No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be.
Did we anticipate that Trump would come back to office wanting to rule as a king, consumed by revenge and retribution, and encouraged by sycophants and yes-men who would ensure that he faced few of the constraints that hampered him in his first term? Yes, but now we certainly know that bracing for the worst did not make the inevitable any less painful. In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.
2025 in Review
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
A partial catalog of the horrors of 2025 that not even the most prescient Trump-watcher could claim to have fully predicted: gutting cancer research in the name of expurgating diversity programs from the nation’s universities. Shutting the door to refugees-except for white Afrikaners, from South Africa.Empowering the world’s richest man to cut off funding for the world’s poorest children. Welcoming Vladimir Putin on a red carpet at an American Air Force base.
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