The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: the people and events that changed the world in 2025

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

In the last Friday Focus of 2025 Rudyard and Janice share their picks on the biggest newsmakers and events of the year and offer some geopolitical predictions for 2026 that could shake up an already volatile period.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the last Friday Focus podcast of 2025. I'm Roger Griffiths, Chair of the Muck Debates, joined by Janice Gross-Stein, the founding director of the Mug School of Global Affairs. Janice, great to be here after 50-plus episodes. We're going to ring out the year. We are coming up to New Year's, Roger. Here we are. So what we decided to do on today's show is give our listeners our thoughts on three big newsmakers each from the last year, who had the biggest impact on 2020. What were the big events, the three big events that you and I thought were important for people to kind of think about as we close out the year?

And then finally, some thoughts on, you know, three things that could happen in 2026 that might, yeah, shake things up, make it even a little bit more spicy. I think we're going to have a more turbulent 2026 and we have 2025. I want, I don't know, I want to go back to like 1983, 1982 and just have like a little bit of. a nice, quiet, static world with lots of calm and relaxation. But I agree with you. An exciting year. Let's put it that way. Surely lies ahead. Well, let's talk about our choices for Newsmaker the year. You and I both picked Putin. And I want to ask you why you did briefly. And I'll give you my quick answer, why we picked him over a lot of obvious suspects who could potentially be seen as a more important newsmaker. So Vladimir Putin is remaking Europe, Roger. He is remaking Europe

because Europeans are now so worried about a war that they see coming within the near-term future five years. They are re-arming. They are taking money away from social programs, and they are reinvesting in defense. Literally across the continent, from London to Warsaw, there's one shared subject of conversation. It is how do we manage Russia. That is an astonishing story from the leader of a country

with a GDP not much bigger than Canada's, who has, you know, used an outdated, clungy Russian army to shape the narrative of Europe. It's astonishing. Yeah, so I would select him for similar reasons. Just simply his longevity, year after year after year, to shape big parts of the world, from energy to security to the same.

the seeming ability to constantly adapt and survive, certainly not thrive. The Russian economy is in a lot of trouble. The country is backward by any set of measurements that you won't want to apply to it. But against that, as you say, a very weak hand, he seems to be able to consistently punch above his weight. And that's why I think he's somebody else. So we need to keep an eye on in. in 2026. Just be, before we leave Putin, Rudyard, what's so interesting, people see no prospect of change

as long as Vladimir Putin rules Russia. Let's go on to some of our other choices. You selected Muhammad bin Salman, the potentate of Saudi Arabia as one of your top newsmakers for the past year. You look at this story, Roger, this is the man who ordered the killing of Jamal. Khashogian and had him quartered and his body parts put in garbage bags out of the Turkish embassy where he was killed. Look at where he is now in 2025. Welcome guests at the White House. Investing so that Saudi Arabia becomes one of the key poles of power in an AI-driven world, transforming his economy.

This is a story of a young man who, again, starting from a very weekend, has recreated himself so that Saudi Arabia is now a must stop on the tour of any Western leader. What do you think that, though, says about us? Because, you know, the fact that, let's say he got his hands on these AI chips, He didn't create them. They didn't have the technology, the wherewithal, the know-how to make any portion of these chips or to make any of the technology that went into them. They seem to have gotten the chips because they've showered the Trump family in tens of billions,

possibly of dollars, of illegal cryptocurrencies or promised developments. They spent lavishly on lobbyists in Washington. I guess my concern with both Putin and MBS is the vulnerability of our own society to these actors, the extent to which they can manipulate us through either our politics in the case of Russia in terms of destabilizing operations of Europe and even here in Canada, the United States, or in the case of MBS, and a lot of these Gulf states, they manipulate the avarice of our political class. and they're able to basically circumvent the democratic will

and democratic accountability on the basis that they're, these very simplistic petro states that, frankly, do something not particularly advanced or complex, which is pump oil out of the ground, turn it into money, and then buy politicians in the West. You know, don't disagree with that description, except to say that what distinguishes MBS is he, really on, understood he had to get himself in his country off oil long before we did right he understood that and he put all his energy it's transforming the Saudi economy and so he's leveraged that wealth

yes through close relationships with the Trump family but way beyond that Richard he's built an integrated horizontal platform for next generation technologies because he put all the pieces together. There is a strategic focus there that there are some days that I wish we had more of in the West. Yeah, I also think that we don't murder journalists inside Saudi Arabia or torture and kill, gays, lesbians. Yeah, that's a problem. And others, and that, you know, I guess one of the things you know this, I'm a bit of a moralist. It's a crutch that I bear. it's that we allow people who do really shitty things to other people to keep doing shitty things. And then we go even further in the case of MBS with the Trump family or the White House.

And we put these people on pedestals. And we claim somehow that they are the leaders of the future when in fact they have dungeons. And they subject their populations. They subject people like Khashoggi, who was outside of the future. Saudi Arabia to murder, execution, and dismemberment, and there you are, five years later, welcome back into the community nations. You know, let me just have one more piece to this, just because let's color in the shades of gray here.

What's happened to women in Saudi Arabia in Ravis is an unbelievable story. There are 40% of the workforce in Saudi Arabia is now women. This is the fastest rate of improvement in the life of women anyway. we're in the Arab world. So you have the picture you just painted, what he did, and by the way, ongoing execution of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia is completely accurate.

The story of women that I just told you is accurate too. This is the world we live in full of contradictions. Brutal war in Yemen, where the Saudi government has funded a civil war that's also killed hundreds of thousands of people through starvation. and death in indiscriminate bombing and mining and other things. So, yes, some things I guess that are positive. I would just say on balance, not a good guy, not a good regime. Let's move on to somebody who had a terrific year.

He was on my list of newsmakers, and that was our own Prime Minister, Mark Carney. He kind of went from zero to hero in the space of 12 months. It's amazing to think that, you know, a week or so ago, that was when Christopher Freeland a year previously stabbed Justin Trudeau in the front of the chest, not the back. In the throat. And a liberal party that by every account was headed for a historic defeat, potentially a reduction of seats into Michael Ignatjif territory or worse, suddenly had this remarkable resurrection under Carney through largely, I think we all agree, the Trump of

effect and the re-election of Trump and the arrival of his inauguration and then the announcement of his tariffs right in the middle of the election campaign in the final critical three weeks. So Mark Carney owes a lot to Donald Trump. It's interesting. And I'm interesting to see how that dynamic plays out in 2020. You know, that's the story of a good guy who was a lot to a bad guy. When I travel, it's like, you know, there are a very important. Mark I hear more than anything else, aren't you lucky? You have a sane prime minister, right? We got lucky in Canada that, and again, non-partisan comment, that we someone stepped forward who is generally regarded as sane, smart, and is widely respected outside the country.

Yeah, let's go on. I chose at the end of the year, Ahmed al-Amad, who was the hero of the horrific massacre at Bondi Beach in Australia, he, a fruit vendor, confronted one of, I think,

the son, the father-son duo. There was massacring Jews who were peacefully gathering to celebrate Hanukkah in a public park. He was shot, wrestled the gun, way and I think just showed for us both courage humanity and it so happens that he is also a Muslim and it shows the the kind of the diversity and depth of of Islam and that there are these horrific

attackers and terrorists that self-identify and are Muslim but there are all also people like Ahmed al-Ahmad who are part of the Muslim community. You know, I'm not surprised one bit because Muslims have a huge range and

the vast majority of them are just outstanding people. I'll never forget that video. I watched him. I'm short, maybe you feel differently, but these things than I do, but just to tackle this shooter from behind, that and climb on his back and the shooter had a long assault rifle.

I was just gobsmacked by the sheer bravery and courage. He could have been killed. And there was a couple who tried earlier. And in fact, they did lose their life. So, Ahmed Ahmed, it's just astonishing. Trump made your list. All kinds of reasons why we might put Trump. on a list of newsmakers for 2025?

What was yours? So let me pick a dimension of Trump that we don't talk about enough. The extraordinary corruption and cryptocracy that the Trump family, the sons, are engaged in. We've never seen anything like this. They are running a crypto business, several crypto businesses. We were talking about billions of dollars, Roger. some of them from Saudi Arabia, some of them from the Emirates, but from many other places as well,

that are actually flooding through channels that are tough to trace. Here we have a United States that is allegedly in a war against drugs, but creating channels for untraceable payments. They're criminals and drug lords and others will explain. exploit to the health. Yeah. And has led many of these, you know, this corruption has led to, you know, the other big story of 2025, which was the sale of preeminent American AI, the most advanced AI, to these

authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. And you just think that was something that the Biden administration had clearly drawn a red line on that this technology, like any dual-use technology, powerful dual-use technology, for instance, atomic weapons light cities up through atomic power, but also can destroy them, that America could and should and would have kept that technology for its allies and for itself. And here the Trump family in so many different ways has, in a sense, monetized different verticals of American power, from tariffs to AI, to access to the American market, And I wonder, Janice, just what you think this means for the future?

Because another president, the temptation, again, to take this colossus that is American technology, economic dominance, military dominance, and to turn that into a vehicle for self-enrichment. Yeah. I mean, you know, I describe the Trump president as he has pay to play, right? pay to get access to the U.S. market. And all by the way, if I can personally profit from it or my family can personally profit from it, not the state, if I can personally profit from it, all the better.

Just to think forward to 2028, and there is a different president who thinks this is not okay. Think of the huge lift it will take, to restore some of these institutions. And everyone under the president who's received a signal that it's open season.

Yeah. I mean, it will be a Herculean task. It will be the work of a generation if there is that opportunity to pull this back. Corruption is erodes democracy in the deepest way. You know, we talk about political movements, but once the public begins to think our government is corrupt, that is the beginning, at the end, democracy. Frankly, we see it all over the world. And this presidency, I think, is the world leader in personalizing an office, a public office for family game.

So let's move on to our big events of 2025. You put at the top of your list, the fall of Bashir al-Assat, the horrific dictator of Syria, who presided over a brutal civil war that included the perpetuation of the war. mass, rape, torture, and really state-led death camps under the portion of the country that he ruled. Transformative event, Roger, you know, there was a, in the wake of the Arab Spring, there was a revolt and uprising against al-Assad. It failed because he and his brother were so ruthless in shooting the protesters and killing

them. And the vast majority of Syrians thought this would never come to. to an end. Well, it did, and it transformed the whole Middle East. It was when that domino fell after Hezbollah had been badly weakened by Israel. When Al-Assad fell, that was the end of the forward defense of Iran. It had invested for two decades in building up that forward defense. It literally crumbled in four days, and that was, I think, shape-shifting event in the region, for sure. Right.

Another one of your big events for the year was the release of the national security strategy just this past month. We've talked about it on this show, and I would agree with you. It was bracing, to say the least. Oh, for sure, it was bracing. And again, to pick the pithiest comment in that strategy, Europe is in civilizational decline. That is the voice now of the United States, right?

You multicultural, infeble, weak Europe, you are in fact, and you will no longer be if you keep up these delusional policies. That was a single most chilling message that the United States has ever given to Europe, ever. Your third big event of the past year was this growing rift that we've seen between Japan's, and China that seems to have been precipitated by the election of a new conservative female prime minister of Japan who seems to be staking out a more kind of aggressive defense and security policy for the island nation. You know, these are two big powers of Asia, and there's a huge asymmetry of military power between Japan and China, but she really stepped up and challenged Beijing directly,

a really interesting follow on from that. Beijing kind of turned to Donald Trump. It said Rinnerin. He didn't do that. He stood back. And I think this is the event that will probably have the most long-lasting effect. There will be a big tale into 2026. How do you think about Asia, as Japan and China really go at each other in a way that we haven't seen before? It's over-tire But this is kind of the lit fuse in that part of the world that could go off. And why is it, do you think that Japan is open to this idea seemingly of now challenging China, and especially the focus on Taiwan, which they know is a big soft spot for G? It's, you know, that's like the waving a red flag in front of a ball.

This is a conservative prime minister on the right of, of her own party. She really sees what China is doing in the South China Sea and on those disputed islands. Right? Which is Japanese islands. Exactly.

She sees this as an existential threat. She wants to call it out now, right, dirt? She doesn't want to let it lie and to leave, in her view, the decision to China about the timing. She wants to call it now, and she wants to pull the United States into this conversation.

Yeah. Let's move on to my top three list. Number one, this may seem like a bit of an odd pick, but it was the announcement later in the year that Chat GPT will be bringing out an adult-only version of its large language model, presumably to generate pornography for users. That's what occurred to me. I wondered if you thought the same thing. The reason I selected this is not because I will be a future user of this product, rather that it is to me a sign of one of the big trends I think we'll see in 2026, which is either the popping or the deflation of the AI bubble.

You as a business only go to pornography when you've run out of really any other useful ideas for humanity. And it's one of the sad things I feel about the last year is that we've developed this quite incredible. technology. But it comes with huge costs. It comes with huge energy costs. Increasingly, we are burning megatons of carbon now to power these large language models that require large data centers, energy heavy consuming chips. We are literally lighting the atmosphere on fire to assemble zeros and ones into patterns that create, again, I would say, artificial intelligence's name was one of the big kind of brilliant marketing. Let's call it machine learning.

And where is that led to over the course of the year? It's led to an explosion of AI slop. It's led to an explosion now of just stupid 30-second videos of, I don't know, cartoons and animals and cats. AI cats are everywhere in my children's, my teenagers. feeds. And now, of course, we get to pornography. Janice, it just suggests to me that, you know, the early excitement of 2024 and AI is now giving away to something that looks a lot more human. Yeah, let me just step into your territory just a little bit because if there is an AI bubble

and it pops, this is something that will have a huge economic impact. back too. And why is that because the financing of these, we are talking about billions of dollars. Hundreds of billions. Hundreds of billions of dollars. I think it's like three to three odd percent of U.S. GDP is related to AI infrastructure spent. And we're seeing the same kind of thing as eerily reminiscent of the period in a way that was before the global financial crisis. The big investors that hedge funds, the private equity, are now slicing it. up into packages. Yeah, different tranches of debt.

Different tranches for different folks, hard to trace. The products are opaque. They're difficult to understand. If you go from that 18 plus to where I went, you could see a big shock to the global economy in 26. I think that's a great pick. My next big pick was the Gaza ceasefire. It is imperfect and incomprehend.

complete, but one has to hope, and I think, again, we've been very critical President Trump on this program in a variety of ways over the last year. And look, there's still a lot that can slip here between cup and lip in terms of some kind of ultimately stable situation for Gaza, but there continues to be seemingly small but steady progress towards that goal. And I think without Trump's involvement, his pressure campaign on Netanyahu to end the war, and his seeming ability to continue to pressure European and Middle Eastern allies into backing both a stabilization force, but then also a policy and a plan to begin the process of rebuilding.

So again, a lot that can happen here. It's still early days, but I think it was, one area where Trump's kind of freewheeling personality, his ability to kind of think beyond or through or ignore conventions about how these types of seemingly often intractable conflicts, in fact, end, has produced something with promise. You know, I pick it as one of my stories of 2026 for exactly the reasons you just talk through. Roger, there's no question without Trump. This would not have happened. He reigned, the only one that is able, and he continues to do it, to reign in Netanyahu. And all those

networks that you and I just talked about earlier was Saudi Arabia, with the Emirates, with Qatar, who are all stable coin investors. He leveraged every one of those networks to make this happen. And then my final story was the pipeline MOU between Alberta and the federal government. We, again, don't know. There's a lot here that still could or should or might happen with regards to this pipeline ever being built. But it was important, I think, step forward for the country to begin to deal with, you know, the tensions that had festered for years between Alberta and the federal government on a whole host of issues.

National unity, I think, has moved beyond simply becoming a domestic concern, I think, in this age of Trump and international destabilization, we have even a greater premium on achieving unity. And there'll be big challenges in 2026, very likely a Quebec election that will return a PQ victory. And this issue isn't going away. So at least hopefully, if we have to turn and pivot to the resurgence of a sovereignty movement in Quebec, let's hope that this pipeline MOU was the beginning of kind of shutting the door on a more substantive or lasting.

separatist threat in the West. I think there's no doubt that was a big part. The fear that there would be two simultaneous referendums in Canada in an age of election interference. What a perfect setup, to be honest, for a president of the United States that talks about a 51st state and the technologies would interfere

to flood the digital space with bots this would be an order of magnitude tougher challenge for Canada anyone we face. This National Unity story, by the way, is coming back, though, in 2026, in the east of the country. Recently, the Monk debates hosted a fascinating debate about the two-state solution, but 90 minutes on this contentious topic can also barely scratch the surface. After all, Israel is a hotbed of conflicting ideologies, identities, interests, and historical narratives. even for experts, that's a lot to keep up with.

And it's not just Israel. The Middle East is changing fast. Alliances are shifting. New power centers are emerging and longstanding assumptions are being rewritten in real time. If you want to understand what's really going on, I'd like to invite you to join me on the Call Me Back podcast. I'm Dan Cynor, host of Call Me Back. Our mission is to give you the facts, context, and insights you need to make sense of Israel and the region.

Our contributors include some of the best source journalists in Israel like Nadavail and Amit Sego and top thought leaders in the U.S. like Sam Harris and Scott Galloway. So if you're ready to go deeper, find me on Call Me Back wherever you get your podcasts. See you there. Let's move on to 26. Your big three stores, the midterm elections, the Alpha and Omega of the coming calendar year. No bigger story. No bigger story than the 2026 midterms.

I kind of think of it as a thermometer. You take the temperature of where we're going in this big debate we're having about the United States. So let's tell this optimistic, if these elections are held, if they're fair, if they're not contested. And if the Democrats take back the House, which is entirely conceivable,

given the fall and the president's polling, we would be, I think we would be much more comfortable about the future trajectory of the United States. I think November 26 is the moment of truth here. For everybody around the world, for people who are worried about the future of democracy, for investors, for everybody, you're going to be focused on these elections. You chose Gaza not as a 2025 story, but as a 2026 story. You know, nothing is stable. Let me just put it that way.

Right now, frankly, the president put a thumb on the scale to get this, but we now have a frozen status quo around the yellow line that is genuinely unstable. This story cannot stay still ready if the president's not able to make progress here on a force, a stabilization force, on a police force, on some governance, and on some, rebuilding, it will blow again and it will set the region on fire again in exactly the same way. That's why to me it's a 2026 story as well. Are the chances of something succeeding versus failing? Is it odds on? It's a tough hill to climb it always has been, but some progress has to make.

There has to be some hope that there's a path forward here. You don't have to go all the way. You don't even have to get halfway, but there has to be some hope there's a path forward. Yeah. And then your final 2026 story to watch is China's economy. China's economy, to me, is a big, big story and sought me if I'm taking too much time here, Red. Because I don't think we really are spending enough time understanding the contradictions in that economy. I looked at some data this last week, which showed investment falling. The housing market still collapsing with prices still on a downward trajectory.

There is no part of the Chinese economy, of the fundamentals of the Chinese economy, which is really growing right now, except for the exports. And those exports are growing in part not only because China wants to undermine the West, but because there is no capacity to consume what China makes. How do you put this picture together, Roger? It's gone up the value chain. It's a manufacturer of some of the most advanced products because it's always been about applications of technology.

But internally, this is an economy that's contracting. That is a huge problem for the world, and it's a huge problem for Xi Jinping, regardless of what anybody else does. Does it make Taiwan a bigger or lesser risk in the coming year, period of time if China's economy is weak versus strong. So I think if we have if we if we if we take with a story that this is a weakening Chinese economy you could argue either way. You could say well this is a story of a leader who needs to distract all those Chinese and the young people we have

high unemployment hugely high youth unemployment we have Gen Z in the West they have what they call the lying flat generation which means they've given up. They're lying down. They're not trying. They're so dispirited. So you say, distract them, you know, evoked nationalist spirit and engage in some nationalist adventure abroad. That's why the China, Taiwan, Japan's story is so big.

The other story here is Shishiping is a cautious leader. He's in between a rock and a hard place, I think, on the Chinese economy. How many markets can you flood without the Europeans? But doesn't Putin show a little? at least in the short term, if you gear up for war, you have a huge domestic, economic, positive hit. Yes. Because suddenly all that slack capacity is pushed into a war effort.

And then Putin has become trapped now in a sense of an economy that's so geared towards this war effort. It's hard to see him ending the war. That's right. You mean inflate the economy, you also distract all the young people. and you get an upsurge of nationalism. There's no question about it, but it's short-term gain, long-term pain

because he's so distorted the Russian economy. The same thing could happen to China, frankly. Big, big story, the Chinese economy. I agree. I'll go through my list quickly. First, we've talked about it a little bit already. I think one of the big stories to watch, I don't know if it's going to happen,

is the AI bubble and whether it pops. It is notable that as we ring out the year, a lot of the big AI companies from Navidia to Meta to Microsoft, their stocks have sold off. It's not in anywhere close to a correction at this point, a substantive correction. But we're starting to see some weakness amongst these companies that have enjoyed this incredible run-up. And as you said earlier, a run-up that has aggregated a lot of. lot of American investment and capital in literally half a dozen or less firms.

So the concentration of the paper gains, because this is an important thing you remember about investing, it's not real until you sell it. Right. And each time, you know, you're selling someone else is buying, so when you're selling, you need a buyer, and that's often why when these bubbles pop, it can be quite kind of violent because suddenly there's a buyer's strike. and you can't sell, or if you do want to sell, it's at a price that is, in many cases, a lot less than people who've been buying into this AI bubble as it has inflated over the last two and a half years.

So it's one of these things that I think, like so many things, we'll look back upon and say, wow, why didn't we see that? Especially when we have the example of the dot-com bubble. We have the example of all kinds of real estate bubble. Real estate bubble here in Canada or China or elsewhere, economics, investing, markets, they're not stable. They inflate and deflate. And again, this is a known unknown, but I think it's one of the things to think about

because it will have so many other potential implications for economic growth, if that capital goes away, if there's capital destruction, at least paper destruction, that has. has big psychological effects on the animal spirits that are currently now kind of gripping the U.S. economy less here in Canada. So there's so many different dimensions to this that, again, I think it's something. Let me ask you one quick question. Reggie, when you compare the concentration among these five or six firms, proportionally, is this like the robber barons at the beginning of the 20th century where you had concentration of capital, that was on present. That's what led ultimately to regulation, because competition disappears when you get

concentration. Yeah, in that case you had Teddy Roosevelt, who interestingly was a Republican, who really busted up the big steel truss. And, you know, the original kind of rough rider, as Roosevelt was called, Teddy Roosevelt, that is. In this day and age, though, one of the maybe reasons why this bubble won't pop is that America seems much more comfortable right. now under the Trump administration with the idea that the country can and will be an oligarchy, a technologically led oligarchy where these large handful, half a dozen so companies, have not only disproportionate economic and technological dominance, they have political dominance, too. So we'll have to see, I've often been curious why there isn't more anger on the part of,

of Gen Z, these other cohorts that are not performing particularly well in this economy, the so-called K-shaped recovery, where the top, you know, 0.1% of asset class holders in the United States, you know, control a third of all the wealth compared to the other 99.9% below them. Why there hasn't been more focus on the tech bros and on their campaign under Trump to really exercise real political power just in the last week, banning efforts to allow for state regulation of AI

by having Trump sign an executive order. Yeah. It's astonishing. The story is really astonishing. And, you know, I think the answer to your question may be that the young people who feel that prospects are dim at the same time are spending so much time on their phone

using digital technology that they deflect their anger away from people who make the products that are consuming all their time and energy as they lie flat. Yeah. Or blame the Jews, as we discussed on last week's show. My other big story, again, playing on our selection, a person of the year is the continued destabilizing effects of a Russia at war.

I really do not think that this latest set of negotiations, will lead to any kind of lasting settlement, let alone a ceasefire, I think, once again, to their credit, the Europeans have walked Trump back from, you know, the maximal Russian demands to something that will be unacceptable to Vladimir Putin. I hope I'm proved wrong, but I think one of the big destabilizing factors, because we're always have to be worried about a mistake that leads to an escalation between Russia and NATO, between Russia and Europe, and I think that's one of the things

we've got to keep an eye on. You know, all the evidence suggests, you're right, Rudyard. There have been, for the first time, really intensive negotiations going on between Ukraine, Europe, the United States, and Donald Trump actually sentenced people to the table, but Vladimir Putin, unmovable,

said again, and again, he is not interested in a deal of this kind. So I'd be really surprised if this particular round got to, us to a breakthrough. And then just finally, we discussed it on last week's episode. We kicked it around extensively for our audience, which is Trump's declining health. And I think you have to acknowledge that it has declined both physically, emotionally, possibly

mentally. We're seeing somebody understandably under the immense burdens of this office who has, as the year gone on, behaved in an erratic fashion. And I say that that's the most charitable way to put it. The reason I think that it's serious is that he's so often behaving against his own interests. You identified the midterm elections in 2026 as a critical story of the year ahead. He's doing all kinds of things that are completely against him performing in those elections in a way, let's say, that allows him to maintain control over Congress.

it suggests to me that someone who is out of control, or maybe to put it in other way, is simply not in control of himself. And that will prove, you know, Trump thrives because he connects, he emotionally connects with his supporters. Those Trump rallies have a chilling component to them as well. But this is a genius communicator at his prime who connected emotionally with people.

This is a very tired. Enfebled. Enfeebled. Enfeebled. Inteated. Trimbed. There's a picture of him not long ago, sleeping during a meeting.

You know, the MAGA movement, the best thing they have going for them is Trump as a communicator. And the Trump that we're seeing now is not the Trump that campaigned in 2024. Of course, just not. Wouldn't the irony be that Biden, in a sense, lost the election and that horrible debate performance that exposed him as too old and enfeebled,

really to viably become president to now have elected a president who equally during the term of his office will become unviable due to his age? Yeah. You doubt, you know, that's in a sense it's made more likely right here that people pay attention to it because a lot of anger against the Biden family because they protected him, the president. They concealed. They knew that there were difficulties. And the whole team circled the wagons around them. Already there's stories that Donald Trump doesn't come to work now until 11 in the morning and ends the day by 3.34. That was the story of Joe Biden that last

year. That's very fresh in American memory. Voters will not overlook that. Yeah. Well, Janice, a great recap of the year. We will reconvene in 2026 in a week's time to kick off another 52 episodes. We've been at this now for almost five years. I don't think we've missed a week together. We have not. We have not. It'll be five weeks in March, five years. Wow. So you do the math. But that's a lot of shows. A lot of shows. Yeah, 250 or more. And I've enjoyed every one of them. So thank you so much for coming here to the studio today. And happy new year to you, Rudd and your family and to all our loyal listeners. It's always a pleasure be with you. Here, here. Until next year, everybody, bye-bye. The Monk debates are a project of

the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.