As a tumultuous year comes to an end, the New York Times Opinion politics writer Michelle Cottle talks to the columnists David French and Jamelle Bouie about the year that was — the damage done by the Trump administration, including his most recent speech, any silver linings and what to take into 2026.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: This is our last round table of the year. How are we feeling about saying bye-bye to 2025?
Jamelle Bouie: Glad to see it gone. See you later, you son of a [EXPLETIVE].
Cottle: OK, OK. It got spicy. David?
David French: I don’t know, Jamelle. As the elderly grandfather in this group, I have found that wishing away time is not my thing anymore. So I’ll be sad to see 2025 slide in the rearview mirror, though it will not be sad that a lot of the events of 2025 are over. No question about it. And then we’re rolling into an election year. So ——
Cottle: That’s going to be calm. It’s going to be peaceful.
French: Yeah, it’s going to be chill. “Chill” is the word that I’m looking for. Absolutely.
Cottle: Speaking of magical political events, did we all watch Trump’s speech Wednesday night? Because that’s what I want to talk about. The economic state of the country as described by our president. From my perspective, really looked more like a primal scream than a presidential address. I want you guys to get in there first — give me some initial thoughts. Did anything surprise you? What struck you about this whole thing?
Bouie: Nothing surprising. I will say as per your first comment, Michelle, that it was more a harangue than an address. sort of jarring. It was striking. The thing about that address is that it’s hard to identify anything that was true. He’s throwing out all of these statistics, all of these numbers.
Cottle: There were charts, Jamelle. He had charts, come on.
Bouie: He was throwing out charts, but he’s making these claims about inflation that aren’t true, making these claims about wages that aren’t true, making these claims about costs that aren’t true — just a torrent of falsehoods. All clearly coming from a place of deep frustration that he isn’t as popular and well beloved as he believes he should be, which, on the one hand, is a sign that something of reality is penetrating this White House. On the other hand, it’s clear that they have no sense of how to respond to that.
Cottle: David?
French: So I would call it banana-republic-flavored Soviet propaganda because ——
Cottle: You’ve been waiting hours to pull that one out, haven’t you?
French: I’ve been waiting.
If you go back and you remember Soviet propaganda in the ’70s and the ’80s, the five-year plan, it is working. The five-year plan always was working. Everything is always going so well, they’re going onto greater and higher achievements. And so you always had this presentation of relentless forward momentum. And then the reason I say banana-republic-flavored is because it was filtered through this demagogic figure who essentially — and not without some justification — believes that he can basically talk his way out of anything: Get me in front of the American people, I’ll fix this affordability thing. Get me in front of the American people, I’ll fix this political decline.
And so here he is, coming in with that Trump personality, with that Soviet-level economic propaganda. And that’s why we looked at it like: What did we just see? It was about an 18-minute version of the one- to one-and-a-half-hour riff that Trump does when he’s at a rally.
Cottle: Well, that’s one of the things that sort of struck me — the morning-after coverage of this, some media person who was in the room was saying that Trump looked to Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, and asked how he did. And she’s like: Well, I told you 20 minutes and you were spot on, so well done. So I got the sense that they had handed him this thing and told him to keep it short.
Bouie: Yeah.
Cottle: But he just kept finding things to complain about. I mean, the title of this, as best I could tell, was “Screw You All, You Whiners: The Economy’s Great, and if It’s Not, Blame Biden.” That was it again and again — and hate the immigrants. So I am just not sure what they’re hoping to accomplish with that, other than maybe to increase the calls for him to get another cognitive assessment. But I thought it was pretty magical.
Bouie: Well, I think that the aim is just to give him something to do. You put him out there to give this 20-minute harangue, and then you tell him it was great and everyone loved it and this’ll turn things around, and then he just goes back to going to his clubs and hanging out in the Oval Office. But it’s not clear to me that this is meant to serve a particular objective. It’s not going to reverse any fortunes for the president.
Cottle: Are you just suggesting they’re trying to keep Grandpa busy?
Bouie: I think they’re trying to keep Grandpa busy, and this is one way to do it.
I want to say real quick, you mentioned that he kind of went off on immigrants. I do feel the need to mention that part of this was a brief but really disturbing attack on the Somali American community of Minnesota, which has been a particular obsession of his over the past couple of weeks. I think it’s really worth emphasizing the kind of crude and base racism of these attacks.
This is sort of the worst kind of demagogic language, the worst kind of assaults on people’s dignity, and it’s really unbecoming. This feels like an understatement, but it’s truly unbecoming of the office of the presidency, and it’s a dangerous thing to come from the office of the presidency.
French: I will say this about Trump that is particularly insidious about the Somali issue, is, OK, look, you had a lot of really good reporting recently about fraud in the Somali community. That is a problem. It’s a real thing that really occurred. But this is what Trump does: He takes a real thing that actually occurred that is a problem, and then turns it into something else entirely. And then he uses that as a pretext to engineer a wave of hatred against an entire group of people that then gets picked up and amplified to the point where it is now a common sight to just see, across this right-wing internet, the hatred and mockery of Somalis writ large.
This is just what he does on issue after issue after issue: He latches on to an actual problem that people are worried about, but then injects this incredibly toxic hatred into the body politic.
Cottle: Well, for all of his self-pitying, whining and complaining, he hasn’t actually made a great case to anybody who hasn’t already been drinking the Kool-Aid that he has rescued the economy. We got job reports and inflation numbers. The November jobs report wasn’t good news. The unemployment rate is the highest we’ve had in four years. Wage growth has slowed now; inflation has unexpectedly fallen. Even Susie Wiles, in her very juicy Vanity Fair piece this month, has been saying that the tariffs were even more painful than she expected. So all of this is not a glowing testimony to Trump’s, what was it — A-plus-plus-plus self-graded economy.
What does he need to do? We can’t just keep Grandpa busy. Grandpa needs to do something.
Bouie: So I wrote this week about how we have this strange confluence of a largely checked-out president. I think you can fairly describe Trump as checked out from the business of governance and a court that’s larding the presidency up with a ton of authority and power that it didn’t have before.
But in practice, what these two things mean is that we don’t have a unitary executive as we do have a unitary deputy White House chief of staff. All of the authority that the presidency has is being exercised by people who are not the president and who are largely unaccountable to anything — the political wins. And they can just pursue their own narrow ideological political goals ——
Cottle: It’s the “deep state.”
Bouie: Using the president’s authority. It’s ——
Cottle: Oh my God, the “deep state” is running the government.
Bouie: It’s quite literally the “deep state.” To answer your question, what does the president need to be doing? Well, a president who was actually running his administration might say: To turn around my approval I have to turn around the economy, and might back off on the tariffs. That’s probably item No. 1. But then might also go to Stephen Miller and say: We have to cut out this deportation stuff because removing a ton of labor from the economy is going to cause inflation. He might go over to Russ Vought and say: We have to calm down this attempt to destroy the bureaucratic state because firing a bunch of people is taking money out of the economy, and creating all this regulatory uncertainty is bad for the economy. He tried to corral his — I’ve been calling them viziers, so I’ll use that here — corral his viziers into doing things a little less tailored to their own particular interest.
But because he isn’t really governing and because these people are largely autonomous of the president in terms of how their actions go, none of that can happen. There’s not going to be any pullback on the deportations, even if this ends up providing a significant blow to the national labor market.
Cottle: David, you got anything before I regrettably let this go?
French: I think the basic reality is we have a really mixed economy right now. There is an enormous amount of A.I. spending that is fueling a G.D.P. increase. We’ve had some pretty good G.D.P. numbers. At the same time, we have the highest unemployment we’ve had in around four years. We had an unexpected dip in inflation, but we’ve had some real problems with inflation in the very recent past. He has implemented tariffs to try to reshore manufacturing, but manufacturing jobs are diminishing.
So it’s a very mixed picture, and I think the reality is — and it’s one thing that folks learn every few years — it’s very, very difficult to spin the economy to people because they live in it. You can spin a lot of things, but it’s really hard over time to convince people that things are great when maybe they’re fine or not fine.
This is something that the Biden and the Harris campaigns learned: You can’t fact-check people out of their experience. So I think Trump’s going to run into the same thing the Biden folks ran into, which is that it’s very hard, over time, to spin the economy.
Cottle: Moving on from this, I do want us to get the big picture and look back at the year over all. First, I’m going to give you an easy one: On a scale of one to 10, one being a dumpster fire, 10 being a joyride at Disney, where does this year fall for you?
.op-aside { display: none; border-top: 1px solid var(–color-stroke-tertiary,#C7C7C7); border-bottom: 1px solid var(–color-stroke-tertiary,#C7C7C7); font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, sans-serif; flex-direction: row; justify-content: space-between; padding-top: 1.25rem; padding-bottom: 1.25rem; position: relative; max-width: 600px; margin: 2rem 20px; }
.op-aside p { margin: 0; font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.3rem; margin-top: 0.4rem; margin-right: 2rem; font-weight: 600; flex-grow: 1; }
.SHA_opinionPrompt_0325_1_Prompt .op-aside { display: flex; }
@media (min-width: 640px) { .op-aside { margin: 2rem auto; } }
.op-buttonWrap { visibility: hidden; display: flex; right: 42px; position: absolute; background: var(–color-background-inverseSecondary, hsla(0,0%,21.18%,1)); border-radius: 3px; height: 25px; padding: 0 10px; align-items: center; justify-content: center; top: calc((100% – 25px) / 2); }
.op-copiedText { font-size: 0.75rem; line-height: 0.75rem; color: var(–color-content-inversePrimary, #fff); white-space: pre; margin-top: 1px; }
.op-button { display: flex; border: 1px solid var(–color-stroke-tertiary, #C7C7C7); height: 2rem; width: 2rem; background: transparent; border-radius: 50%; cursor: pointer; margin: auto; padding-inline: 6px; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; flex-shrink: 0; }
.op-button:hover { background-color: var(–color-background-tertiary, #EBEBEB); }
.op-button path { fill: var(–color-content-primary,#121212); }
Know someone who would want to read this? Share the column.
Bouie: I’d say this year is pretty solidly, in terms of politics, this year is pretty solidly a two. Not the worst possible, but it ——
Cottle: It can always be worse.
Bouie: But pretty bad. Pretty suboptimal.
Cottle: David?
French: Yeah, I’m going to go maybe slightly higher, just because I think maybe my basement of what a one means is very, very low. So I might go for a three.
Cottle: What would a one be for you? Like, we were actually in a shooting war?
French: Fort Sumter. If Fort Sumter is your one and Victory in Europe Day is your 10, then you know we’re heading more toward, say, a three. But the thing that we’re going to look back on in 2025 isn’t for any one specific scandal. It’s going to be for the totality of the Trump onslaught on the rule of law, but also I think we’re going to have a lot of tail-end consequences for Trump’s assault on the civil service, his assault on U.S.A.I.D.
We’re going to pay some real prices, and people are already paying the price with their lives for the cuts to U.S.A.I.D., for example. And I think the tail-end effect of a lot of that is we’re not even close to experiencing it yet.
Cottle: OK. All right.
Bouie: I very much agree with that. We’ve arguably gotten somewhat lucky this year that there haven’t been any particular big, external crises facing the United States, but the kind of damage done to the civil service, the damage done to the federal bureaucracy, to agencies whose job it is basically to help the United States handle acute crises, I think it suggests that should we have something like that in the next year or two years, we’re going to experience it in a much worse way than we would have without Trump. And then the destruction of U.S.A.I.D. is, I think, one of the great tragedies of recent memory.
Researchers are already expecting or estimating death tolls in the hundreds of thousands of people because Donald Trump and Elon Musk destroyed this agency for no particular reason. Just did it to do it.
Cottle: You guys have already pre-empted what was going to be my next question, which is what do you think is one of the moves that’ll have the biggest impact going forward? I was in fact going to bring up PEPFAR and U.S.A.I.D. — like a global perspective. So you beat me to the punch. I am thinking that the assault on health care, which Congress is going to continue its fight into the new year, is going to have some immediate effects. It’s not just the slashing of Medicaid; it’s letting the Obamacare subsidies expire. People already have a hard time affording their health care. I think that this was just a devastating misreading of the American public and what it needs.
And I have to go with a three if we’re going to go ranking, just because I thought the year was going to be much, much, much worse. I actually thought there would be more external problems, or I thought that there would be more violence that broke out in the country because I saw the unleashing of the National Guard on American cities and all of these abuses as having worse repercussions than they did. Now, this suggests that I’m a very dark and negative person in my expectations, but I’m just fine.
So I want to switch now just slightly and ask: Were there any under-the-radar stories that you wish had gotten more attention? I realize we’re talking about a president who manages to get saturation coverage and widespread attention every time he burps or naps. But was there anything that you wanted to throw out there that bothered you and you just don’t think it got quite enough play?
French: This might sound weird to people because we’ve heard a lot of conversation about it off and on, on the atmosphere of threat that pervades the judiciary, as well as Congress and essentially state and local governments. When you defy Trump, and we’ve seen stories about the experience of Indiana Senate Republicans who defy Trump on redistricting and then are subjected to this wave of harassment and intimidation, I honestly think that we’re going to look back on this moment and recognize the extent to which all of American politics was distorted by fear in this moment and the extent to which MAGA, at a very grass-roots level, was constructed in large part through the use of fear.
It is still underappreciated as a central factor in American politics, and we don’t like to think about it and talk about it because we don’t like to think that that’s what American politics is like. We think of American politics as about debate, dialogue, discussion and compromise, not fear, threat and intimidation. But I honestly think that that pervasive sense of intimidation and threat is still a not sufficiently understood part of our politics.
Cottle: Jamelle?
Bouie: I think that’s right. I don’t know if I have an under-covered story or anything from the year. I might actually just second David’s here, like the extent to which one of the enforcement mechanisms for Trumpism is just death threats.
You have people levying credible death treats against you if you decide to speak up for your own interests and buck the party line. And the thing is that Republicans have spoken about this before. Mitt Romney spoke about it. Lisa Murkowski recently — this year, I think — spoke to it. I mean, it’s not as if this isn’t in the air, but it seems to not be taken as seriously as what it is. That Republican lawmakers are just being threatened with violence to themselves and to their families if they don’t fall in line. I think David’s right to say that we’re going to look back and identify this as one of the key mechanisms behind Trump’s control over the entire Republican Party.
Cottle: So now I’m torn. Now what do I do? Do I go really small bore or do I just talk about my vague concerns about how much Trump has been meddling in the private sector and bullying media organizations and grabbing shares of companies for the government and playing favorites and just generally trying to exert his will on private actors?
I’ve been struck by how much we kind of nod and are like: Oh, yeah, OK. That’s totally normal. I’m sure it’s fine. I could go very generic like that, or I could bring up my personal terror of A.I. and say that his executive order stomping on states’ efforts to step back and think about regulation for this strikes me as just shortsighted. I mean, when isn’t he shortsighted, I guess? So I’ve got both of those in there. So there you have it.
Is there anything like a silver lining that you see as we exit this crazy year? What has made you hopeful?
Bouie: The clear political silver lining to me, at least, is that politics are still occurring. Political gravity still exists and voters are reacting the way you would expect them to react to an unpopular administration during unpopular actions. The Teflon Trump thing seems to maybe apply during election years or when he specifically is on the ballot running for president. But outside of that, people don’t like this stuff. And that, to me, is the silver lining that we’re probably going to see next year: a very standard thermostatic reaction to the president. And the depth of the president’s unpopularity will determine just how large that is.
French: The silver lining, I think, is pretty transparently the majority revulsion at what we are seeing. There does seem like there is at least some thought that we’re turning the page and that there is some evidence of that — let’s go back to Indiana Senate Republicans. I don’t know that that happens — even four months ago, three months ago — that there’s that kind of defiance. But I think people have seen that this era will in fact end, and the knowledge that this era will in fact end means that you’re going to start to see some alternatives peeking out, some green shoots.
Cottle: What we needed was for the public to feel like there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Or even if you’re talking about people in Trump’s own circles, the Republicans on the Hill or whatever, they were buying into the idea that there’s just nothing you can do and this is going to last forever, even though they know that’s not true.
So what has happened is: quack, quack, quack. The guy’s a lame duck. He’s not going to be at the top of the ticket anymore. Political gravity is beginning to reassert itself in terms of, you have to start planning for the next step. So you have this confluence of events and every time Trump opens his mouth, out comes all this crazy stuff. But also behind it, I can hear the quack, quack, quack.
Bouie: This speech that he gave on Wednesday was a lame duck speech.
It’s sort of the impotent thing that presidents on their last legs do: Let me see if I can’t convince them to get behind me with one last go of it on the stump. And they can’t. They never can. The thing that’s interesting to think about — interesting, ominous, I don’t know — is that there are still three more years of this. So it feels like they kind of burned themselves out this first year, a maximal attempt to do everything. And as the pushback has gotten stronger, as the electoral defeats mount, they have one of two choices, which is that they pull back and try to consolidate what they’ve achieved or continue with this full-spectrum attack. I think they’re going to try to do the latter, and I just don’t think that that’s sustainable through another year, politically or otherwise.
French: The smarter people in MAGA are already recognizing that by coming out of the gate with an executive order agenda as opposed to a legislative agenda, they have turned a lot of the actual legal elements of Trumpism into vaporware because, in the hierarchy of American law, executive orders rank near the bottom. There’s a reason we don’t talk about F.D.R.’s social security executive order or the Medicare executive order.
Cottle: Trump doesn’t really want to be president, David. He wants to be king. He wants to make decrees.
Bouie: Yeah, and I think that was very much the appeal of the executive order. As David points out, though, there’s a real chance that come 2029 — not that far away — there’s a Democratic president who wipes away these executive orders. There’s Democratic Congresses that pass laws that try to push back on what Trump did. And then Trump himself, depending on how things go, may end up presiding over a lot of failure.
And so, far from being this triumph, Trump ends up being this real albatross for the Republican Party. I’m saying this as both of this could happen, and also sort of, like, inshallah, this shall happen.
Cottle: Nice, nice. All right, so, as we’re wheeling into 2026, do you have any resolutions or goals you want to share?
French: As a family, we have a very formalized New Year’s resolution process, and we still often do it. We’ll gather in a Waffle House on New Year’s Day.
Cottle: Oh hell yes, Waffle House. Do they have Waffle Houses in Chicago?
French: Well, that’s a problem. No, I have not found one. But sometimes late on New Year’s Eve when we’re in Nashville, we’ll be at the Waffle House. I have pared down my resolutions year by year to the point where I now only have one. Every year for the last five years, it’s the same resolution. I’ve been able to keep it, and it is: Move more than the year before. In other words, more exercises, more steps, more whatever. Move more than the year before. It’s attainable and it’s healthy. So that’s my annual resolution.
Cottle: Jamelle?
Bouie: I do not do resolutions. It’s never been a thing that I’ve really been into. I’m always much more of the type that, you know, there are things I want to accomplish and I’m going to accomplish them this year. And that’s how it’s going to be.
Cottle: Well, OK.
Bouie: I’m always up for trying to maintain and improve good habits. One thing I’ll say is that I have a pretty healthy diet, but there are things I could improve about it. I could probably stand to eat a little less sugar or that kind of thing. So I’m going to aim for that.
Both my parents were in the military and I was raised with and continue to have a very clear mind-set of, like, oh, I have a task. I have to do it. It’s got to get done, kind of an approach to life.
Cottle: I do resolutions. I am just fond of a good gimmick. I have been trying to find a local organization, charity, nonprofit, whatever to get involved with this year. Not just donate financially but to get in there, spend some time with the community. So that is my goal. I have looked into a few, but if people out there have a good recommendation in the D.C. area, hit me with it.
Before we go, give me one more recommendation for the year. This is it. Last chance. Top recommendation.
Bouie: I don’t have a top recommendation for the year. I’ll say, Michelle and I did a little round table on the career of Rob Reiner, who died this week. So let me recommend a film from that remarkable run he had from basically the early to mid-1980s to the early ’90s. This isn’t going to be a surprise pick, but I watched “A Few Good Men” two nights ago, and I hadn’t seen it in about 10 years. And that is a picture. That is a movie.
It hits all the pleasure centers of a good Hollywood movie, but I have to say, Jack Nicholson’s performance and his climactic courtroom scene is endlessly parodied, endlessly referenced, but I recommend just watching it and trying to watch it with fresh eyes. It is, first, a remarkable performance. But also it feels so relevant, this notion that defending our freedoms requires brutality, requires people with no regard for the law, for decency or for humanity. The movie being a rejection of that is so relevant. I think it’s a movie that’s actually well worth watching in this moment, in addition to being a tribute and a testament to Reiner’s abilities as a director.
French: Jamelle, I’m so glad you went in the Reiner direction. I feel like that’s a great way to end. I was going to point to “The Princess Bride,” which, the irony here is that Reiner was a pretty left-leaning guy, not known for being particularly religious, but “Princess Bride” turned into the most quoted movie in evangelical youth group history.
Cottle: Really?
French: It’s just a super wholesome movie. It’s the kind of movie, that really rare movie that is incredibly wholesome and also extremely popular at the same time. I will also say, for me, when I think of Rob Reiner, I think of “This Is Spinal Tap.” I probably have watched that 10 times, minimum. I have been to a live “Spinal Tap” concert ——
Cottle: That’s a thing?
French: Yes.
Bouie: They did a tour back in the early ’90s, in fact.
French: Yeah. I was there in the early ’90s at the now defunct Starwood Amphitheater outside of Nashville.
It’s so brilliant. What a brilliant man who left a marvelous legacy of art, and just what a crushing loss.
Cottle: Plus, “Spinal Tap” gives us the quote for this podcast that is the most useful during the Trump era: “These go to 11.”
French: Exactly. Everything is going to 11.
Cottle: So far be it from me to break the trend with Rob Reiner. I am an enormous “When Harry Met Sally” fan. This was the defining romantic comedy of my youth. I can quote the whole damn thing if you get me started with just no provocation. I’m all about that. So I think since we’re just going full Rob Reiner, that’ll be my recommendation.
All right, and with that, we’re going to land this plane for the last time in 2025. Jamelle, David, thank you so much as usual.
Bouie: See you guys next year.
French: Happy holidays, happy New Year, and see you again soon.
Cottle: OK, that’s it for the year for us, guys. Everybody, enjoy their holidays.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The White House Is Just ‘Trying to Keep Grandpa Busy’ appeared first on New York Times.
