HEATHER - DOUG JONES

 

December 12, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Dec 13 Today former Alabama senator Doug Jones launched his campaign to become the state’s next governor. He announced on November 24 that he would enter the race, but said in a speech tonight that he chose today for the official launch because the date marks exactly eight years since he won a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate. In that election, voters tapped Jones, a Democrat, to fill the seat formerly held by Republican Jeff Sessions, who left the seat empty when he went to Washington, D.C., to be President Donald J. Trump’s first attorney general. Jones’s election was an “earthquake,” Daniel Strauss of Politico reported at the time. For the first time in 25 years, the Senate seat Jones had won would go to a Democrat in what Strauss called “a huge political setback” to Trump. After he won, Jones told his supporters: “At the end of the day, this entire race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule of law. This campaign has been about common courtesy and decency.” If Jones wins the Democratic primary for governor, he will likely face off for the governorship against current Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach who beat Jones to win the Senate seat in 2020 after then-president Trump strongly backed him. During the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the certified electoral votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president, both Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Tuberville to get him to delay the counting of the votes. Tuberville has remained a staunch Trump ally, embracing the increasing MAGA emphasis on protecting “western culture,” insisting that undocumented immigrants are, as Representative Michael Rulli (R-OH), said today, “terrorizing our people,” “killing our children,” “raping our women, just like they do in England,” and “destroying western culture.” That language is at the heart of the administration’s recent National Security Strategy, which advanced the idea that the U.S. and Europe must protect a white, Christian, “Western identity.” This week, Tuberville echoed it when he claimed that Alabama’s Muslims embrace an “ideology…incompatible with our Western values.” The MAGA claim that white Christians in the United States and Europe are engaged in an existential fight to protect their superior race from being overwhelmed by inferior racial stocks has roots in the U.S. that reach all the way back to the fears of white southerners in the 1850s that if human enslavement could not spread to the West, the growing population of Black Americans in the South would overwhelm them, probably with violence. The theory that race defined history got its major “scientific” examination in the U.S. in 1916 with a book by lawyer Madison Grant titled The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, “[e]fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.” Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant describing the book as “my bible.” In this era it is easy to see the strand of American history that informs the worldview of someone like Tommy Tuberville. But Jones has also inherited a strand of American history. In his speech tonight, the former senator talked about the economic concerns of people in Alabama, noting the administration’s $40 billion support for Argentina’s president Javier Milei while American farmers lose markets, the loss of access to healthcare, the skyrocketing cost of energy, and the inability of young people to find a job that pays the bills. But he also talked about history. He talked about his earlier election, when Alabama proved it could transcend partisan labels and stand up for the values that made Alabama great. Jones rejected the administration’s “attacks on democracy, on freedom of speech and freedom of religion; attacks on minorities and the media, attacks on the rule of law where political adversaries are targeted and political cronies are pardoned; proven science is cast aside, placing our health at risk; policies and executive orders that only benefit the tech bros and billionaires while working folks struggle to make ends meet, farmers are losing their markets and forced to take handouts to survive….” Instead, Jones called for reinforcing Alabama values of “hard work,” “fairness,” “looking out for your neighbor, even when you don’t agree on everything,” “telling the truth—even when we don’t want to hear it,” and believing “that every person deserves dignity, respect, opportunity, and a voice.” “Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values,” he said. “They’re Alabama values.” Jones’s campaign launch today built on his 2017 senatorial win, but his career reaches back from that. Jones is perhaps best known for his successful prosecution of two Ku Klux Klan members for their participation in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls. The local Ku Klux Klan had not been able to stomach the organization of the Birmingham community for Black rights and had responded by bombing the church that was the heart of community organizing. President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997, and Jones’s support for charges against church bombers Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry brought a jury to a guilty verdict after the two men had walked away from accountability for their actions for almost 60 years. Jones came to be in the position of U.S. attorney that would enable him to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had killed four children after law school because as a second-year student in 1977 he had watched former Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley prosecute Robert Chambliss for his participation in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Jones had skipped class to be present at that trial because, in a chance encounter, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had encouraged him to go to courthouse trials to see good lawyers in action. Jones took Douglas at his word and watched as Baxley brought the first of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers to justice. “It had a profound effect on me,” Jones later recalled. “Not only did I witness a great trial lawyer and learn from him, I also witnessed justice and what it means to be a public servant.” The encounter between Justice Douglas and Jones came about because Douglas had been invited to speak at the University of Alabama Law School, where Jones was a student, in 1974 on the twentieth anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in the public schools to be unconstitutional. Justice Douglas was a member of the Supreme Court when it issued its unanimous Brown v. Board decision overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In 1896, the court had said segregation was constitutional so long as the facilities provided to Black people were equal to those provided to white people. The Brown decision exposed “separate but equal” as a lie. It concluded that “[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thereby launched the modern era of desegregation. Douglas worked to protect Americans’ civil liberties from a powerful government. He once told New York Times court reporter Alden Whitman that he had gone into the law after working summers as a migrant farmhand. “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I[ndustrial] W[orkers of the] W[orld] who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.” Douglas took his seat on the Supreme Court in 1939 following the retirement of Justice Louis Brandeis, who had personally recommended to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Douglas should take his place. The first Jewish justice, Brandeis had taken his own seat on the court in 1916—the same year Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race—and, with the help of his sister-in-law Josephine Goldmark, pioneered the concept of basing the law on the actual conditions of life in the United States rather than on previous legal opinions. On the bench, Brandeis was a crusader for social justice against the nation’s established powers. Brandeis was the son of immigrants from Prague who were abolitionists, opposing the American institution of enslavement. His uncle was a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president. Progressivism is as deeply rooted in American history as reaction. In his speech tonight, Jones noted that Alabama politicians “love to say they are running to protect our values” and encouraged voters to make it clear to elected officials what those values are. He urged people in Alabama to rise above the current political divisions and build a government not for the powerful, but—as Lincoln said—a government of the people, by the people, for the people. “On that election day in 2017 we gave the people, not just in Alabama but across this country, something even more significant,” Jones said. “We gave them hope for a stronger democracy. And today, eight years later, we’re rekindling that hope, that optimism, that enthusiasm. Let’s face it,” he added, “there is a greater urgency for hope today than there was in 2017.” —

 

Trump's Secret Pardon-for-Profit Racket Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and a bit of the backstory of the shameful pardon of the former Honduran president Jonathan Alter Dec 13 Roman statue of Clementia, remix by ChatGPT. Upgrade to paid Pardons go back to ancient Mesopotamia, 4,000 years ago, and they haven’t improved with age. I’m currently writing a book about Julius Caesar, who employed “clementia” — clemency — extensively in the closing days of the Roman Republic. After the Civil War, he pardoned two guys named Brutus and Cassius, and we know how that worked out. Caesar pardoned enemies to get them to his side. I’d be shocked if Trump has ever read anything about Caesar, but he’s taking a leaf from him. Witness Trump’s anger at Rep. Henry Cuellar, indicted on federal bribery charges, when Cuellar wouldn’t switch parties. “Such a lack of LOYALTY,” Trump posted, suggesting that the congressman didn’t seem to understand that he was expected to uphold his end of a blatantly corrupt deal aimed at holding the GOP’s narrow House majority, which may be imperiled even before the midterms. In the (good) old days, that kind of quid pro quo would have landed Trump in hot water, but it is almost quaint in the context of the 1600 pardons Trump has granted since 2017, including his appalling decision to free the convicted January 6 insurrectionists. More than a dozen of these gentlemen have since been convicted for offenses ranging from homicide to child sexual abuse. The blood of the victims of those crimes is on the hands of the Orange Monster. Those pardons — as sickening as they seem — were mostly about owning the libs; Trump’s more recent pardons are about owning a yacht or an estate or an island, thanks to a huge payday for someone that we can’t see. With Trump, it’s always about the Benjamins. But some form of accountability is coming. House Democrats are likely to take power about a year from now. They’ll hold hearings that at least try to get to the bottom of Trump’s pardons-for-profit crime syndicate. We can expect to see scorching oversight hearings that explores Trump’s pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to facilitating money laundering on the crypto exchange. Families of October 7 victims are suing Binance over use of this money by Hamas. Then there’s Trump’s commutation of the seven-year sentence of former private equity CEO David Gentile, who served only four days in prison before Trump sprung him. I heard from a good source that the House might well subpoena Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan of Pronomos Capital to hearings about the case of “JOH”—John Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, whom Trump pardoned this week. There’s nothing that can be done to send Hernandez back to jail, where he served less than four years of a 45-year sentence on charges of aiding drug traffickers. The pardon power is in the U.S. Constitution and not subject to reversal. But think about where we are now. Trump’s policy in Latin America is cognitive dissonance on steroids — pardoning drug traffickers from one country (Honduras) while waging war on drug traffickers from another (Venezuela). A little background on the Hernandez brothers at the center of this scandal. The story starts not with JOH’s brother, Tony, who took a million dollar bribe from “El Chapo,” ordered assassinations, alerted drug traffickers to U.S.-led nighttime raid, and pumped drug money into his brother’s presidential campaign, as prosecutor Emil Bove convincingly explained in his closing argument (Yes, that Emil Bove, who defended Trump in the Stormy Daniels trial, wrecked a strong case against New York Mayor Eric Adams for crass political reasons and got a federal judgeship out of it.). In truth, the greed at the heart of this case begins in 2013 with the establishment of Prospera ZEDE, a charter city on the island of Roatán, Honduras. ReasonTV / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 What’s a charter city? It’s a libertarian nirvana — a free-enterprise zone that operates under its own legal and regulatory system, insulated from nearly all national oversight. Prospera is a small, unfettered, autonomous capitalist kingdom that’s free to regulate itself—or not— as it pleases. Who’s behind it? Ridiculously wealthy and arrogant broligarchs who are using cryptocurrency and crony capitalism to write their own rules while steamrolling anyone who stands in their way. You almost certainly know something about Andreessen, a true internet entrepreneur (Netscape, anyone?) who put his once-liberal principles in a blind trust and went over to the Trumpian dark side, and Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder who is J.D. Vance’s mentor and once said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Share Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, is less well-known but possibly even more dangerous. Srinivasan, who believes that the tech industry should move abroad, wrote in an email to the self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin, “If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment [Yarvin] audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts.” Prospera is located on the island of Roatan, Honduras (Google Maps) As you might imagine, these crypto-colonialists are not exactly popular in Honduras, where the enabling law for Prospera ZEDE (one of several charter cities) was repealed in 2022. For years, the company’s biggest Honduran champion was none other than John Orlando Hernandez. Fast forward to November 30, when Honduran voters went to the polls in an election where Prospera was a top issue. Election authorities cited incidents of “manipulation and sabotage” and the results are not yet final, though former Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the conservative National Party —JOH’s party—holds a narrow lead. Trump, who backed Asfura, told Politico he pardoned Hernandez because his conviction was “an Obama-Biden-type setup.” He said he had been “told” this by someone. That turned out to be Roger Stone, whom Trump pardoned in 2020. Stone wrote that pardoning former president Hernandez would energize the National Party before the election, which he cast on his Substack as an ideological showdown between leftists and Trump’s authoritarian friends in Latin America, Javier Milei of Argentina and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who are strong backers of Prospera. Sure, Trump likes libertarian thinking — on everything except the libertarians’ core issues of open immigration and reproductive rights. But this struggle isn’t blue vs. red; it’s green, as in money, not environmentalism. Prospera is a more opaque Cayman Islands — a place for Trump, his family, and his thuggish friends to feed at the trough without anyone knowing. It’s no coincidence that this is all taking place in the Western Hemisphere. Trump, Xi, and Putin are carving up the world into spheres of influence, where strongmen can have their way in their own neighborhoods. The headlines in the stories about last week’s new national security doctrine focused on U.S. warnings of “civilizational erasure” if Europe didn’t control immigration. But the real takeaway is that the U.S. doesn’t even see China and Russia as adversaries anymore; they are barely mentioned. That’s how much their might-makes-right attitude has seeped into our own government. The United States once stood for freedom. Now it stands for freedom to steal.

THE SCUM KEEPS RISING

 

2025 Year in Review

 

Noahpinion's 2025 Year in Review

Year Five of the Noahpinion Substack.

Noah Smith

Nov 27, 2025

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Five years ago, I made the (questionable) decision to launch my Substack over Thanksgiving weekend. So every Thanksgiving or thereabouts, I do a roundup of seven important themes from the past year, along with a few themes to watch for in the upcoming year. Here’s last year’s edition. The links below are all links to other posts I wrote over the past 12 months, so you can use this post as a reference for what I wrote about in 2025.

I’d also like to thank everyone for reading and supporting Noahpinion. A year ago this blog had 280,000 readers; now it has 414,000. I never expected my blog to get that big, and I’m incredibly grateful to all of you for helping to make that happen. Please remember to recommend Noahpinion to your friends, family, and coworkers! I also published a book this past year, though so far it’s only in Japanese; this upcoming year I’m going to write an English-language book about macroeconomics, so be on the lookout for that.

Anyway, here are the seven themes for 2025.

Tariff madness

This was the year that Donald Trump, true to his campaign promises, upended 70 years of American economic policy. On April 2, which he dubbed “Liberation Day”, Trump announced truly enormous tariffs on almost all of the countries in the world. Many of these tariffs were eventually walked back, sometimes after “deals” in which other countries made various promises to the U.S. and/or to Trump and his family. Thankfully, none of the worst-case scenarios have yet reared their heads.

But some tariffs remained in place, and these tended to be tariffs on America’s allies rather than on China. And general uncertainty about future tariffs has exploded. This, along with worries about U.S. political unrest and national debt, has led to a depreciation of the dollar as some investors hedged their bets by moving money out of the country.

The tariffs haven’t yet tanked the economy or raised inflation, but they’re exerting a corrosive influence on the economy, pushing up prices, weighing on employment, and hurting the manufacturing sector. This was entirely predictable; economists have long understood that tariffs on intermediate goods hurt manufacturing by disrupting and shrinking supply chains. Trump’s team, unfortunately, makes it a point of pride not to listen to economists, instead choosing to invent a blizzard of dubious ad-hoc justifications for the President’s whims.

In fact, one reason Trump was able to get away with his tariff policies was that a great deal of B.S. and myth has grown up around trade and trade economics. Lots of people persist in thinking that trade deficits make countries poorer, because of the way GDP is broken down into components. But they do not. It is now widely accepted that globalization hollowed out the American middle class. It did not; in fact, nothing did. The whole case for Trump’s tariffs was based on misconceptions.

Which is a shame, because pure free trade is not the ideal policy. If America were smart about strategic trade, we could craft approaches that would enhance national security, protect infant industries, help American companies scale up, and discourage Chinese mercantilism. This would require America to trade freely with allies while putting tariffs on China, and to implement the kind of Biden-esque industrial policies that Trump had disdained. But at this point, no one in the halls of power seems to be thinking strategically, listening to experts, or worrying about details. And so the madness continues.

The AI boom (and possibly, the AI bust)

The biggest reason that the U.S. economy is still doing OK, despite the pressure from tariffs, is the AI boom. Data centers are being built out at a stupendous rate, exceeding the 1990s telecom boom and drawing comparisons to the railroad boom of the 1800s. A lot of people are worried that this construction bonanza is being financed by shady private credit deals that could hurt the macroeconomy if the AI sector goes bust.

That possibility has fueled a lot of debate over whether AI is as useful as its proponents believe. But this debate misses the key point that railroads and telecoms were ultimately even more useful than their proponents believed, and yet both still experienced busts along the way. If AI fulfills everyone’s wildest dreams, but slightly too slowly to pay back the data center loans, there could still be carnage in the financial markets.

An AI-driven financial bust could also happen if the AI industry turns out to be much more competitive than the traditional software industry. There are plenty of essential industries that make low profits — airlines, solar panels, and traditional agriculture come to mind. Traditional software depends a lot on human capital (engineers), but AI depends a lot on physical capital (compute), so it could end up being a lot more competitive of an industry.

In any case, it seems inevitable that our economy is going to make a giant macro bet on AI.

Meanwhile, a lot of people continue to worry that AI is going to take lots of people’s jobs. But nobody really knows whether that will happen, and the people who make strong claims about it are just being overconfident. So far, it looks as if industries more exposed to AI have been hiring fewer entry-level workers, but hiring more experienced workers. So it’s possible that AI is biasing the playing field toward people with more experience…or it’s possible companies just over-hired young workers back in 2021 and are now correcting. Only time will tell.

The rise of the Electric Tech Stack

AI is only one of the big inventions remaking the world right now. The other big one is what Sam D’Amico and I call the Electric Tech Stack — batteries, electric motors, and power electronics. Together, these technologies have made it economical to use electric power instead of combustion in a large variety of applications — cars, appliances, certain industrial processes, and power generation itself — in addition to enabling lots of new robots, drones, and so on.

The problem is that America is falling way behind China in terms of mastering the Electric Tech Stack. Americans seem to have collectively decided that the Electric Tech Stack is all about climate change, and so it has become a culture-war football, with Republicans trying to cancel battery manufacturing. Very few Americans seem to understand that as battery-powered drones master the battlefield, whoever can build more batteries and motors will rule the skies. The Electric Tech Stack is about power, first and foremost.

(Of course, saving the world from climate change isn’t nothing. Right now it’s China that’s doing that, by flooding the developing world with cheap solar panels and batteries.)

Anyway, I’m pretty worried that Americans’ rejection of the Electric Tech Stack is a sign that they’re starting to fear the future itself. It’s possible to see anti-electric sentiment as of a piece with anti-AI fears, antivax craziness, and various other anti-tech outbursts. If so, it’s a very bad sign.

The Chinese Century and its discontents

This year was really when China’s ascendance over the developed democracies became apparent. Trump’s battles with domestic opponents, isolationist instincts, and eagerness to start fights with allies have accelerated the rise of Chinese power, and helped to undo much of the damage China did to its own image through “wolf warrior diplomacy” during the Biden years. Meanwhile, China’s economy is now bigger than America’s by most reasonable measures, and it dominates the manufacturing technologies that would prove decisive in a protracted military confrontation.

It’s therefore safe to say that we’re now living in the Chinese Century. Demographic and macroeconomic factors will present headwinds for China, but won’t be able to knock the country off its perch.

But even at its glorious peak, China’s civilization may prove underwhelming in certain ways. It’s a scientific and technological leader, but it doesn’t yet seem to be driving breakthrough progress the way the U.S., Britain, Japan, and Germany did in their heydays (and which the U.S. still does). It’s cities are visually impressive, but sprawling messes on the ground.

Meanwhile, China is making some mistakes. In recent years it has unleashed the biggest industrial policy push in the history of the world, intent on replacing the real estate industry and filling the hole left by that industry’s collapse. But by paying a bunch of Chinese companies to compete each other’s profits to zero, China unleashed “involution” that is hurting corporate balance sheets and causing deflation. And thanks to that involution, China’s people are working hard but seeing relatively few benefits. As Dan Wang wrote in his popular book Breakneck, China’s leaders are a bit too focused on feats of technical and social engineering. and not focused enough on making their people happy.

And in the distance, Xi Jinping’s succession looms. The most powerful Chinese leader since Mao is 72, but he has not yet picked an heir apparent, and appears intent on ruling well into his dotage. Either a superannuated leader or a vicious succession battle could present major problems for China.

The ongoing collapse of progressivism, and the rise of new ideas on the left

Trump has generally been a terrible President in his second term. The only thing still keeping him afloat — indeed, the only thing that allowed him to win in 2024 despite all he’s done and said — is the American public’s deep disdain for the Democratic Party. Some of that disdain is due to Democrats’ seeming weakness in confronting Trump. But a lot is due to general exasperation with the progressive movement, which has lost credibility on a wide number of fronts in recent years.

On one issue after another, progressive approaches have proven inadequate to America’s needs. Many progressive state and local governments have gone soft on crime, allowing a breakdown in public order that victimizes the most vulnerable and also makes it politically impossible to build dense transit-rich cities. Progressive procedural requirements have made building infrastructure, transit, housing, and green energy very difficult in America — thus hampering a lot of progressive causes. The progressive approach to education has emphasized “equity” instead of teaching kids how to do math.

Ideologically, progressives remain enamored of the disastrous idea of degrowth. They’ve ignored or dismissed the recent successes of free-market economics, instead blaming “corporate feudalism” for America’s problems without much evidence. Progressive online culture, once so dominant, has become downright ghoulish, cheering the murders of business executives and spending untold hours trying to “cancel” each other on Bluesky and in other deeply progressive spaces. Progressives have embraced “land acknowledgements” that might seem harmless, but which ultimately delegitimize the U.S. as a country. And so on.

Some progressives have begun to think of useful alternatives to the canon inherited from the 2010s. Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein published a blockbuster book called Abundance that proposed a new progressive agenda based on getting Americans more material stuff. Some progressives leapt to attack the new book, but their attacks fell short and looked petty. Hopefully the abundance movement will be able to steer progressivism out of its current dead end.

Besides embracing abundance, progressives also need to moderate on all the issues where their approaches have demonstrably failed — and to be honest with themselves and with their activist base about why they failed in the first place. The liberalism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the idea of liberal nationalism itself, represent a much better way forward for the Dems than an accelerating slide into radicalism. Fortunately, the recent No Kings protests displayed plenty of patriotism, suggesting that the tide may be turning on the left more generally.

Trump’s gangster regime

This whole year was lived in the shadow of Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory. Trump’s first term turned out to be relatively benign, and even featured some important successes. There was always the possibility that his second term would be similar. Sadly, this was not what ended up happening.

As I predicted, Trump has spent much of the early days of his administration feuding with American institutions — the media, the Fed, the courts, the electoral system, and so on — and threatening his domestic enemies. As it became apparent that institutions weren’t resisting him as they had in his first term, Trump began to overreach, issuing a blizzard of executive orders that assumed far more executive power than U.S. Presidents have exercised in the past except in the middle of total war.

Eventually the Supreme Court emerged as the one institution in the country that Trump wasn’t willing to openly defy, producing an uneasy stalemate. But the U.S. now feels like a much more authoritarian country than it did a year ago. This sadly fits with the global trend toward strongman rule.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk by a leftist radical prompted Trump and his allies to issue dire threats against Democrats, and to threaten restrictions on freedom of speech. Some Trump officials even used the rhetoric of civil war for a few weeks after the assassination.

In foreign policy, Trump has abandoned the liberal nationalism that marked both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War 2, acting instead like a bully trying to extract tribute from weaker nations. Although he did manage to broker a successful cease-fire in Gaza, Trump’s abdication of America’s traditional stabilizing role in world affairs has pushed the world a bit closer to war.

But despite the ferocity of its rhetoric and its reckless assumption of power, the MAGA movement feels strangely weak. Contrary to the hopes of its adherents, Trumpism is not building any new communities, institutions, or organizations in America; instead it’s just a blast of mostly online rage. And Trump’s policies seem startlingly incompetent, from his rejection of vaccines to his infinite tax cuts that explode the national debt. The Tech Right, which was supposed to provide an injection of elite human capital into the MAGA movement, has instead withdrawn after the failure of DOGE. International actors are quietly laughing at America’s fumbling lack of competence.

And the biggest question — what happens to the right after Trump and his personalistic rule are gone — has yet to be resolved. The most likely scenario is that without Trump’s personal charisma to hold it together, MAGA will become more ideological, conceiving of itself as a crusade to save Western civilization from immigration and liberalism — in other words, a typical right-wing movement. Whether that sort of movement can succeed in America has yet to be seen.

America’s identity crisis

Why is America being forced to choose between Trumpian gangsterism and dysfunctional progressivism? The fundamental reason is the age of sociopolitical unrest that began in the U.S. around 2014. That era of unrest is slowly fading at the grassroots level, as Americans tune politics out, but we’re still dealing with the institutional and political consequences.

Fundamentally, unrest was touched off by social media, which threw Americans all into the same room as each other, destroying our ability to spread out and tolerate our differences from afar. Curbing social media use among the youth and fragmenting the internet into more private, curated conversation spaces will help undo some of the damage. But the more fundamental crisis — the thing social media revealed — is a crisis of identity. As America diversifies, ethnic notions of nationhood are being strained, even as the internet fragments our cultural unity.

This identity conflict was most intense in 2014-2021, but it’s still roiling, especially online. Anti-Indian sentiment has risen on the right, and antisemitism has made a comeback on both the right and the left. Immigration, once cast as an economic issue, is now the main culture-war flashpoint, with both rightists and some progressives seeing it as a tool for reengineering the American populace. The Trump administration’s xenophobic policies are a reflection of that conflict.

And in the background of all of this is the end of the aftermath of World War 2. The liberal, tolerant values that emerged from the resolution of that conflict have weakened as the generation that fought for them has passed away.

Still, I am optimistic that America will eventually resolve its identity crisis. These things have happened in the past, and the nation always emerged stronger after a period of unrest and division. We just might pull it off again.

Looking ahead to 2026

If 2025 was Trump’s blitzkrieg, 2026 will be a year of retrenchment. The administration’s falling popularity, as well as emerging divisions between various factions on the right, will act as a partial check on Trump’s program. So I predict a more static, less terrifying year in the world of politics and policy.

The Democrats, meanwhile, will be energized by Trump’s low poll numbers and by the likelihood of retaking the House of Representatives in next year’s election. That feeling of confidence will paper over some (but not all) of the bigger divisions and recriminations that followed Trump’s victory in 2024. But there will still be a constant ongoing debate between those who want to take the party in a more leftist direction — led by the charismatic Zohran Mamdani — and those who want to moderate in order to win.

Economically, the big looming question is whether there will be an AI crash. I personally doubt that 2026 is the year — the big AI “hyperscalers” are still funding too much of the data center build-out with their own considerable cash reserves, and borrowing still hasn’t hit the absurd levels that we usually associate with a major crash. The continuing boom will keep the economy mostly afloat, though we’ll keep seeing some signs of tariff-related deterioration as more tariffs go into effect.

If, as I expect, the AI boom continues for another year without a crash, it’ll convince a lot of people that a crash is never coming — which of course will induce more reckless borrowing, and set things up for an actual crash in the years to come.

The international situation is the biggest question mark by far. Will this be the year that China’s leaders finally decide to pull the trigger and invade Taiwan? If so, will Trump try to put up a fight or just let them have it? Will this be the year that Trump finally pulls the trigger on aid to Ukraine, and washes his hands of the conflict? What effect will that have on the war? Will Europe step into the gap? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but the danger of a further expansion of great-power war is certainly there.

All in all, Trump’s loss of momentum, the looming uncertainties of an AI crash, AI itself, and the volatile international situation mean that 2026 is likely to be a year where America finds itself at the whim of events beyond our control.

But whatever happens, I’ll be there to write about it and hopefully to explain what’s going on. Hang in there, and enjoy another year of Noahpinion.