As we lumber toward another New Year, clutching our calendars like emotional support dogs, it may be useful to consider what we learned about politics in 2025.
This task isn’t easy when you consider that President Trump generates roughly a million outrages a week, most of them before lunch. It’s hard to know which developments matter.
What follows is my list of the five big trends that shaped the year in politics:
Donald Trump’s political decline
Trump’s opening months of 2025 were terrifyingly efficient. Watching him bulldoze institutions like the mainstream media and Ivy League universities fostered the sense that Trump could accumulate so much power that resistance would become illegal or, at the very least, highly inadvisable.
But success, like spiked eggnog, tends to make people sloppy. By summertime, Trump ran into opposition from his own party on issues ranging from bombing Iran to the Epstein files.
Among the most surprising and notable detractors this year was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a populist MAGA loyalist who, heretofore, had been a Trump booster.
Meanwhile, millions of average Americans grew disaffected by DOGE cuts, harsh immigration crackdowns, National Guard deployments in American cities and — let’s not forget this classic hit from the spring — “reciprocal” tariffs that raised the prices of everything from bourbon to coffee.
Nothing undermines political fervor quite like an expensive hangover. Which brings us to the second big trend.
Affordability continued to be the dominant political issue
Rising costs and creeping unemployment squeezed a lot of Americans this year. And Trump’s insistence that the affordability crisis was all imaginary only made matters worse. Voters tend to trust grocery receipts over social media pronouncements by a president.
Democrats, who are now keenly aware that the economy — not “preservation of liberal democracy” — is what moves voters, have discovered that affordability is their likely trump card.
Which dovetails neatly with Trend No. 3.
Democrats recovered their mojo
They aren’t wildly beloved by any means. Let’s not get crazy. But after spending most of the last two years looking like political crash-test dummies, Democrats got their groove back during autumn’s government shutdown, which was ostensibly about highlighting the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies and the looming spike in health insurance costs for millions of Americans.
That issue, combined more broadly with rising costs, gave Democrats a strong showing in November’s off-year elections. And those results, coupled with events like Trump’s failure to cancel Jimmy Kimmel’s TV show and the “No Kings” protests, conspired to provide momentum and a growing sense that Trump wasn’t unstoppable.
Still, Dear Reader, if your goal is surviving the Trump presidency, Democrats growing a spine was just a start.
The other salutary development was the growing realization from Republicans that Trump is a lame duck and (crucially) won’t be getting a third term. Which brings us to trend number four.
JD Vance ends 2025 as the favorite for the GOP nomination
By year’s end, Republicans started looking past Trump, and Vance had become the favorite for the Republican nomination. This was confirmed by that infamous Vanity Fair interview with Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, in which Marco Rubio politely announced that he would absolutely not run for president in 2028 if Vance does.
Then came news from Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest that Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, had declared: “We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible.”
Vance’s frontrunner status doesn’t ensure a smooth path. In fact, trend number five may prove to be his biggest headache.
The rise of the conspiratorial fringe
Speaking of Kirk, his murder in September left a vacuum of leadership on the influencer right, and nature abhors a vacuum — especially when it can be filled by a more racist faction.
In the intervening days, this conspiratorial wing (which constitutes some of the most popular podcasters and influencers) has grown louder, angrier and more openly antisemitic. One of its loudest (and growing) voices, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, openly disdains Vance for a variety of reasons, chief among them his marriage to an Indian American woman.
To survive these attacks and fully inherit Trump’s mantle, Vance will likely have to burnish his right-wing credentials by continuing to attack immigrants — despite being married to the daughter of immigrants.
It’s a delicate dance, though not impossible. After all, Trump is also married to an immigrant, and he has a daughter who converted to Judaism.
But then again, Vance isn’t Trump, and we’ve likely got three years to see how this part of the story ends.
This is to say, 2025 was not a year of triumph, but of transition. A year when Trump’s dominance began to fade, successors started circling and voters quietly reminded politicians that groceries still cost money, no matter how often you declare that affordability is a hoax.
Before anyone pops the Champagne, however, a note of humility: In their end-of-year 2000 columns, very few pundits predicted that Islamist terrorism would dominate the headlines in 2001. It’s entirely possible that something in 2026 will make all of this seem like an argument over parking spaces.
We see through a glass, darkly. Here’s hoping the New Year is easier on the nerves — and cheaper at the checkout line.
Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”