2025 was a menacingly miserable year
We can get bogged down in the details in certain year-end retrospectives. The big picture? This was a remarkably bad year. Was this the worst year for American politics this century?
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
About a year ago now, during that transition period between the election and inauguration, I’d be talking with fellow non-MAGA folks about what Trump’s second term might mean for the country, and I liked to ask people this question: Who was a worse president, George W. Bush or Donald Trump?
This proved to be an interesting Rorschach test about people’s perceptions of politics in the 21st Century. Both Bush and Trump were (and are) truly awful presidents and left the country in far worse shape at the end of their respective administrations than the superior situations they each inherited. Most people quickly answered Trump, while acknowledging the catastrophe of Bush starting the War in Iraq — and I’d remind people that Bush not only started this terrible war, he also played a central role in ruining the global economy and ushering in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It is in part because of how in-your-face disastrous Trump has been that Dubya’s enormous failure of a presidency has been somewhat painted over.
But any questions about who was a worse president seem to have since been answered over the course of this menacingly abysmal year. While much of this quarter-century has seen a nation in full-fledged decline, this has been the year where it’s felt like the bottom has fallen out. What once felt like the slow-burn collapse of a world power now feels like a freefall, one where we are still rocketing downward.
As we reach the end of this miserable year in America, it’s hard to calculate just how much we’ve lost, how far we’ve fallen. The vicious, constitution-trampling ICE raids. The attacks on any kind of immigration — a central issue to our national identity and what makes America different — much less regarding any matters of legality. The increasingly transactional economy, a neo-feudalist embarrassing fealty to the king. The clear-cutting buffoonery of DOGE and its cataclysmic impacts, from cutting funding for pediatric cancer research to the shutting of USAID and the hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world that have followed. The world stage abandonment of small-d democratic principles. The immense push to gerrymander state after state, a slow-moving Jan. 6 of an attempt to essentially steal election after election in yet another attack on democracy. A signature legislative achievement that both cuts social services and explodes the debt, in service of the “largest transfer of wealth from the bottom half of the country to the top that we’ve ever seen.” The Epstein Files. Absurdity both gargantuan and miniscule. Assassinations. Mass shootings. Ever-present tragedy. The cruelty-is-the-point sinisterness at the core of all things MAGA. Each day seems to bring fresh outrages, blurring together into a constant hum of crisis. I could continue listing these for another 10,000 words.
This year, 2025, feels like the one where the American Century has become officially dead and buried. The torch atop the Statue of Liberty extinguished. Donald Trump has knocked this great nation from atop its perch as the “city on a hill.”
And it feels as if things are on track to get even worse. Donald Trump is now probably the most influential politician of these first 25 years of this century, and it seems as if he’s going to have more of a say in how the next 25 years are shaped than George W. Bush or Barack Obama or certainly Joe Biden. Trumpism is not going away anytime soon. The fever is not breaking.
This is not an easy reality to grapple with, but it’s becoming harder and harder to pretend it isn’t happening. The next generation of Republicans appear built in Trump’s image, and that’s a problem at every level. We should not be out here pretending the outlook is anything other than remarkably bleak.
The response from the purported opposition party, the Democrats, could most charitably be described as uneven, and more accurately as profoundly unable to meet the moment. The party feels like a rudderless ship, flailing without a clear sense of direction. Even with next year’s midterm elections offering a real opportunity to halt much of the Trump agenda, Democrats seem more than capable of squandering it.
It’s hard to know what comes next after this interminably wretched year. I still, for some reason, have some semblance of hope buried deep within my American soul. But I am not confident we will right the ship anytime soon. Undoing all that Trump has wrought will be the fight of our lifetimes, and I’m not sure those at the helm are up for it. We can start small, turn local, and build from the ground up — one race, one election, one battle at a time. We can look back and hold on to the victories — the courts holding the line in key moments, elections that showed flashes of resistance, like the one in April here in Wisconsin — but we must also recognize that these are extraordinarily dire times for this nation and its democratic promise. We are hanging on, but barely.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” That warning feels alarmingly relevant now. This has been a bad year — for many of us, the worst year in American politics we’ve ever experienced. I want to remain hopeful, but it feels as though we are still falling. And I do not know if we will stop.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he became the Political Editor of Civic Media. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 23 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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