In my first column of 2025, I wrote that the forthcoming year was “looming like the open cellar door to the end-times.” Nailed it. The year 2025 was beyond anything even my most cynical self could have imagined. However, since it is my duty as a columnist to do an annual “year in review” piece, here goes.
The first major news event of 2025 was the January fire in Los Angeles that swept through 40,000 acres and killed 400 people. Then-President-elect Trump blamed the fire on the L.A. Fire Department’s DEI hiring policies and Governor “Newscum’s” refusal to allow water to “flow daily into many parts of California.” A couple weeks later, now-President Donald Trump granted blanket clemency to all 1,600 people with offenses related to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Also in January, Trump told the premier of Denmark the U.S. wanted Greenland and renamed the Gulf of Mexico. As one does.
In February, Memphis got a taste of the racist terrorism to come when masked ICE agents raided a TACOnganas food truck and sent three men to an immigration facility in Louisiana.
In March, Trump unleashed bazillionaire Elon Musk on U.S. government agencies, after which Musk fired thousands of federal workers who inspect and direct airplanes, protect food, test drugs, provide disaster relief, run our national parks, and administer the IRS, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the last of which Musk called a “Ponzi scheme.” Later that month, Trump ignored a federal judge’s orders and shipped 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Trump said he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which permits the government to deport people from countries at war with the United States.
In April, Memphis got 12 inches of rain in four days, but it was really just background noise as the country was being “looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far.” Or at least that’s what was happening in Trump’s cranium, as he proclaimed “Liberation Day” and imposed tariffs on pretty much every country in the world except Russia.
In May, this was a real headline in The Washington Post: “Trump Orders Government to Stop Enforcing Rules He Doesn’t Like.” Those rules included enforcing anti-discrimination laws and air- and water-pollution standards, and releasing climate change information.
Trump celebrated his June birthday with a Putin-esque military parade in Washington, D.C., and followed it up a couple weeks later by boasting that U.S. bombers had destroyed three nuclear sites in Iran. A subsequent report noted that the facilities were still mostly intact.
In July, The Wall Street Journal reported on a birthday card from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein which contained lines such as: “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” and “May every day be another wonderful secret,” and a nude drawing of a small-breasted female.
In August, House Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned Congress indefinitely to avoid allowing members to vote on releasing the Epstein files.
In September, the United States began destroying small Venezuelan boats in the open sea and killing their occupants, claiming without evidence they were bringing drugs to the U.S. Then Trump renamed the Defense Department the War Department, while massively amping-up ICE racist-terrorism efforts in several cities.
In October, Trump abruptly tore down the East Wing of the White House and announced construction of a massive ballroom to be named after himself. After months of bullying and extorting law firms, universities, automakers, pharmaceutical companies, and media corporations, Trump met his match in ABC talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, who was suspended but reinstated, even after pressure from the administration to fire him.
In November, as Johnson’s “Epstein shutdown” of Congress entered its third month, federal employees didn’t get paid, SNAP benefits weren’t distributed, and airports became crowded morasses. Later that month, a contrived deal of sorts ended the shutdown.
In December, Trump began showing more and more overt signs of mental decline — falling asleep in public several times and posting deranged late-night rants on Truth Social, including one particularly sick response to the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner. After Vanity Fair ran a disastrously revealing interview with Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, he was pumped up long enough to give a speedy nationally televised lie-fest. At this writing, the Epstein files still await. Happy New Year.