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The rolling tide of misery and chaos imposed on us by the crapulous ubiquity of Donald Trump in our lives, politics, culture, and society always has one weird trick that his fans, allies, enablers, business partners, wives, and mistresses mutter like an incantation: "This time, it's going to be better."

In 2025, we put that myth to bed, once and for all. It was, to tweak the title of a great Christopher Koch novel (and subsequent movie) that I love, The Year of Failing Dangerously. My catalog of this year's failings is, necessarily, incomplete. For that, I apologize, but this is a Substack post, and not a Dostoevsky novel. There are sins and excesses here that I can't catalog in one piece.

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We were famously promised a second coming if Donald Trump was returned to power. A Trumpian "golden age" was an article of faith for his supporters and the vast media apparatus devoted to affirming even the most ludicrous claims to waft from his constantly flapping lie hole.

You remember those promises, yes? A return to economic greatness so incandescent, so penetrating, so transformative that it would stand unparalleled in American economic history, a tidal potlatch to wash away the supposed economic sins of the Biden era.

You know the refrain: "Inflation! Groceries! Communism! Lack of gold leaf!"

Instead, we got in the first year of Trump's second term what anyone with more intellectual horsepower than the average planaria could have easily predicted: failure, destruction, chaos, misery, and humiliation, served daily, like prison cafeteria loaf, with a side of televised cruelty and fascist spectacle. We got Project 2025 goons and DOGE bros committing not reform but arson.

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The lie at the center of MAGA has always been simple: Trump will hurt the people you hate, and you'll finally get ahead. It was the promise that sold in 2016, fell short in 2020, and sold again in 2024.

MAGA voters don't want prosperity; they want punishment for anyone darker than clotted cream and who varies in even the slightest degree from their lane of populist, post-conservative culture-war Christianity. Sadly for them, that punishment was limited to some DHS immigration excesses, but the pain MAGA voters wanted to inflict on everyone else hit them instead.

This year, the people who felt the hurt of his rampant failures were the MAGA faithful.

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Our new national security strategy may as well have been written in Smolenskaya Square. Trump (and Putin fanboy J.D. Vance (if that's his real name)), and their treason valets Stephen Witkoff and Marco Rubio, have turned our allies into enemies, and our enemies into our masters. Putin and Xi laugh uproariously at how easy it's been to buy America's lot lizard President..

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You don't need to be a doctor to recognize what's happening: the mental lacunae, the mysterious MRIs, the obvious dragging leg, the dementia centaur stoop, the bruises, fatigue, physical fragility, and the increasing sense that the presidency is being run like an influencer brand; carefully managed optics rivaling the old Vaseline-covered lens, the controlled information, and a constant demand that you believe the edit instead of your eyes.