The year being ushered out this week is passing like a 12-month campaign of saturation bombing. The relentless pounding of President Donald Trump’s airstrikes on ethics, norms and basic human decency has left our nation stunned but still holding on.
The best we can hope for in looking back on 2025 is that the year marked the peak of the White House’s efforts to remake America in the image of Project 2025’s vision of a country stripped of respect for diversity, voting rights, the contribution of immigrants, scientific advancements, access to health care and affordable housing, national sovereignty, independent institutions of higher education and the rule of law.
Trump kicked off his return to the White House by issuing pardons on Inauguration Day to some 1,600 people convicted of or awaiting trial or sentencing for their part in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the process of certifying the 2020 election won by Joe Biden. The president kept up the drumbeat of pardons throughout the year, springing corporate fraudsters, political crooks and other assorted felons from prison with little regard for statements of remorse or culpability for their crimes.
The elevation of billionaire Elon Musk to the head of the Department of Government Efficiency helped accelerate the destructive goals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint to subvert American values. One of the Tesla executive’s first victims was the U.S. Agency for International Development. Its offices were forcibly vacated, its name removed and its mission gutted with the firing of personnel and the revocation of grants to provide vaccines and food aid to the poor around the globe.
Musk summarily fired or put on furlough thousands of government workers, many of whom had to be recalled, to achieve what turned out to be small savings. The effect — with its disproportionate impact on African American employees of Uncle Sam — sowed uncertainty and chaos in government functions and further undermined public trust in institutions.
While his minions removed references to Black history from government websites, Trump cashiered prominent African Americans from government service, including Carla Hayden, the first Black Librarian of Congress, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown. Trump’s campaign against diversity — put in place by executive orders — resulted not just in pulling back from equity and inclusion in government hiring and contracts but also pressuring private industry to drop DEI efforts. The financial consequences to Black, women and minority-owned businesses have been devastating.
Trump’s budget plan — the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” — predictably offered enormous tax breaks to the wealthy while slashing food, housing, energy and health subsidies and making benefits harder to obtain by imposing work requirements for much of government assistance. But Trump was hardly restrained by conventions like a budget process to put social programs in his bomb sights and achieve his larger agenda.
He attempted to outright ban birthright citizenship, deployed National Guard troops without local support to facilitate round-ups of immigrants and ignored due process protections to deport and send many to countries and continents they had never visited.
Trump’s rapid and repeated assaults on justice and equity prompted the National Urban League to issue a “state of emergency” mid-year report, saying the administration represented a clear and present danger to democracy and social justice. “A democracy willing to destroy itself rather than deliver justice is a democracy in crisis,” wrote National Urban League President Marc H. Morial. “The notion that we are living through a ‘state of emergency’ is not rhetorical flourish. It is an honest reckoning with a government increasingly determined to sacrifice its founding principles—equality, liberty, and justice—rather than accept the truth of a diversifying nation and deliver equitable opportunity to all.” The hollowing out of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the failure to enforce Voting Rights Act protections signaled a disturbing turn from the empowerment of marginalized communities.
While pining for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump enabled mass civilian casualties in Gaza, which included hundreds of journalists, some who appeared to have been targeted. He also embarked on a campaign of blowing alleged drug-smuggling boats out of the waters of the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific — without providing any evidence of those craft and their operators of posing an imminent threat to the United States.
Trump’s crossing of numerous red lines has resulted in massive “No Kings” protests, state and local action in places like Massachusetts to fill in for millions in federal cuts, and legions of court challenges to his questionable actions. The Supreme Court has largely enabled the president’s agenda though the recent decision barring his use of the National Guard to protect immigration agents in Chicago was a hopeful sign.
The election of strongly anti-Trump Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia as well as Zohan Mamdani as mayor of New York City in the November elections was also positive. In Syracuse, N.Y., voters elected Sharm Owens as the city’s first Black mayor, as did Albany, N.Y., voters with the elevation of Dorcey Applyrs. In Detroit, Mary Sheffield became the Motor City’s first Black woman mayor. On Capitol Hill, two Black women were serving in the U.S. Senate for the first time in history — Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester from Delaware.
The surge of Trump foes to victory in local and state offices is adding momentum to the 2026 midterms as a moment of reckoning. The president’s bungled handling of tariffs — which have caused costs to skyrocket rather than drop — the mean-spirited tone of his governance and the blatant self-enrichment of his family and cronies have driven down his support and endanger the Republican majority in the U.S. House and Senate.
Black America didn’t need the Epstein files to know the base character of Donald Trump. Long before the truth of his close relationship with a serial sex predator became public knowledge, we knew him for his racist attacks on the innocent juveniles known as the Central Park Five, his baseless charges against Barack Obama and his cozying up to antisemites and white supremacists.
Few of us will mourn the old year’s passing. In order to have something to celebrate in 2026, we must continue to protest, to support institutions that are fighting back and to get behind candidates committed to rebuilding the democracy that Donald Trump and his enablers tore down faster than he destroyed the East Wing for his ballroom.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner