To the Editor:
2025: It’s always good to look back on where you’ve been before estimating where you’re likely to go (for which there is no GIS). Facts are the only basis for evaluating the past. Here, since the Political Past is the subject, facts only, and just a few. Americans have always questioned their leaders. It’s our job in a constitutional republic.
As the year began, Trump pardoned all but a few of the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists. Later, he pardoned enablers of the “Stop the Steal” efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election, a claim rejected even by SCOTUS. Other pardons include fellow felons for fraud, drugs, money laundering, identify theft, etc.
Immigrants, or people who look as if they might be, are being rounded up and subjected to inhumane detention centers and moved without notice to families or attorneys. Citizen-children are abandoned to their fates. “The worst of the worst” was just another lie.
Through a series of executive orders and politically motivated hirings, firings, and defiance of court orders, this administration has drastically expanded the “Unitary Executive” power by fiat across all branches of government and, to date, the Republican Congress and SCOTUS have complied. Trump encouraged Musk to disembowel federal agencies with no proof of the need for such violence, or proven savings. Trump handed over our private information to his uber-campaign contributor with no known restrictions.
Adherence to the “P2025 blueprint” (which Trump disavowed and you dutifully ignored) dissolved or depleted numerous federal agencies like the Center for Disease Control (CDC), numerous medical research facilities, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the DOE, FEMA, and transformed the DOJ and FBI into politically motivated entities reflecting Trump’s endless lust for revenge.
The president of our country incessantly whines insults of elected past presidents, praises himself beyond reason or shame, and vents revenge and hatefulness at every turn (his horrendous comments on the Reiner tragedy is just one example). Trump’s Christmas message called Democrats “scum.” He openly attacks the Free Press as “enemies of the people,” and demands the firing of comedians who are “negative about Trump.” Trump’s coverup of the Epstein Files continues.
Our once-elevated status among other nations has been battered, possibly beyond reclamation, in just one year. Campaigning, Trump promised to be the “peace president,” but is unilaterally attacking or blockading other countries at will. He is mediating Ukraine/Russia like a Russian toady, checking in with aggressor Putin before and after negotiations with ally Zelensky. And proudly and openly racking up family billions dealing with foreign countries.
Trump’s tariffs, imposed without Congressional authorization, are a maze of overarching grievance, reversals, and denigration of other nations. His condescending moneymen smile approvingly while Trump lies about who pays tariffs. Tariffs are, functionally, taxes ultimately levied on the consumer. Yale University estimates that Trump tariffs will cost an American household $2,400/year. “Affordability” is “meaningless.” Here, I will simply acknowledge the current economy despite Trump’s alternate reality.
His weaponization of the dollar has escalated the trend to replacing it as the world’s reserve currency, an “erosion of [our] global economic dominance.” Wired reports that perceptions of the “safety” of the dollar is shifting as countries trade and pay in alternative currencies, a fact which will have significant negative effects on our economy.
Despite a rising deficit and threat to the dollar, Trump touts modest tax reductions for some, while demanding millions in tax relief for billionaires, and cuts social and medical programs for those who are in need because of the increasingly severe wealth imbalance. He and many in his base consort with known neo-Nazis and antisemites (I can provide citations as I did with Hegseth, Martin). Opposition voting rights are under attack without justification.
I want to be able to look to the wonderful possibilities for our country in 2026, but 2025 gives me pause. I don’t award “mulligans” to world leaders, especially where their failures are the result of their own hubris.
Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca.