" movement, the Trump Administration's foreign policy, the aggressive use of executive power (including the pardoning of the J6ers), the Fall 2025 government shutdown, political violence (including the killing of Charlie Kirk), the partisan gerrymandering wars, and the Epstein files. We conclude by noting that the year 2025 has been largely a negative one for American society, but there are still a few reasons to keep hope alive.

Transcript

“From Boomers to Millennials,” a modern US history podcast, provides a fresh look at 20th Century America and, sometimes, 21st Century America. Welcome to Episode 21C, the “End of 2025 Special.” The year is almost over, & it’s time to bring back our new tradition of reflecting on current events in light of their historical context. Our current news cycle moves so fast that one easily finds oneself overwhelmed and disoriented by what is going on in the world. That’s why I find that it is very helpful to reflect on what has happened in recent months and where we are now, and try to put it all into perspective.

In last year’s recap of 2024, we concluded by discussing the possible policy agenda of the 47th presidency in United States history. I’m going to shamelessly quote myself here; here’s what I wrote in December of last year: (quote) “[Donald] Trump openly campaigned in favor of the mass deportation of immigrants, and stated he would raise tariffs on imported goods. If fully executed, these policies would have major disruptive effects, not only for foreign residents, but also upon the entire US economy. Yet it remains to be seen whether these plans will be successfully implemented. Under the Constitution, the nation’s legislative bodies & courts have the power to shape & to limit the president’s plans. However, it remains to be seen if they will choose to wield that power, because both the Supreme Court and the US Congress are currently controlled by conservatives sympathetic to much of Trump’s agenda” (close quote).

I’ve got to say that was a fairly prescient analysis. The Republican controlled Congress has done very little to reign in President Trump’s efforts toward mass deportation and tariffs, and the Supreme Court has largely had his back, sometimes overruling lower courts that had blocked some of his actions. The economic impact of deporting millions of people had the potential to create pushback within the Republican Party’s donor class, yet, while some farmers are complaining about labor shortages, for the most part, the GOP has remained on board with mass deportations. Trump has gone big on this policy, engaging in a huge expansion of the agency know as Immigration & Customs Enforcement (or ICE), and he has let one of his most ruthless and combative lieutenants, Stephen Miller, take charge of the effort. Thousands of people have been deported back to their home countries, and others have been sent to third countries like El Salvador. Many have been denied the usual due process afforded to non-residents in removal proceedings. Even some Americans who support stricter enforcement of immigration laws have found scenes of masked ICE agents grabbing grandmothers off the street and whisking them away to be rather disturbing.

A lot of 2024 Trump voters who are Hispanics or immigrants themselves have written on social media, “this is not what I voted for. I thought he was only going to deport the criminals.” Perhaps they were hearing what they wanted to hear during the presidential campaign, or they took Trump’s characterization of all the immigrants he was going to deport as a bunch of dangerous criminals to mean he was just going to deport dangerous criminals. But if you look up the 2024 Republican National Convention, you can see photos of the delegates holding up signs saying “Mass Deportations Now!” Those signs didn’t say “Narrowly Tailored Deportations of Immigrant Criminals Now!” Trump’s actions in this area have been consistent with things he said on the campaign trail.

During 2023 and 2024, many Americans were concerned about a large influx of undocumented immigrants, especially those claiming refugee status when fleeing troubled countries like Venezuela. This occurred during the second half of the Biden Administration, after Covid era border restrictions were relaxed. Anxieties about mass immigration are not new to American history. In the 1840s and 1850s, a secretive society nicknamed the “know nothings” mobilized into a serious political force of nativist backlash against the large waves of Irish and German immigrants arriving at that time. The attitudes typical of this group were memorably captured by Daniel Day Lewis’s character “Bill the Butcher” in Martin Scorsese’s Civil War era film “Gangs of New York.” Later, in the 1920s, the US Congress put strict quotas on immigration at the same time that another secret society, the Ku Klux Klan, was growing in opposition to Catholic and Jewish immigrant groups. The new quotas from the US government during the Twenties explicitly favored immigrants from Northwestern Europe by putting far more severe limitations on those from Southern and Eastern Europe. These historical waves of nativist sentiment did eventually subside, but generally only after the rate of immigration slowed. It remains to be seen if the public will turn against the Trump Administration’s current policies. Regardless of public opinion, an increasingly powerful ICE organization fully backed by the president shows no signs of slowing down, and it seems likely that minority communities will have to live with the fear of heavy-handed raids by masked agents for at least another 3 years.

President Trump also has followed through on his campaign promise to impose a new protectionist system of tariffs against foreign countries, but the picture of this policy’s implementation is more complicated & incomplete. Historically, tariffs were used in 19th Century America to protect the nation’s budding manufacturing sector from being undercut by cheaper goods from Great Britain. The British had been the first nation in the world to industrialize, and their factories had become very efficient at churning out affordable products. But the United States did not want to become overly dependent upon foreign goods, so it imposed tariffs that inflated the prices of foreign-made good for consumers, making customers more likely to buy products made in the USA. Tariffs also served as a source of government revenue in an era before the imposition of the federal income tax.

Trump seems to love the concept of tariffs, or at least his idea of tariffs. In a campaign speech, he called “tariff” (quote) the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.” But there is evidence that he does not really understand how they work. He has said that foreigners would pay the tariffs rather than American consumers, and he seems to have convinced many of his supporters of the same idea. The president likes the concept of the world’s most powerful nation bullying foreign countries into paying a toll to access the US market. But the USA has no more authority to impose tariffs on non-citizens than it does to make foreigners pay taxes to the United States. Tariffs are paid by American consumers on imported goods, and the companies that have to pay tariffs often pass along the cost to buyers of their products through price increases. The chaotic tariff regime that Trump has imposed has caused pain for business owners and consumers, and it has contributed to rising prices across the board, which may be the president’s biggest current political problem.

There is a major asterisk that needs to be added to any claim that President Trump has imposed the exact tariffs that he touted on the campaign trail. He has repeatedly backed down and delayed implementation of a most significant set of tariffs, namely those imposed on the USA’s biggest trading partner & source of imported goods, the People’s Republic of China. After initial stock market panic over the potential impact of these tariffs, Wall Street investors eventually relaxed & coined the phrase “TACO,” meaning “Trump Always Chickens Out” from imposing the most economically consequential tariffs. There is evidence that corporations initially ate part of the tariff costs or avoided their impact by amassing a backstock of inventory before they were imposed. But this spring, with reports of half-empty container ships arriving at the Port of Long Beach due to tariffs against China, apparently advisors got through to Trump and assured him that empty American store shelves would not be good for him politically, and he backed down on those tariffs. While other foreign leaders have kowtowed before the president to try to get him to remove or reduce tariffs, Trump has been utterly unable to intimidate Xi Jinping of China. It is ironic that the country most targeted by MAGA’s pro-tariff rhetoric has gotten off relatively easy thus far.

It has already faded in people’s memories, but it’s important to remember that the second Trump administration got off to an utterly bizarre start. For a few weeks, it looked like the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, was acting as a sort of co-president. Trump gave Musk & his minions full access to the government as they engaged in a cost-cutting initiative known as the Dept. Of Government Efficiency of “DOGE.” Those efforts resulted in mass firings of federal workers, & the cutting of programs that Musk deemed inefficient or unimportant, such as the US Agency for Intl. Development (or USAID). Back in Ep. 18, we discussed a program called Food for Peace administered by future Senator George McGovern, which provided free grain to impoverished countries back in the 1960s. Food for Peace was part of USAID, & that agency has continued to provide humanitarian relief around the world in recent decades. One recent estimate indicates that Musk’s defunding of USAID emergency assistance has resulted in almost 600,000 preventable deaths of people around the world.

In addition to DOGE, another important acronym for 2025 American politics has been “MAHA” or “Make America Healthy Again.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, gyms were closed and many people in the fitness & wellness industries found themselves out of business. Many health enthusiasts who viewed wellness as a matter of personal responsibility began to question why the economy should be closed down to protect an especially vulnerable minority of people who were either very old folks or (quote) “unhealthy” people with preexisting conditions. This MAHA movement rallied around a skepticism of Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, and vaccines, and it coalesced around the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Junior. By the end of 2024, Trump and RFK Junior became allies, and MAHA became part of MAGA. Initially, some progressives expressed hope that they could find common ground with MAHA around ideas like regulating the chemicals allowed in American food products. However, food safety has not been a major priority of cabinet secretary Bobby Junior. Instead, we have seen the federal government defund vaccine research. There has also been a diminution of scientific expertise within agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, as Trump Administration officials have sometimes given credence to pseudoscience.

Speaking of government officials ignoring hard science, one of the most extreme views held by Donald Trump is that human-caused climate change is a (quote-unquote) “hoax.” He has pulled the plug on many green energy projects that had been funded by Congress during the Biden Administration, and he seems to be doubling down on using fossil fuels as the main source of American energy. While other countries around the world are making great strides toward sustainability and green energy, the USA now stands as an outlier that is abandoning the fight against climate change.

Pres. Trump’s foreign policy has been erratic. The administration began with surprising announcements that the US was interested in annexing Greenland, & even parts of Canada. In recent months, we have seen the president openly lobby for the Nobel Peace Prize, while simultaneously changing the name of Defense Department to the Dept. of War. He put a former Fox News TV host named Pete Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon. Hegseth is a military veteran, but he is also widely reported to be an alcoholic, & he was once accused of being an abuser of women by his own mother. Hegseth is also a known Christian nationalist with an anti-Muslim agenda. Yet the Republican-controlled US Senate, which has been doggedly loyal to Pres. Trump, found it appropriate to put this man in charge of the world’s most powerful military.

The Trump Administration has generally cut back financial support to Ukraine and has leaned toward the Russian perspective regarding the war in Eastern Europe. He confronted Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House and continues to pressure Ukraine to make major concessions in exchange for peace, much to the chagrin of NATO allies in Europe who fear this path would only embolden Vladimir Putin to intimidate and bully more of Russia’s neighbors. Trump did manage to pressure Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting a brief ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza, in exchange for release of the remaining hostages there. This is something President Biden failed to accomplish during his time in office. Still, Trump also let Netanyahu pressure him into bombing Iran, and he has suggested that many Palestinians should leave the Gaza Strip, a region he seems to view as a real estate opportunity. His latest military gambit is trying to intimidate Venezuela by blowing up boats off its coast, based on usually unsubstantiated claims that the people on board are drug traffickers. So far, it seems Trump’s general plan is to try to intimidate nations he views as enemies, such as Iran and Venezuela, while stopping short of an actual war.

The most troubling aspect of the new administration probably involves the abuse of executive power. President Trump has used his pardon power very aggressively. He pardoned everyone convicted for participating in the January 6th insurrection, including the most violent participants in the attack on the US Capitol. At least a dozen of the J6 participants have since been rearrested for other crimes. This administration has also violated the principle of separation of powers at times, sometimes refusing to spend money as appropriated by Congress, and it has gone right up to the line of disobeying court orders. 

Some speculate that the Supreme Court of the United States has largely gone along with Trump in part because they know if they act too aggressively against him, he could just start ignoring their decisions, effectively putting an end the court’s immense power in recent decades. During the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson indicated he would not enforce a Supreme Court decision upholding the rights of Native Americans. There is debate among historians as to whether the court actually obligated the executive to take a specific action to enforce its decision in that case, but the point remembered by students of history is that a powerful and decisive president such as Jackson can refuse to act on a court’s decisions without any real consequences, particularly if Congress does not move to check his power. During 2025, the Republican controlled Congress (as I said before) has very rarely broken ranks with Trump. However, the president is clearly concerned about what might happen if control of Congress changes, because he has encouraged “Red states” to gerrymander their maps in order to prevent the GOP from losing control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms.

In my opinion, the first few months of the second Trump Administration did not see much in the way of effective resistance to the new regime. Because the president won the popular vote in addition to the electoral college, which he had not done in his 2016 victory, some viewed Trump as having newfound popular legitimacy & a clear mandate to govern. Congressional Democrats lacked control of either house within the federal legislative branch, and their leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, seemed to not have much of a plan for stopping Trump, other than hoping that he eventually became more unpopular. Many protests have been held, but so far they have not had that much of a disruptive impact on the existing administration. 

There have also been less peaceful acts of opposition, such as the vandalism of Tesla vehicles during Elon Musk’s time rampaging through the government as the head of DOGE. The most prominent incident of political violence during 2025 was the assassination of 31-year-old conservative commentator Charlie Kirk at a college campus near Provo, Utah in September. The killer was a 22-year-old male from Southern Utah who appears to have been a lone wolf motivated by opposition to Kirk’s anti-LGBT rhetoric. The shocking murder of Kirk only appeared to play into the hands of the Trump Administration, which tried to collectively blame the killing on their political opponents. Individuals who made insensitive comments about the shooting were sometimes fired from their jobs in its aftermath. It is worth remembering that Kirk’s death was not the only politically motivated murder during 2025; in June, two Democratic state legislators in Minnesota were shot by a 57-year-old anti-abortion extremist who was falsely posing as a police officer. One of the targets, State Representative Melissa Hortman, died along with her husband as a result of that attack.

Lately, peaceful political opposition to the Trump Administration has gained some momentum. Many “blue states” have organized to counteract Republican efforts at gerrymandering in red states. There were a limited number of elections across the country in November 2025, but the Democrats did quite well in those that did take place. At the same time, the Senate Democrats finally used their limited leverage to prevent the passage of a budget significantly reducing health care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Because the Democrats refused to vote for this budget at the end of September 2025, the US federal government shut down for 43 days, effectively limiting access to benefits and services for millions of citizens, before a few Democratic Senators crossed party lines to put an end to the gridlock. Some polls indicated that many Americans were blaming Trump and the Republicans, who had refused to negotiate with Democrats on the budget, for the costly government shutdown. So, the tide of public opinion may be turning against President Trump, especially after he has failed to live up to his promises to lower prices and improve the economy. Still, the country remains very divided. Many conservatives have been disappointed in some aspects of the current Trump Administration, but most are still adamantly opposed to voting for anyone affiliated with the Democratic Party.

In recent weeks, there has been substantial media coverage of the attempts to get the federal government to release the files related to the criminal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious billionaire and sex trafficker of underage girls. Epstein died in prison during August 2019; his death was ruled a suicide, but the circumstances surrounding it have raised suspicions for many. Epstein was connected to many rich and powerful individuals, and he may have had incriminating evidence that could be used against some of these powerful elites. Populist conservative conspiracy theorists had long held that revelation of the Epstein files would bring down Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities, in a kind of an overlap with QAnon. However, as more information came out about President Trump’s own history of friendly relations with Epstein, Congressional Democrats led the efforts to get the administration to release the Epstein files. The Trump Administration dragged its feet for weeks, but has now agreed to release many of the files. Many Democrats hope there will be a smoking gun that strongly incriminates President Trump, but so far, the Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to have removed or redacted anything that implicates the president. Still, there is hope that the release of more of the files may help expose the crimes of other powerful men, providing an accountability that has been all too rare in an age when disparities in access to the legal system have allowed many wealthy elites to engage in unethical or illegal actions without facing consequences.

The year is at its end, and I’m sorry to say that my own overall opinion on the future implications of the developments in the United States during 2025 is not an optimistic one. It appears that the USA is heading in the direction of becoming a poorer, sicker, more polluted, more violent, and more divided country. Democratic norms and individual rights appear to be under attack. American universities, media companies, and law firms have sometimes allowed themselves to be intimidated into compliance with the new administration. The sanctity and fairness of future elections has been cast into serious question, with Trump openly musing about running for a third term, despite the existence of the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, which explicitly prohibits a president from serving more than two elected terms. Meanwhile, rival powers like China continue to exploit American political division and dysfunction by expanding their influence on the world stage.

Despite all this, I am not a total ‘doomer.’ To paraphrase a famous quote, I would advise my listeners to maintain an optimism of the spirit, even when the facts lead you toward pessimism. Many people have felt the need this year to take a break from the news, and I support doing that sometimes for the sake of your mental health – I know I have to at times. But when you feel ready to re-engage with current events, I recommend that you try to get involved in local organizations you find meaningful, and find ways to resist if you see unjust actions taking place in your community. Thinking about things in a global and historical context helps to put things into perspective, at least for me. And even if it takes years to turn things around, a better world is still possible. We may be in what many of us regard as a dark chapter, but the end of the American story remains unwritten, and we all have a chance to influence its outcome in some small way. I wish all of my listeners, both inside and outside of the United States, a very happy holidays and a wonderful new year. See you in 2026 for more fascinating historical content. Until then, thank you for listening.