The 5 key plotlines in the politics of 2025

AS WE LUMBER toward another New Year, clutching our calendars like emotional support dogs, it may be useful to consider what we learned about politics in 2025.

- MATT K. LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

THE ADMINISTRATION lost public support with DOGE's chaotic job cuts. SOME critics of JD Vance dislike that he married a nonwhite child of immigrants.

(MARK SCHIEFELBEIN Associated Press CAYLO SEALS Getty Images)

This task isn’t easy when you consider that President Trump generates roughly a million outrages a week, most of them before lunch. It’s hard to know which developments matter.

What follows is my list of the five big trends that shaped the year in politics:

Trump's political decline

Trump's opening months of 2025 were terrifyingly efficient. Watching him bulldoze institutions like the mainstream media and Ivy League universities fostered the sense that Trump could accumulate so much power that resistance would become illegal or, at the very least, highly inadvisable.

But success, like spiked eggnog, tends to make people sloppy. By summertime, Trump ran into opposition from his own party on issues ranging from bombing Iran to the Epstein files.

Among the most surprising and notable detractors this year was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a populist MAGA loyalist who, heretofore, had been a Trump booster.

Meanwhile, millions of average Americans grew disaffected by DOGE cuts, harsh immigration crackdowns, National Guard deployments in American cities and — let's not forget this classic hit from the spring — “reciprocal” tariffs that raised the prices of everything from bourbon to coffee.

Nothing undermines political fervor quite like an expensive hangover. Which brings us to the second big trend.

Affordability continued to be the dominant political issue