National Review
So Long and Good Riddance to a Year of Tragedy, Presidential Antics, and Mamdani-Mania
By Jeffrey Blehar
December 30, 2025 6:30 AM
Greetings and welcome to this final edition of the Carnival of Fools . . . for 2025, that is. No, we’re not folding up our circus tent just yet, and have no plans to cancel this weekly get-together — in fact, we’ve got a good three more years of madness in store, absent death or dismemberment. But I’ve never been happier to announce that we’re closing out the year 2025 with both a bang and a whimper: After having lived through all of this once and written about it now at least twice, I’m even more eager to wipe the dirt from my hands as I walk from the grave of 2025 than I was back in 2024.
There is thus little need for introduction or explanation. (Those who missed out on the equally cheerful Part 1 of the Year in Review can refresh their memories of the first half of the year here.) Whatever comedy arises from churning the soil of 2025’s second half will have to do so organically, because I didn’t think there was much to joke about when it came to the tragedies and broken dreams of July through December. But if you happen to have a taste for bitter irony? Then brother, you came to the right buffet; pull out your knife and fork and prepare to carve into an all-you-can-eat portion of it.
The Year in Review, Pt. 2: America Spits the Bit
IN JULY . . . The president of the United States settles a $10 billion nuisance lawsuit against CBS News; his claim was “60 Minutes edits its interviews and doesn’t like me,” which was probably not going to hold up in court as a cause of action, but was absolutely going to hold up the corporate merger of CBS’s parent company Paramount so long as Trump was president. Elsewhere on the legal front, judicial resistance to Trump hits the point of absurdity as progressive judges, tired of merely temporarily staying his various executive orders, begin to declare even his duly-passed legislation null and void, at least the parts that seek to defund Planned Parenthood.
Zohran Mamdani, the new and splendidly diverse Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, is revealed to have lied about his race on his college applications — apparently, rich and ethnically Indian upper-class children get a bad shake with admissions committees, so he marked himself down as “African-American,” despite being neither. (Later, he became an American citizen; he remains non-black to this very day.) In other racialist news, Elon Musk, still smarting from the DOGE experience, proudly rolls out his new AI creation “Grok” to Twitter/X, a handy chatbot designed to give only “truthful” answers, without woke fear or favor. It takes exactly six hours for online trolls to feed it enough carefully-tailored prompts to turn it into MechaHitler, at which point it is hastily shut down for retooling, like a failed Robocop prototype.
Stephen Colbert’s late-night show on CBS is canceled for no longer being either funny or watched, which fairly describes the totality of the late-night talk show format in its dying era. Donald Trump assists his old showbiz friend by publicly taking credit for the cancellation, briefly providing Colbert with the highest ratings of his career. Once America remembers that he is no longer funny, the national conversation then turns to the prodigious natural talents of Hollywood “it” girl and American Eagle jeans model Sydney Sweeney, and whether these threaten America with their implied endorsement of white supremacy. (She ends December on a high note by displaying said talents in Paul Feig’s The Housemaid, which America can skip seeing in the theater, given that all of its most “salient points” have already been revealed on YouTube.)
Kamala Harris declares she will not trouble herself with a California gubernatorial race that absolutely nobody wanted to see her run, then inaugurates an abortive career as a novelist in the horror-fantasy genre with her campaign memoir, 107 Days — it at least feels like a less destructive use of her decidedly limited talents. And, in a seemingly irrelevant footnote, State Senator Omar Fateh defeats incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey for the Democratic endorsement as mayor of Minneapolis during its summer convention — momentarily capturing some of that insurgent “Mamdani magic” — but the endorsement is later withdrawn once it is shown that Fateh, political avatar of the city’s tight-knit Somali community, won the convention vote via massive and coordinated fraud.
IN AUGUST . . . President Trump, tired of seeing unpleasant numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fires its commissioner for reporting statistics that make him look like a chump. (The numbers perk up a bit after that.) Tired also of seeing unpleasant numbers from his internal pollsters, Trump leans on Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP legislature to redraw their congressional map, to lock in what he believes to be permanent gains among the state’s Latino residents ahead of a midterm pasting that only small children and MAGA true believers cannot see has been building since the moment he took complete political ownership over the economy with his April tariff regime. Texas Democratic legislators respond to the impending redistricting vote by fleeing the state to a safer place, and are therefore horrified to find themselves in Chicago.
What follows is a nearly apocalyptic Gerrymänderrung. Part-time California governor and full-time presidential campaigner Gavin Newsom immediately floats a plan to jettison his state’s nonpartisan redistricting committee and redraw his state to balance out Texas’s anticipated gains. Trump’s attempt to pressure other states runs into speed bumps in both Utah (where Mormon Republicans without “Based” in their screen names tend to view Trumpism skeptically) and Indiana (where clearer minds can anticipate future election cycles).
After an unprovoked attack on DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in the streets of Washington, D.C. by area youths, legions of like-minded commentators make the same obvious joke: “DOGE still exists?” Donald Trump, however, does not take the beating of his Big Balls lightly, ordering the National Guard into D.C. to patrol the streets and subways. Despite wails from the Left, the crime rate immediately drops, the streets become safer, and Trump grows fond of the idea of having a personal police force on call to deploy to blue cities — for multiple overlapping reasons. (He promptly floats the idea of sending the National Guard to Chicago — to walk the Magnificent Mile.)
August ends with a senseless attack on a Minneapolis Catholic school by a shooter motivated by an inscrutable and perhaps incomprehensible fusion of madness, self-loathing, and transgender ideology. May those children rest in peace; there are no jokes to make in the aftermath. I instead mark the occasion by warning that something wicked this way comes — and it will arrive sooner than we think.
IN SEPTEMBER . . . the author of the Carnival of Fools miraculously turns 45 with no major arrests on his record. That’s about it for the good news. The rest of the month is cursed: My miserable prophecy is immediately proven right with the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. The moment itself is traumatic — captured on video, seen by millions on Twitter, and with the killer unknown for days. Speculation (and blame-throwing) about his identity and motivation blooms until the killer is captured and revealed to be a young man involved with a transgender lover — after which point it promptly mushrooms into insanity.
The month only lurches ever more hopelessly onward from there. Democrats threaten to shut down the federal government and nobody cares, because nobody is paying attention to anything that happens in Congress anymore. Another activist takes up a rifle and attacks ICE vehicles in Dallas, managing to kill only several detainees and then (blessedly) himself. Marjorie Taylor Greene declares her independence from MAGA Republicanism, scoring the first of what will become two glowing New York Times profiles before being stuffed into a cannon and shot to the moon by President Trump a month and a half later. Meanwhile, the Right indulges in its urge to purge, hunting the internet and social media for anyone insufficiently reverent toward Charlie Kirk after his death. But nobody gets hit quite as hard as the useless Jimmy Kimmel, who suggests it was “Groypers” — fans of the heretofore obscure racist Nick Fuentes — who really shot him.
IN OCTOBER . . . the Groypers, who did not shoot Charlie Kirk, nevertheless join in with Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and a host of low-level internet-borne parasites to gleefully cannibalize his legacy. This story — the revelation of hard-right “true believer” racists and antisemites in the Trump administration and other GOP offices — plays out continuously throughout the month and into the present moment, but spins out of control into an ongoing soap opera so quickly that I resolve not to write about any of these people until their careers have all been ground into fine particulate dust.
That makes October something of a respite. (It also helps that the federal government is shut down during the entire month, in the longest such kerfuffle in U.S. history. Aim for longer next time.) The month gets off to a fantastic start with the tale of “Dr.” Ian Roberts, Des Moines school superintendent, who somehow connived his way into work as a senior-level educational administrator despite being an illegal alien. California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter self-destructs in an interview only slightly less scalding than a boiling pot of mashed potatoes. Donald Trump and his team of negotiators help secure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza — an undeniable victory for the forces of decency. (Trump celebrates by demolishing the East Wing of the White House for a Big Beautiful Ballroom.)
In news of the amusingly tribal, Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is revealed to be the proud owner of a large Nazi tattoo; his primary candidacy only gains in strength as progressives and woke youth rally to him after the revelations. As befits its reputation as a retirement community, approximately 45 former Republican officeholders from around the country filed for Florida Congressman Byron Donalds’s soon-to-be open seat. And, reminding us all that we live in a two-tiered system of justice, Brett Kavanaugh’s would-be assassin faces criminal sentencing after a guilty plea and gets time off for trans behavior.
IN NOVEMBER . . . the party abruptly ends, as the bill for a year of Trump’s high-handed behavior, executive overreach, and economic blundering comes due, and the worst and most devastatingly predictable outcome finally happens: The Los Angeles Dodgers repeat as World Series champions. Also, the wheels fall off the Republicans’ low-rider as the November elections roll through; Democrats score a clean blue sweep in every single competitive race on election day, taking not only the Virginia and New Jersey governorships in blowouts, but nearly every downballot race as well. It’s not the outcome per se that breaks the spell, it’s the margins: Suddenly, everybody in Washington begins to imagine the world soon to come — the world where Trump is a lame duck.
While the political class immediately senses Trump’s mortality, he is determined to prove theirs: he unendorses Marjorie Taylor Greene in the aftermath of the drubbing and quickly drives her from Congress altogether. Democrats reopen the government, having accomplished their mission: getting enough northern Virginians angry enough to vote the week before. (Chuck Schumer, having played a weak hand surprisingly well, is naturally greeted with cries of betrayal and calls for resignation from progressives.)
And in an “inside baseball” story from the media world, former Myspace idol and disgraced journalist Olivia Nuzzi — whose last name, she is at pains to stipulate, does not rhyme with “slutsy” — unveils her brand new job with Vanity Fair and its accompanying memoir, a lavishly told tale of her whirlwind 2024 e-romance with the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Her mewlingly cuckolded ex-fiancé objects to this, and Washington media thrills to the resulting fireworks — Mark Sanford, you absolute hound, you — until forced to pay to read further installments.
Trump concludes the month with a plea for relevance to a nation in danger of forgetting for a moment he is president, issuing several Oval Office statements over the Thanksgiving holiday, one calling Tim Walz a “retard” and accusing Ilhan Omar of marrying her brother for immigration purposes, and another attempting to repeal the entire Joe Biden presidency via executive order.
IN DECEMBER . . . seeing that this did not work, the president then engages with Phase II of his plan to ensure that Washington, D.C., will never forget him: by vandalizing it as much as possible with his name and stench. Beloved filmmaker Rob Reiner is murdered alongside his wife by their drug addicted son — and Trump announces that he was really killed by his own Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump posts a series of portraits in the White House — a “Presidential Walk of Fame” — and then inserts ridiculously juvenile engraved plaques of his own half-written opinions about each of them underneath. (“Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History” is how the one about his predecessor, whose picture he has replaced with an autopen machine, opens.)
In other news, it turns out that Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh isn’t the only Somalian fraudster living in the Twin Cities, not by a long shot. Trump escalates his rhetoric against Venezuela as he enforces a partial blockade against the country; he then concludes a week’s worth of saber-rattling with a national address pivoting right back to form: announcing that he still exists, and that Americans should be grateful to have him. He then concludes the month by adding his name to the Kennedy Center, ensuring its temporary demise as a national concert venue.
Some other things happened, but nothing worth mentioning. What matters the most about this year is that we’re finally seeing the back of it. To hell with 2025, a year somehow even more disappointing than 2024, which at least ended with a sense of hope. And yet paradoxically, at the end of 2025 hope is all we have left — hope for a 2026 that improves upon this misbegotten mess.
Until next week.
