2025 brought us a new Trump administration, DOGE, cankles, the Epstein files, One Big Beautiful Bill, one very bruised hand, new faces, a second very bruised hand, and new names: Who had heard of Big Balls, Mar-a-Lago Face, the Gulf of America and the Donald J. Trump Center for Peace until this year?
In a tsunami of news, a nation has cringed, hidden behind the sofa, gasped in outrage, grappled with scandal and dysfunction, and wondered when it will end.
And for every day of an exhausting 12 months, the Daily Beast has brilliantly told the biggest stories through our unique illustrations. They can be directly revelatory, deviously pointed, affectionately sarcastic, unashamedly scathing, or laugh-out-loud funny. But every one is a carefully created work of art.
Just four people are behind the hundreds of illustrations the Daily Beast published in 2025. Elizabeth Brockway, Eric Faison, Thomas Levinson and Victoria Sunday produce the first artistic draft of history against the clock, holding a mirror up to the biggest figures and revealing them, warts and all, to the world.
They follow in the long tradition of cartoonists and illustrators who tell the story of a nation, from Georgian England’s William Hogarth, through the U.S.’s Thomas Nast and Puck in the 19th century to the New Yorker and Herblock in the 20th. One advantage our peerless team enjoy in the 2020s: They are not restricted to static images, with some of their best work coming in the form of GIFs.
Nobody knows what 2026 will bring. But day in and day out, the Daily Beast will be rendering its drama, outrages and shocks as only we can do. Stay tuned… and, if you dare, remind yourself of this tumultuous year captured in our inimitable way.
Days into the second Trump administration, our prescient columnist Michael Ian Black noted exactly who to compare the new president to in Trump Is Already Headed For His Napoleon Moment, and Not in a Good Way. Others followed his lead—including some in MAGA who think it’s a flattering comparison—but none more brilliantly drawn than Trump in the uniform he himself would have wanted. Birthday parades and renaming everything in sight for himself would come later for the second Petit Caporal.
It only took a few weeks for 2025 to go from Austerlitz to Auster-holy-s–tz. On March 25, the new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Signal addiction spilled out into public view in spectacular style: his fellow Trump goon Mike Waltz including the editor of The Atlantic in the chat. In Read the Messages From Trump Officials’ Group War Chat we reported on how the real-time details of the bombing of Yemen would—in any past administration—have been a top-secret operation but now was an emoji-filled back-slapping group chat sent direct to a journalist.Our art was 👊 🇺🇸🔥, as Walz would say.
What better symbol of the year than a billionaire putting his fiancée on his rocket for a 10-minute trip to just-about-space with her best, or at least most famous, girlfriends? Maybe one so overloaded with metaphor that it’s a miracle it got off the ground. Our Chief Creative and Content Officer Joanna Coles said what everyone wished they had thought of first on April 14: Lauren Sánchez in Space Was Marie Antoinette in a Penis-Shaped Rocket. And we made sure la Sánchez was dressed accordingly. Let them eat… space dust?
Our indispensable Washington D.C. columnist David Rothkopf skewered Trump’s sole legislative plan on May 21, with Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Should Doom the GOP. But It Will Doom Many Americans Too. But it was the unforgettable image of Uncle Sam reduced to a money-stuffed skull which summed up his outrage at the inhumane cost it imposed on the country—which will come to fruition early next year.
The headline was bad enough, but on May 30, All the Drugs Musk Took Every Day Listed in Bombshell Leak got the GIF it and Elon deserved. The leak of his pharmaceutical campaign habits was the beginning of the end for his status as First Buddy and chainsaw-wielding DOGEfather: Now his unending presence at Trump’s side was in a K-hole too. Within weeks, he was cast out of Trump’s court.
An imperious Trump had taken the presidency on January 20 with a shock and awe tsunami of executive action apparently designed to make him a King Donald. But on June 14, the tables turned. Millions Mock Trump With ‘No Kings’ Protests in Every State we reported, with the tsunami now one of millions of outraged Americans turning on a Trump who, to those who took part, seemed cut down to size.
Trump’s arsonist instincts have been much commented on. But on June 22, our D.C. Bureau Chief David Gardner reported on Trump’s Shocking Gamble to Prove He’s Not a TACO President: his willingness to risk setting the Middle East on fire with a war against Iran to prove his cojones. Our GIF captured a man playing with matches in an oilfield just as the new TACO nickname took hold: Trump Always Chickens Out.
It may seem like a long time ago now but the ubiquitous DOGE shibu inu was for months biting at the heels of the federal government. On July 1, we reported how SEC Staffers Fear DOGE Overreach Amid Push to Change Wall Street Policies, just one of the many arms of the executive branch where goons set loose by Musk were running free.
The MAGA mania for renaming (“The Gulf of America,” Army bases, “Department of War”…) was only just beginning on August 6 when columnist Holly Hudson suggested Here’s What the Trump Administration Should Be Renaming Next. Chief among the renaming suggestions, a nod to the scandal which Trump spent all year trying and failing to shake off: Epstein. His association with Ghislaine Maxwell was the perfect fodder for a darkly satirical image which summed up an administration determined to rebrand everything for Trump.
The brutal cost of war in Ukraine was not top of Trump’s agenda on August 18 when we reported that Shallow Trump Pressures Zelensky to Wear a Suit to the White House after that Oval Office bust-up in February. Helpfully we were able to offer a MAGA makeover to Ukraine’s president including, yes, knee pads. Notably, California Governor Gavin Newsom followed our kneepads lead later in the year, offering them to all who kneel, or worse, to Trump.
The sad and inevitable coda to Trump’s controversial Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin came on October 21 when Trump’s Big Meeting With Putin Has Been Canceled. Our response to this crushing moment for Trump, who had thirsted over the idea of a second Yalta? Two figures drawn squarely from the style of Soviet Art, one of them clearly frustrated. You’re welcome, comrade president.
The Democratic donkey is close to two centuries old but it got new life, just like its party, on November 8 as Republicans suffered blowout defeats in New Jersey and Virginia. Democrats Need Bold New Messaging to Meet the Moment—and Their Momentum, wrote our veteran political chronicler Eleanor Clift. Our illustration responded in kind: A saddled-up donkey with a rider blasting out the noise.
The unending scandal of Epstein had another moment on November 17, when Trump wrestled with the end of his long-running attempt to keep the Epstein Files secret. Trump, 79, Launches Late-Night Pity Party After Humiliating Epstein Reversal, we reported. In a non-stop stream of Truth Socials, he posted through it—and we offered a way to understand what he was up to.
If it was the year of Mar-a-Lago face and Karoline Leavitt’s lips, it was also the year when male plastic surgery went mainstream. Which was why our unmissable new vertical, The Looker, set out to answer, on November 17, a question everyone was asking: Why Some Men’s Plastic Surgery Looks So Strange. Mr. Potato Head helped us answer that question in an unforgettable GIF.
To his haters, he is a troll in the White House. So the news on December 3 that Trump, 79, Falls for Foreign Trolls Posing as MAGA Influencers in Embarrassing Self-Own brought some warming schadenfreude for those who recoil at the chief executive’s endless posting. It also brought a detailed anatomy of the fake trolls, equipped, hilariously, with a Trump Phone. Literally, in fact, satirical gold. The Beast is sure to be returning to the seam in 2026.
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