Bulwark Takes - Yes, These Things All Happened in 2025

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

From the Trump–Elon Musk Twitter war that briefly melted everyone’s brain, to the election of the Bulwark Pope, and the moments of real tragedy and moral collapse, the year of 2025 delivered a nonstop barrage of chaos, absurdity, and consequence. The Bulwark team looks back at the craziest, most astonishing moments of the year to give their takes on the stories that dominated headlines and the events of the last 12 months that will matter long after the news cycle moves on.

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. The craziest moment of 2025, like, there's some serious ones that obviously deserve to be in the category, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, chief among them. There's some absurd ones that you could point to, like throwing a great Gatsby party while you're trying to cut food stamps. I was kind of crazy. But for me, the truly craziest moment of the year was the Twitter war that erupted for a brief. glorious few hours in, I believe it was like June or something between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I was sitting here in this office. Door was open to the bullpen of journalists. And

people were just hooting and hollering as the two of them went out each other. And we were going crazy. And everyone was just waiting for the next tweet to drop and Trump's statement to be posted. And we didn't know how I was going to end or if it was going to end. But now I went back and I read what was happening and some of the shit is really truly wild. I mean, Elon accused Trump of being in the Epstein-Fauss fact. And then he said he was going to decommission the dragon two spacecraft, which is insane because it was the only operational American vehicle, I believe, that could get to the International Space Station.

So that was pretty wild. Then he threatened to start a whole new party. Then he called for Trump's impeachment. And then Trump was just sort of like, you know what? We might just pull all these government. contracts. At one point in time, someone was like, yo, Elon, you've got to cool it off. And it's just a very random person. And I think Elon responded affirmatively to that. So if you step back and you think just about that whole episode, the world's richest man,

one of the president's top advisors, basically going ballistic on him in the most emotionally irresponsible way possible. And it made you really wonder, like, should these individuals have any power whatsoever, and yet they're the two most powerful individuals in the country, if not the world. And so that's why it was the craziest moment of 2025. When I look back at 2025, the two most astonishing moments that jump out to me, both happened in the Oval Office. One was the berating of Barimir Zelensky by J.D. Vance. Just say thank you. You haven't said thank you once, and just this treatment of our ally who had shown Chud's bravery in the face of Russian aggression and having him dressed down in front of the cameras. It was a sickening

display. And I just remember it being the one moment of all the craziness that caught my attention the most. And immediately I had to change what I was doing. It was Marty Girl Week. I was about to go see my friends for a party. And I had to stop and come back up here and sit with all you guys and rant about it because I was just so floored that the vice president had done this. The other most astonishing moment, I think, was a little bit more. I think reflects the Vipishness of this year was when Donald Trump absolutely was certain that Kilmar Brago-Garcia had MS-13 on his knuckles, and he was being interviewed by Terry Moran. And, you know, Terry is like trying to let him off the hook, basically, and just being like,

I agree, oh, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. And Trump was like, adamant, like, no, show me the picture. Terry. You did not have the letter MS-1-3. It says MS-13. That was Photoshop. So let me just- That was Photoshop. Like, he really believed that, like, the meme that has.

the MS paint aerial font MS-13 on the fingers were actually on Gilmar-Brigo Garcia's fingers and I think it shows a the kind of unseriousness with which they took this effort and you know the piggishness and bullishness of this president it was a truly astonishing moment and I was lucky to have a chance I think I had the first interview with Terry Moran afterwards to hear him talk about it you should go check that out if you missed I would say the most astonishing moment of 2025, unfortunately, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You had a figure that was so prominent in the right, and in many ways kind of tied all of these factions together. And then to be assassinated like this and be gone so suddenly, I think, has really torn a hole in the American right.

This is someone who could pull in figures like Tucker Carlson, these kind of anti-Israel, sort of insurgent Republican figures, as well as figures like Ben Shapiro. much more sort of typical mainstream, mostly MAGA Republicans. And ever since then, I think the right has been in chaos. I think we're seeing, you know, the rise of white nationalist figures like Nick Fuentes, the sort of insanity or the chaos brought in by Candace Owens and her conspiracy theories. I think essentially very little of that would have been going on at this level, if not for that assassination. And I think, honestly, I think Donald Trump, his image has been heard on the right by Charlie

Kirk's death. Charlie Kirk was a guy who had a lot of control over the message. We saw after Trump administration refused to release the Epstein files that suddenly Charlie Kirk said, well, never mind, we're going to move on from the Epstein files. And I think that was very powerful for the administration. And without him gone, I think, but the administration of the right more broadly has really been thrown into a tumult. I would choose two of the most astonishing moments for 2025. One is when we tariffed penguins in the herd and McDonald Islands.

Those are islands off the coast of Australia as part of Donald Trump's Liberation Day tariffs. He imposed reciprocal tariffs on countries around the world ostensibly because we were trying to get back at them for how much they were tariffing us. None of that made any sense because if you look at actually the way that they calculated all of this, it was made up of a nonsense equation that nobody in the administration wanted to take credit for. But it especially made sense if you're talking about tariffing an uninhabited island that is home only to penguins, as was the case. My other astonishing moment of 2025 is when RFK Jr., our

HHS secretary, decided to swim in sewage accompanied by his whole family. Crazyest thing to happen, absolutely, positively, the American Pope. The Pope is American. So Pope Francis dies and he'd been on death watch for forever. The guy just kept like defying the doctors over and over and over. And the conclave starts, and they've been in there for like a hot two minutes, and all of a sudden the white smoke goes up. And it's Bobby Prevost from Chicago, USA, a white socks fan. A white socks fan, for God's sake.

And this guy, I'm sorry, if you're not Catholic, maybe you don't realize this. But the idea that the Europeans would ever allow an American to become pope is insane. Absolutely insane. All the Italian and German cardinals, they want no part of this. It was generally believed that there would be a Pope from Africa decades before they picked a guy from America. Instead, they go with Bobby Prevost,

who becomes Pope Leo the 16th, patron saint of the Chicago White Sox, and here's the cherry on top. And again, you got to be deep into American Catholic culture to appreciate this. we get an American Pope and the guy didn't even go to Notre Dame. No, no, Bobby Prevost went to Villanova. He's a wild cat.

He's a wild cat. Suck it, domers. Greatest upset in pontifical history and the craziest thing that happened in 2025. This might be recency bias, but that Rob Reiner tweet, a man and his wife who are beloved. in America, who has been, like, a creative person who, like, has touched all of our lives. He's murdered. He and his wife are murder. And Donald Trump's immediate reaction is to criticize him and make it about Trump by saying that he was killed because of his Trump derangement syndrome, which, by the way, is entirely false.

faceless. Based on what we know, of course, it has nothing to do with Trump. It really does convey the utter level of depravity that is Trump as a person. And I have always said that Trump is a bad president because he is such a bad person. Like, he has no shred of goodness in him. And that tweet was a perfect example. But in a world where it is difficult to be shocked by Trump's depravity, that was still shocking to read. It has been a hell of a year if you care about health care, and I don't mean that in a good way. 10 million people are probably going to lose health insurance

because of the unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and the one big, beautiful bill. We've got another 4 million people are probably going to lose health insurance because Republicans have refused to extend those Affordable Care Act subsidies. If you look at what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing over at HHS, they've been slashing funds for medical research into everything from cancer to Alzheimer's,

dashing hopes for future cures and destroying the great engine of American innovation. Kennedy has wrecked the CDC. He has purged the career scientist, installed political appointees who are right now implementing his anti-vaccine agenda. I think it is literally true. People are going to be more likely to die from diseases that are preventable because of the changes he's made. Really awful stuff that we're going to be paying the price for for years and decades. And yet, when I think of this year, the single moment that stands out as the most, I don't know if it's most surprising, most significant, or most tragic, is what the Trump administration has done to USAID. Reminder, USAID, Agency for International Development, was a legacy of the Kennedy administration. It was an effort to do good and do good for the United States by doing humanitarian works, building goodwill for the United States, and creating a more stable world that is not hospitable to terrorism.

stability. The Trump administration came in and wrecked it, sometimes cutting off funding for programs that provided food or medicine while they were operating in the middle with no notice. Now, Mark R. Rubio, the Secretary of State, swore that no one was going to die because of this, but we now know that's not true. There have been media accounts in places like the New York Times, the Washington Post Bloomberg. Also from Atoll Gawande, the former head of global health at USID, who visited with us and told us this incredibly tragic story about a woman whose daughter, died from hunger. There are credible estimates that hundreds of thousands of people have already died. It is only the beginning. There are going to be many, many more. In a just world, this would weigh on the conscience of people like Trump and Elon Musk. I don't know if they have that kind of a conscience. So it's up to the rest of us to keep talking about this, to bear witness, to raise awareness in the hope that someday we can start to undo the damage. A really emblematic thing happened last year that a lot of people have forgotten about. To be fair, it wasn't really in 2025.

It was in very late 2024. But do you remember the great drone hysteria that swept through the country, swept through New Jersey and the whole East Coast late in the years after the election? It was December. And everybody from Governor Hogan to censor.

Andy Kim, to New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, to all kinds of people on social media believed that we were under drone attack, that there were hordes of drones that were being cited. People were afraid to leave their homes. Donald Trump canceled a trip to his Bedminster Golf Club because of fear of drone attack, Joe Rogan saying that he was genuinely concerned that the drones might be looking for lost nuclear material. He declared that the government's explanations were suss. Tucker Carlson said something big is happening and that the cover-up is bipartisan. Marjorie Taylor Green said that she would shoot

the drones down herself, along with every other red-blooded, freedom-loving American. Okay, so, of course, what was it? It was normal air traffic and, you know, a handful of drones, but it revealed what a bunch of hysterics and ninnies people in this country have become willing to suspend their judgment and their common sense and believe crazy things like we're under alien attack or there's a massive drone attack going on, but that, you know, the authorities are covering it up. I mean, it was such a, such an emblematic moment of how the craziness has taken hold of this country. And unfortunately, it's not going to be the last episode like that.

Donald Trump has thought of a whole host of creative ways to profit off of the presidency in this first year of his second term. But the most amazing of these, to me, took place back in April and May when the president announced that he was going to have a dinner at his golf club in DC for the top holders of his meme coin, dollar sign Trump, one of his various cryptocurrency ventures and one of the ones that stood to put a lot of money in his pocket personally. The president announced back in April that that as a way to boost interest in his particular meme coin, the top holders of that coin would all be getting an invitation, not just to come hang out at his club, but to come hang out at his club with him, with the

president of the United States, with the people's favorite president, as the president likes to say. And that announcement immediately provoked a lot of backlash. A lot of people sort of noticed, hey, isn't it sort of strange that the president is openly promising, not just to take time out of his day to meet with these people who are doing nothing except enriching him personally by buying his meme coin, but in fact, incentivizing them to buy more by having this open leaderboard competition, come buy my meme coin, come push up the price of this. this fake product that I've put out, this cryptocurrency, and the more you buy, the likelier it is you're going to be a person who gets to talk in my ear. People noticed

that it was basically just a more explicit, more obviously corrupt version of the sort of pay-to-play stuff that the president had been embarking on in a whole bunch of different venues already. But the openness of it, the brazenness of it was kind of on another level. nevertheless the dinner went forward as usual as it had been promised back in back in may the thing finally happened at the top holders of the coin all got their invitation it turned out the event actually kind of sucked nobody was really very happy that they had made that investment that the access to the president was a little little worse than advertised he just kind of showed up and yacked about crypto and kind of broad terms for a few minutes 20 minutes and then he split and the

the people who had who had he had kind of suckered into being there were left a sipping water and Trump brand wine and eating a rubber chicken dinner of the sort that you get at this sort of thing. But it was just one little stepping stone in the in the parade of open graft that the president has engaged in this year. But because of the brazenness of it, I think it's pretty astonishing that we've all basically forgotten it happened, even though it was only about six months ago. This year, as we know, there were a lot of insane moments when it came to the federal immigration crackdown led by Trump and Stephen Miller. People in good faith could decide that some were worse or that something stands out as terrible.

Of course, all the stuff that happened in Salvador, for my money, what stands out to me because what it says about our country, and it brings the lies out of a lot of things that we were told we're going to happen around immigration, is the case of Narciso Baranco, a 48-year-old landscaper, father of three U.S. Marines. There was a viral video of him running for his life with his weed whacker. being chased down by agents, beaten, punched in his head, in his face, in his neck. Why? You know, immigration is a civil offense, right?

We've been told that these are all criminals. These are the worst to the worst. He's the father of three U.S. Marines. He's been in the country since the 1990s. Is he in the country illegally he is? Why wouldn't you be able to take him from his home, surrogate in the car, Bring him to court, go through all the processes, right? The other thing it puts the lie to is caring about our veterans, caring about, I mean, he has three U.S. Marine sons, one who, like, had to, like, throw the phone down when he saw the video over the way they treated his father, two who are active duty, U.S. Marines.

So not only do we not care about our military members and their families, it also brings the lie to, and of course, It brings a lie to you that these are all criminals and these are all the worst to the worst. But it brings to light what mixed status families are. Some people are U.S. citizens. Some people are in the Marines. Your father's been here working since the 1990s with no criminal record. So a lot of the stuff that I've done this year sort of brings those questions to the four. What kind of country are we?

Do we really represent the things we say we represent? And just one man's instance, by the way, DHS said that he attacked an agent with a weed whacker. The guy's running for his life getting pressed and beaten into concrete. DHS posted the video. They were proud of this. They posted the video on their social media. So pretty terrible in a year of crazy stuff, not the funnest one, but something that just like sticks with me. Even though there's been like really horrible things that happened this year, that one sticks.

with me because of what it says about our country. The thing that surprised me and astonished me the most from this year would probably have been how quickly all the big law firms, corporate media and big academic institutions all bent the knee to Donald Trump. I think it made the first few months of his presidency all the more unsettling. And quite frankly, I thought that they would have put up a bit more of a fight and played the long game. Despite what Trump says, no one stays in power for forever.

I thought that they would have seen that and recognize that public opinion can change quickly and decided to hold their ground a bit more, but they didn't. And I think that that's going to be a defining moment of 2025 and something that's going to be a thing that some of them are going to have to answer for, especially when a Democrat is in power again. So something that you might have missed or forgotten about that happened this year was back when Doge was going through every agency, there was a component about Social Security that really stuck out and it could have long-term effects that we don't know yet because back then the Commissioner of Social Security or the acting one, he sent this memo where he basically rarad the troops and rallied everyone to say this is

our great opportunity. But tucked in it was this line where he said, we need to revitalize the Social Security Administration operations by streamlining activities and outsource. non-essential functions to industry experts. So that was important because we've seen them attempt to integrate AI into things and to remove the human component of it. It matters, especially now, and you'll think about it maybe in the years to come, is that a lot of the baby boomers, you know, the largest population chunk, they're reaching their retirement ages in the peak years of the baby boomer years, in this year and the last year in the next couple of years, that's going to be a lot of new people enrolling in Social Security.

And so if they're decreasing the amount of human beings that you can get on the phone, it could end up being really, really bad. And so that's something I think we all kind of forgot about or we brushed your side or got caught up in the chaos of what Doge was doing, but it'll come back to bite in the coming years. Okay, so my most astonishing moment of 2025 happened near the end of the year. It was December 2nd. It was a cabinet meeting. And Donald Trump just went off about an ethnic group in this country, which was Somalis. And I'm just going to, I'm not going to make you watch it, but I'm going to read to you what the president of the United States said because this was a big deal.

He said, quote, Somalians ripped off that state, Minnesota for billions of dollars, billions. By the way, all of this is lies. All of its lies. Every year, billions of And they contribute nothing. These are direct quotes. The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don't want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason.

Their country stinks. And we don't want them in our country. We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. He used the word garbage. Ilan Omar, a congresswoman, a Somali congresswoman, Somali American, a citizen. Ilan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage.

These aren't people that work, that they complain. They do nothing but bitch. We don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from. Okay, that was an astonishing thing said by the president of the United States in the cabinet room. But the most astonishing thing was that instead of somebody in the room expressing dissent or just a stunned silence, which is what should have happened in a civilized country, what happened was applause all around the table, people pounding the table, clapping, words of affirmation.

You can see Pete Higgs that's sitting next to Trump nodding. A lot of people nodding around the table. That is horrifying that this happened in this country. And just 10 years earlier, when Donald Trump said that he proposed a ban on all Muslims coming to this country, leading Republicans spoke up against him. Ten years later, now he gives this absolutely bigoted tirade in the cabinet room and the whole cabinet applauds. So if you think that what happened in Europe a century ago can't happen here, What happened in December, on December 2nd, was a warning. And it is astonishing to me that there wasn't more of an outcry against it.

You know, this isn't the most important story of 2025, but it's the one that made me scratch my head the most. Do you remember the opening months of the Second Trump administration when there was that terrible plane crash between a military helicopter at a civilian airliner at D.C.'s national airport that killed scores of people, and the administration just sort of made up that DEI was the reason why. They were like, I don't know, maybe one of the air traffic controllers. was black and one of the pilots was a woman, so, you know, there you go. It's actually not at all why, of course, and there was a full investigation by the Department of Transportation that went into all the reasons that crash happened. But anyway, the administration just blamed DEI and moved on. But that's not even the weirdest part of the story. The weirdest part is that just a couple weeks ago, the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Health and Human Services were back

at that airport doing pull-ups like by the gates in the concourse as if nothing had happened and they hadn't made a huge controversy about it just, you know, some casual pull-ups. Like they have nothing better to do. Very weird. I'm going to go with two most shocking moments of the year.

One, one happy, one not-so-happy one. The not-so-happy one came very late in the year. Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, being murdered by their son. A terrible, terrible event like genuinely. I'd could not have imagined that ever happening.

He was one of the great nice guys in film and made some of the movies that defined my childhood. Very sad. That was a shocking moment for sure. The other one, a happier moment, was the American Pope. American Pope never thought we would see an American Pope in my lifetime. I'm not a Catholic. I'm an agnostic of various stripes. JVL has been trying for years now to convert me, JBL and his wife, Shannon, last.

And, you know, I can't say that the idea of an American Pope is going to make me, you know, become a Catholic, but it's right out there. I love America. America number one. And if, you know, we have the, the bulwark American Pope running things, they could get me on board. You never know.