Opinion: Welcome to 2025. Anyone Else Got the Same Sense of Dread?
Has there been a more dreadful New Year’s Eve? I don’t mean dreadful in the sense that it’s hard to get taxicabs in the cold when it’s two o’clock in the morning, you’re drunk and either you or your date is wearing heels, one of which has almost certainly broken off. I mean dreadful, rather, in the sense that I am full of dread for what is to come.
It’s rare that we head into a year with the expectation that it’s going to be bad. Whether we like to admit it about ourselves or not, humans are optimistic creatures. We make resolutions! We’re constantly looking to the future. Surely, we think, the coming year promises much.
2025 certainly promises much, I will give it that.
Every new year brings strife and suffering, of course, but have we ever elected “suffering” to be president? Because that’s what Donald Trump promised. He explicitly campaigned on making others hurt: Immigrants, trans people, students, the poor, the marginalized, the sick. If Obama’s Shepard Fairey poster read “Hope,” Trump’s might have read “Hopeless.” We elected suffering because we thought it would make us strong.
It would be one thing if Americans collectively decided to tighten our belts, dig in, and sacrifice a bit now to make the nation better for all. That’s not what we did.
We are a people who voted to cut off our noses to spite our faces. We voted to give more money to billionaires and less to those who could use it to pay for the slightly higher cost of eggs. (Let’s not forget the economic policies Trump promoted during the campaign are likely to short change the average American consumer by way of the tariffs he’s promised to stick on just about everything.) We voted to give our climate over to polluters and tech bros who want to build nuclear power plants to power their sloppy AI moviemaking. We voted for incompetence mixed with incoherence and we called it a movement.
We voted to rid ourselves of the best of us—those who have, historically, always risen from the nation’s underclasses to innovate, educate, explore, create, inspire. That’s the American story told over centuries. We voted to turn our backs on all that because we’d rather believe “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
2025 promises rampant ugliness, both within and around the incoming administration. We’re already seeing a repeat of much of the messiness from Trump’s first turn in the Oval Office as any number of parasites in the president-elect’s orbit jockey for position and his ever-fleeting favor. When I think about the goings-on among that billionaire boys club in south Florida, I imagine a queue of MAGA faithful fighting to get into one of those money tubes that whirl dollar bills around as people try to grab as many as they can. That’s what we elected. A carnival barker playing a carnival game.
The ball has been dropped in Times Square, but also across our country—and there’s not much we can do about it.
