It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. It was an era where the most inept, execrable wash out of a president in the history of America should have simply gone home. If he didn’t want to do a presidential library, as was the custom, he could have done many other things. But there were still plenty of angry MAGAs who believed his conspiracy theory of a “stollen” election and he maximized their anger and his greed and fleeced them something fierce right after the 2020 election. And kept on fleecing them.
As you painfully recall, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for a third run and a second term a full two years ahead of the 2024 election. So between the two years of post-defeat grift and two years of campaign, the airwaves were saturated with Trump. Contrast this with an effective administration by Joe Biden, an administration that would have been lauded, or at the very least given its due, in a world that wasn’t smothered in right-wing media.
And you know the rest. We all age but we age differently and we don’t know when we’re going to age — or how. I have, in my life, seen perfectly healthy people suddenly be struck with Alzheimer’s or have a heart attack or stroke out of the blue. Sometimes fatal ones. These things are commonplace when we get to a certain stage of our journey. Joe Biden aged in office as have all presidents before him. But unfortunately, he aged out of the job, while still in it. And he didn’t recognize it in time. And that set up the scenario for Kamala Harris going onstage to play the lead a mere 90 days before showtime. While her efforts were praiseworthy they didn’t generate the result that was needed. And now we are here.
Mary Trump has come forth this second day of the brand new year. Here are her thoughts:
For personal or political reasons—or a combination of the two—at the end of every year since 2015, I’ve thought, “Next year couldn’t possibly be worse.” And surprisingly, sometimes shockingly, every new year was worse.
Now, I think we can say with some degree of certainty, that 2025 will be worse than its predecessor. This is rather shocking, considering what we lived through in 2024. But the the fact that an adjudicated rapist, a convicted felon, an inciter of insurrections, and a thief of highly classified documents (a very small selection from a very long list of his disqualifications) is going to be president of the United States really is worse than the fact that he was elected—or that he was even eligible to run in the first place.
If the first two days of 2025 were any indiction, I think it’s a safe bet that 2025 has a lot of bad in store for us. Three hours into the new year, a domestic terrorist—a veteran of the U.S. military, born in Texas—drove his pick-up truck into a crowd in New Orleans, killing fourteen. A few hours later in Las Vegas, an active duty officer with U.S. Army Special Operations, also born in the United States, parked a Tesla Cybertruck outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and shot himself in the head. Shortly after, the truck, which had been rigged in advance exploded. Seven people sustained minor injuries.
According to the FBI, there is no connection between the two incidents. The perpetrator in New Orleans appears to have been a pro-ISIS sympathizer, while the perpetrator in Las Vegas, according to family members, “Loved Donald Trump.”
And then, in the early hours of January 2nd, ten people were wounded in a shooting at a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens—twenty blocks from where I grew up—at an event to celebrate the life of a child who died because of gun violence, because America.
Whether this is a harbinger of things to come or just the way it is in America, we don’t yet know. But as I said in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, we do have certainty about what a significant plurality of American voters chose for this country. We have certainty about what the fight really is. And it is so much better to know what we’re up against; it’s so much better to shed the false hope that so often constrains us from making the right decisions and from making real progress.
PREDICTIONS
Here are a couple of things I think need to happen if we’re going to make progress even though Democrats, the only major party that still believes in the American experiment, are out of power.
- Republicans do not know how to govern. We know this and that assessment was validated two weeks ago when Donald and Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan budget deal placing us on the brink of an entirely unnecessary government shutdown. We’ll see it again tomorrow with the vote for Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson may win reelection, but the fact that that is not a given, that Donald’s endorsement of him may not have enough influence suggests that the extremely narrow Republican majority in the House might go along way towards mitigating the disastrous policies of the incoming Trump administration.Having achieved his main objective—staying out of prison—Donald’s main objective over the next four years will be to plunder the U.S. treasury in order to enrich himself and his cronies and to punish his perceived enemies. He doesn’t care about governing and that will create chaos and division—the waters in which he has always swum. Chaos and division, however, are terrible if you have an interest in governing and the Republican Party will not be well served. This will expose weaknesses that the Democrats can—and must—exploit to mitigate the damage Republicans plan to do to civil rights and our institutions.
- The best bulwark against the fascism that is now here will be Democratic governors, especially governors of blue states like J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, and Josh Shapiro, as well as Democratic governors of red states like Andy Beshear.A strong coalition among these states will protect undocumented workers, and lessen the damage the new administration plans to do to the environment, the health of the American people, the economy (at least as it applies to the working and middle classes) and women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom.
We will know more by midday tomorrow, January 3. If Mike Johnson slides in without incident and keeps the gavel, chaos will be minimal. If, however, he goes more than a few rounds and does not keep the gavel, or if he gets it like Kevin McCarthy did, after a protracted battle and only to keep it a short while, then we will know what a split government we’re dealing with. And the stage will be set for legislative gridlock.
And in point of fact, going through this new year that we’re in, it may only be possible to take things one day at a time because of the level of chaos and division. Certainly this has been the most chaotic interregnum in history, far more chaotic than 2016. In 2016, Trump was assembling his children around him to fumble through it all with him and he didn’t have Project 2025. And he certainly didn’t have Kash Patel lined up to head the FBI or Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense. Such things would have been shocking and unthinkable even a few years back. Yet look at where we are now and what has become normalized.
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Friends, I am forced to self-promote and ask you for money. We had a bad year compared with 2023 and the end of the year has been catastrophic. Traffic died on November 5. We are a small blog and completely self supporting by ad revenue, donations, and subscriptions. If you can afford a monthly subscription that would help us out. If you can make a small donation, likewise. Our only goal is to stay in business and give you the best content we can generate. I do not want to have to put a certain number of stories behind a pay wall. I want our work to be available to all. Help if you can. And thank you once again to those who subscribe and donate regularly. You are the wind beneath our wings. Thank you. Ursula
Since you wrote this, Mike Johnson did win, and that on the first ballot, although the voting stayed open for a shockingly long time in order to accomplish that. I don’t believe it was on his merits and it was certainly not on party unity. I believe it was because, without a speaker, there is no Congress, because the speaker has to swear them all in, and failure to have a speaker could delay the certification of the electoral college vote, and that could delay all kinds of things. And there wasn’t anyone else obvious. From the comments they made, I think some of them had to superglue their noses shut in order to vote for him.