National Review
The Year in Review 2025, Part 1: The End Came Near the Beginning
By Jeffrey Blehar
December 23, 2025 6:30 AM
Greetings and welcome to this extended 68th holiday edition of the Carnival of Fools! We like to get festive around the Christmas season, at least in our mordantly resigned sort of way, so while the Carnival could have devoted this week’s space to its typical karmic trifles — the bitter end of Elise Stefanik’s political career, to name but one — instead we’re going to open that giant, beaten-up gift hidden underneath the far corner of the Christmas tree, the sloppily-wrapped one with an odor of decay wafting off of it. What’s in the box? Yes, it’s horror beyond belief: It’s the Year in Review 2025, Part One.
Christmas is a season of communal feeling after all, so let’s suffer together! A sunnier way of looking at things: Celebrate the fact that you’re still alive! You made it to the end of yet another lap through the relay race of life. (If you are reading this, quod erat demonstrandum.) As crazy as the year 2024 was for all political observers — you’re never going to see a presidential election like that again in your lifetime, unless we’re all hexed — 2025 has been no less of a cyclone, with Trump’s second presidency roaring through Washington, D.C., uprooting pieties, testing the outer boundaries of constitutional law, and buoyed by a seemingly single-minded purpose that later revealed itself as (or devolved into) hubris.
Yes, what to make of the situation at the end of 2025, a year that began with so much political promise and ends with the president pasting his name onto the Kennedy Center, in a vainly tinpot attempt to rub his continuing presence in the face of his advancing opponents? What to say of Donald Trump’s political career as a whole, really, which began with a vow to “drain the swamp” and has ended the first year of a second term with him renaming parts of that swamp after himself? (He also ends the year up a free Qatari airplane, a bright and shiny resort development deal, several million dollars in Chinese-sponsored cryptocurrency, and with approval ratings in the high 30s to low 40s.)
Well, it began optimistically enough, at least. There were those few good weeks. There have been some good changes. And the world didn’t end — always important. I like to keep my expectations low like that, primarily because if I dare to dream about what might have been in this second Trump term, my stomach feels small and I start to shudder uncontrollably. So for this first half of the Year in Review, from January to June, I’ll try to remember that initial flicker of optimism; compared to what comes in July through December, today I’m Mr. Brightside.
The First, Funnier Half of the Year
IN JANUARY . . . the year begins poorly when America awakes from its collective New Year’s Eve bender to discover that Joe Biden — who the country assumed had been permanently moved to a rest home in Rehoboth Beach somewhere back in September — is still president of the United States. His staff having already autopen-commuted the sentences of all the murderers they could find back in December, Biden is left to play out the final month of his misbegotten presidency like a window mannequin taken off display and stuffed into a side-alley dumpster. With nobody to pardon except a few more family members, Biden mumbles through an Oval Office farewell speech where he offers the country one last gypsy curse, blatantly tempting fate by invoking an image of the Statue of Liberty swaying in the wind, much like America was built to be flexible enough to withstand even a presidency as precedent-shattering as his. (Meanwhile, the cruel gods of irony impassively nod their heads in approval.)
In spiritually related news: After spending longer in hospice than our Iranian embassy hostages did in captivity, former President Jimmy Carter finally passes away peacefully in his bed. Proving once and for all that he is truly History’s Greatest Monster, he requests that John Lennon’s “Imagine” be sung at both of his funeral services. Donald Trump, however, is in no mood to imagine no possessions: Before taking office — and in an ominous sign of developments to come — Donald Trump floats the idea of annexing Greenland. (He will later tack on “all of Canada” as an ask.)
A new era dawns stormily as Trump takes office in the eye of a self-generated hurricane: Nobody is quite prepared for his first week in office after inauguration, which speeds by in a gust of so many executive orders and Oval Office press conferences that the media is left in a daze, wearing its clothes backwards and inside-out, its pockets picked. In a whirlwind of official pronunciamentos, Trump makes good on his promise to undo the noxious immigration and social policies of the Biden administration: DEI and transgenderism are uprooted from the federal government, the border is effectively sealed, and ICE deportations are resumed. Journalists are frankly awestruck by the vigor on display, in contrast to the last four years of presidential somnambulance: Is there anything this world-bestriding Ozymandias cannot do?
IN FEBRUARY . . . The incoming Trump administration focuses first and foremost on confirming his controversial cabinet picks, many of whose nominations threaten to go off the rails once it becomes public knowledge that they are Trump administration cabinet picks. Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth is revealed to have a lengthy history of drunkenness and sexual indiscretion. (He is confirmed in late January on a close vote.) Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is revealed to have a lengthy history of drunkenness, sexual indiscretion, and, in addition, lunacy. (He is confirmed in early February on a close vote.)
Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi is confirmed to lead the Department of Justice in place of discarded pervert Matt Gaetz, as conservatives sigh with relief: At least she can be trusted to be competent. Understanding that while the Senate might have stomached RFK, Jr. they would balk at a guy blazing on boutique barbiturates during his confirmation hearings, Donald Trump instead creates the Department of Government Efficiency out of thin air for his benefactor/co-conspirator Elon Musk, and grants him a non-confirmable position as the administration’s avatar of budget cutting. (Musk promptly emails the entire federal government, asking for its resignation. It doesn’t work.)
Professional Democrats respond to events with their strongest possible play: electing spindle-armed anti-gun activist wunderwhelp David Hogg to party leadership. He rewards their vote of confidence by immediately beginning to fundraise against aged Democratic incumbents, and has his election annulled later in June on the technicality that he was, unbeknownst to voters, actually a white male.
The first full month of the Trump administration ends with the most spectacular display of incompetence seen from an attorney general since the days of Janet Reno, as Pam Bondi “fulfills” her promised rollout of the Epstein Files — she claims to have a client list sitting on her desk, waiting to be unveiled — by staging a White House “influencer event” to release a stack of empty office binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase I” to a gathering of sad-faced men sporting cowboy hats and/or badly-cropped haircuts.
IN MARCH . . . the circus continues apace with Donald Trump occupying every spotlight, sidelight, and lowlight in the media, as ringleader of his own purpose-built PR carnival. He puts the world on notice that NATO is deader than disco, as he tag-teams with Vice-President Vance to dress down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. (Zelensky is careful to wear a suit the next time he visits.) When Trump cabinet appointees Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz are revealed to be accidentally sharing war plans with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg (the administration’s inveterate political enemy) on Signal, Trump responds first with denials and then by reassigning Waltz to the United Nations ahead of a rudely jettisoned Elise Stefanik.
In other news of note, sassy phony Jasmine Crockett formally declares her candidacy for “Biggest Democratic Trash-Hound” by labeling Texas Governor Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels,” in relation to his paraplegia. Abbott likely remembers this when the time comes later in the year to redraw his state’s congressional map.
IN APRIL . . . Donald Trump declares “Liberation Day” on April 2, narrowly avoiding April Fool’s Day but invoking the laws of cartoon physics nonetheless, and carrying America over a cliff with Wile E. Coyotenomics, implementing his long-dreamed-of tariff regime. Gathering nearly all the skeins of foreign trade into his hands personally, in an unprecedented arrogation of American taxing power to the executive branch, he immediately slaps the entire world with blanket tariffs in pursuit of an economic fantasy formed during his youth. Over the next two months, the markets are rocked with chaos, oscillating up and down at rumors of deals, as Trump forces individual companies and countries to make personal deals with him. One way or another, this is the turning point in the second Trump administration, as he pot-commits the bulk of his political capital — and the Republican Party’s political fortune — to his belief in mercantile levels of taxation and permanently higher prices.
Elon Musk — having flailed ineffectually at cost-cutting with DOGE for the last few months in a haze of bold tweets and self-pity — sees the writing on the wall and takes the moment of Liberation Day to quietly resign his position, an act of symbolism that seemingly nobody notices at the time. Later, as the tariff regime sends the markets into seizures, he will go to war first with economic adviser Peter Navarro and then the administration itself, until Trump relents and re-ups his ketamine prescription.
In lighter news, a bum copulates with a freshly-dead corpse on a New York subway train and remains on the lam for over 72 hours, which as it turns out is more time than Andrew Cuomo spends in the city campaigning for mayor during the entire month. (Conservatives confidently assume that things can get no worse in the Big Apple.) Elizabeth Warren’s soul briefly leaves her body live on-camera when asked during a podcast about her history of vouching for Joe Biden’s mental competence. The month finally ends on an undeniably bright note, as scientists in the U.K. announce their intent to combat climate change by blotting out the sun. But all in all, the die is cast in April, which – in a stroke of poetic appropriateness – was the cruelest and most decisive month for the Trump administration’s future.
IN MAY . . . the world gains its first American pope, Cardinal Robert Prevost (now Leo XIV) of Chicago, and right in the nick of time — the Windy City has never been more in need of divine intervention than after two full years of Brandon Johnson as mayor. (Practical results begin to surface as soon as November, when the Chicago Bears are elevated by mysteriously improbable and clearly holy forces to #1 in the NFC North.)
Looking for more nails to strike with his lucky tariff hammer, President Trump proposes to address the death of Hollywood the only way he knows how: by tariffing the hell out of it. Coming in duty-free, however, is a brand new “Air Force One,” gifted to Trump by the postage-stamp-sized Middle Eastern oil oligarchy of Qatar, which also coincidentally has begun sponsoring resort deals with his son. James Comey begs the president to find a pretext to indict him by engaging in decorative seashell photography. Former president Joe Biden is diagnosed with cancer, surprising Americans who believed him to be long dead. And in bleakly portentous news, two Israeli embassy employees are gunned down in cold blood by a college activist, as the progressive ecosystem continues to breed killers. By the end of the month, I survey the chaos engulfing the Left and confidently announce that for once, the Dems really are in disarray.
IN JUNE . . . summer gets off to a yawn as Connecticut’s Chris Murphy — a senator so boring that he occasionally strolls the state on foot to remind voters that he is not Chris Dodd — sets up a Super PAC to signal a forthcoming run for president, and former Biden spokesmuppet Karine Jean-Pierre announces the least-awaited political memoir of 2025. Spotting an opening, former teenage ecological scold Greta Thunberg shouts “arr, matey!” from the mizzenmast and begins an instantly forgettable career as a celebrity sailor, joining a flotilla for Gaza as its avatar of autist activist virtue.
Israel responds to Thunberg’s experiment in cosplay piracy by beginning a devastating air and missile campaign against the Iranian regime’s nuclear facilities. In the face of dire warnings from both Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, Trump commits the U.S. to finishing the strikes begun by Israel, and drops a series of bunker-busters on the Fordow nuclear facility, reducing it to a pile of smoldering rubble. (World War III fails to start, despite which absolutely nobody misses a rhetorical step.) The month wraps — along with the world, if you’re a certain kind of urban conservative — with the utterly repulsive tush-grabbing, granny-killing former governor Andrew Cuomo unexpectedly losing his New York City Democratic mayoral primary to a lab-grown third worldist named Zohran Mamdani, who may be an anti-Israeli socialist but at least remembered to smile for the cameras once or twice during the campaign.
And that was the fun half of the year.
Until next week.
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