A Daily Reid: 2025 Wasn't shit ... 2026: do better

We learned a lot about our country last year ... not all of it great

The year of our Lord 2025 was one hell of a shit year. It began with the inauguration of an insurrectionist president, who completed what he started on January 6, 2021 after four years of lying, whining, and manipulating 80 million American fools into letting him back into the White House. Did none of these people watch Sinners???

And once the Devil was back inside, he wasted no time fucking the country up. He started by pardoning his 1,600 violent minions who sacked the capitol on his behalf, including the most violent among them. (Some of the most prominent insurrectionists are planning an anniversary march next week, to continue telling themselves that they are patriots, not pieces of the same excrement their like left on the Capitol floor after the riot… and by the way, God Bless Jack Smith forever…) In doing so, he spat in the face of the law enforcement that he and maga claim to love. Things did not get better from there.

We had the TACO nightmare of on and off tariffs …

The threats to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal (the former are still not done with)…

Trump’s continued cozying up to his idol, Vlad Putin, including literally rolling out the red carpet for him in Alaska (from which apparently Trump now apparently wants to drill a tunnel to Moscow…)

The White House red carpet was rolled out for Bibi the Butcher — Israel’s most notorious war criminal and land grabber, whom Trump also invited to party with him and his fellow Marie Antoinettes at Mar-a-Lago on New Years Eve. For his next act, Bibi will be brokering deals with Jared and Trump’s other flunky / business partner Steve Witkoff to add the flattened, likely soon-to-be ethnically cleansed Gaza to the Trump-Kushner real estate portfolio.

Meetings with other foreign leaders didn’t go quite so well.

Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelenskyy got screamed at for not wearing a tie (which will be the least of his problems, since Trump is now attempting to steal Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for a Moscow-dictated “peace.”) Zelenskyy now seems almost desperate to curry enough favor with Trump that the war can finally end, as Trump vowed he would make happen “on day one” of his second term.

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa got a TV-aided lecture from Trump in the Oval about fictional white genocide, and Trump even made good on one of the goals of global white nationalists by importing a claque of white South African “victims” into the U.S. It went well for some of them, I guess, except for this guy, who is now facing re-deportation. And White South Africans now stand as the world’s only eligible refugees to the U.S. No Blacks, no Browns, no Asians allowed. Nearly 40 countries face total or partial travel bans, and Trump and maga are attempting a Bibi-style ethnic cleansing of the United States using ICE, federal police, and in some states, the U.S. military (although at long last, the Supreme Court has said maybe no to the military occupation of U.S. cities.

Also WTF Kavanaugh? Suddenly, you’re not so much with the racial profiling? Have you informed Herr Alito of your inconstancy???

Not to make the bad list too exhausting, but in 2025, we saw Black, Latino, LGBTQ and women’s history summarily erased from the official public records of the U.S., the end of the United States as a participant in improving global health and stability, and the ripping away of the pretense that we are a moral, Christian nation. Instead, maga and Trump turned us into a nation of mean, angry people, who genuinely hate each other, and who include tens of millions of people who willingly re-elected a literal criminal back into the White House.

And while Trump failed to fulfill his promises to make the country safer, more prosperous, or more affordable in 2025 — far from it; we’re damned near in a recession due to his TACO tariffs — he and his family and a small club of billionaires got a whole lot richer. The open profiteering and theft was breathtaking even for Trump, who — if his clearly failing health holds up — will end his second term as something he could never become by his own merit: a billionaire in his own right.

We have a vain, idiotic defense secretary, who styles himself “the secretary of WAR” LOL.

A crass, self-interested fop for a secretary of state.

A cruel, ignorant, distorted-faced fool for a homeland security chief.

The guy from The Real World Boston is running our federal transportation system into the ground (literally, and with tragic consequences…)

A captured Kennedy is allowing measles and the flu to spread like wildfire.

And we’re stuck with an almost comically corrupt Justice Department under Pam Bondi — with Trump’s failed legal team littered all over the agency, and podcasters running the FBI (poorly — whose main purpose, apparently, is to try to prosecute people who have made Trump sad.

2025 was also a banner year for losing beloved celebrities, including Malcolm Jamal Warner, D’Angelo AND Angie Stone, and during the Christmas holidays, the great Rob Reiner, who Trump viciously attacked following his and his wife’s murder, allegedly by their own son.

Trump also spent the days before New Years attacking the Kennedy family, following the death of Caroline Kennedy’s daughter — to punish them for resisting his attempt to steal the Kennedy Center from JFK — the beautiful DC theater that he’s now bankrupting in true Trump style. Artists are canceling their planned performances, and audiences are staying away in droves, particularly now that Trump has done his favorite thing: slapping his name on someone else’s building.

On the upside, two of the worst people in the country got their asses thoroughly whooped. Andrew Tate took his licking from a brother named DeMoor, who mollywhopped him whilst wearing pink gloves:

… and the thoroughly idiotic Jake Paul got his jaw broken by the gorgeous Brit Anthony Joshua (who sadly, then lost two of his closest friends in a tragic car crash in which he too was injured.) Did I mention, 2025 wasn’t shit??? Still, this was a thing of beauty:

The year that broke the constitution and exploded the myths of America

Last year, we learned in so many ways that what we thought were rules and laws and constitutional edicts were really just suggestions, which presupposed that U.S. presidents would always be moral white men from respectable wealthy families who would never dream of breaking faith with the notions of freedom and liberty (for themselves) in the Sacred Document. The whole American system as it turns out, rested on the very shaky edifice of this agreement. As long as presidents agreed to abide by the constitution, the constitution had effect. Now that we have a president who does not agree to abide by the constitution, and a billionaire-captured Supreme Court majority that agrees that he doesn’t have to, we have returned to the oligarchy that we began as. A small number of very wealthy men do as they please and pay no taxes, while everyone else just tries to survive. And so we learned in 2025 that:

Trump is our slovenly, lascivious dictator.

ICE is our Gestapo.

We have concentration camps again.

U.S. higher education — once a source of national pride — as well as our museums, national parks and natural spaces are all under attack by Trump, his warped, 1930s cabinet members like Stephen Miller, TV’s Hegseth, Tom Homan and the like, plus the greedy oligarchs who seek to exploit it all, for their own profit and for the sake of their racism and egotism.

The reimposition of slavery for detained migrants and forced labor by the poor ARE the plan.

Q’anon got some things right

We also confirmed in 2025 that yes, Q’anon, there really was a global pedo network, serving the most powerful and nastiest men on earth. It was run by Jeffrey Epstein and was populated by a ring of pageant, apparel, and modeling agency owners who serviced international leaders, business tycoons, high priced attorneys and celebrity creeps by trafficking women and girls who aspired to be rich and famous in the shadow of the 1980s, which was the era of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And Trump was right in the middle of it all. That DC Pizza parlor was not.

The agonistes over releasing the Epstein files even drove Q’anon curious Marjorie Taylor Greene out of The Faith — whether genuinely or because she’s getting out of dodge with $25 million in trades — she’s out and seemingly building her own maga alternative, with lots of media time for herself, including on The View and with the New York Times.

Greene’s break with maga comes as Trump hugged Israel tighter and part of the maga base got off the Zion train. The breech over the Gaza genocide (which also took out lots of Palestinian Christians and their churches — something the conservative Qaida maybe didn’t previously realize existed) spilled over into the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder this August. After the fury of cancellations and firings that amounted to a Kirk McCarthyism from the right, as Kirk became maga’s Horst Wessel died down, all that was left was the infighting between the pro-Israel right (represented by The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, the insane, Muslim hating meltface, Laura Loomer (Trump’s former plane buddy), and far right podcaster Mark Levin versus Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, MTG and nazi fan Nick Fuentes. Newsweek has a good breakdown of the contretemps here, if you’re interested in the gory details. The breakup over Israel has even hit the Project 2025 radicals at Heritage, which is good news if it means they’re distracted from turning the U.S. into a fake Christian* version of Taliban led Afghanistan or zealot-led Iran.

Oh we also met Erika Kirk in 2025 … Trump’s former pageant queen turned modern-day Tamy Faye Bakker… what a treat. (And no ma’am, you still cannot hug me…)

This was also the year that the oligarchs all-but completed their takeover of mainstream media and social media, too. Elon, the Ellisons, Zuckerberg, Bezos and the rest have made it clear that they don’t value the First Amendment — they intend to warp it, like the rest of the constitution, to serve their own endless lust for wealth and unregulated power. And there are enough Bari Weisses in the muck, willing to play Orc to their Saurons by destroying venerated institutions like CBS News, that the media itself is in danger of being weaponized against democracy.

We ended 2025 in an incredibly dangerous place, with our democracy teetering on the brink of collapse.

Do better, 2026

I’m sure I’ve missed a lot (trauma can make you forgetful.) But to bottom line it, 2025 was a house of horrors. It had its moments — including the launch of this Substack and my YouTube-based podcast, The Joy Reid Show (after I got fired by the Artist formerly known as MSNBC, who now goes by Ms. NOW.) But there were so many bitter lessons learned, that the project this year is to learn them — and to take action based on that unrequested education.

We come into 2026 with our eyes open. With the reimposition of Trump as president, white supremacy is the official policy of the United States, just as it was in the beginning, after the then-oligarchs broke away from The Crown in 1776. It is that white supremacist version of America that Trump means to celebrate in 2026.

But we needn’t accede to that celebration.

We still own ourselves, and we have the right to refuse.

I for one, will not be bullied into celebrating a nation who officially states that only this is an American family:

… and that only white men should comprise the labor force … and that only white men (and a handful of ghoulishly surgically enhanced white women) should be allowed to get a college education or have a job in the military, corporate America, or the federal government.

Say it with me, class:

1. White men have advantaged access to high paying white and blue collar jobs in most states.

2. This advantage for upper and middle class jobs strengthens in states with larger minority workforces.

3. In contrast, for working class jobs, White men face considerable employment competition from minority men in these same states with large minority workforces.

4. White men’s advantages are weaker, and sometimes absent, in occupations that require educational certification. Educational requirements favor women’s employment.

5. In every state, except for Utah and Washington, White women are more likely to be found in professional jobs than White men.

6. Only in mostly white states are White men disproportionally employed in low paid occupations. In these states, better educated White women are White men’s competition for better working class jobs.

And hence, the ghoulish ethnic cleansing that ran rampant in 2026…

I am heartened by the artists dumping the Kennedy Center and hope that any decent artist will refuse to become a Minaj or a Snoop or any of those who have sold out creative people and the communities of color who literally birthed American culture, to join the unseasoned maga herd.

Not interested in their rehashed, false narrative about America’s founding.

There is no amount of bullying that will make me celebrate their lies, or respect or venerate Trump or them. They can have their false stories and their imitative, appropriated culture. I’ll just be over here with the people they want to exclude, chilling with people who are actually interesting, creative, soulful and real.

In 2026, we can seize back hope. We have primaries this spring and summer, and midterm elections in November, in which a number of amazing people — Black and Brown, Muslim, Hindu and women … atheist, Southern, Northern, Western, New Englander, Californian and Texan and many more … will be running to replace the bad guys with Mamdanis. We can flip the House, take the Senate, and like the kids in Welcome to Derry; seek to put an indigenous cage around our national, demonic clown. We can do small acts of rebellion against the regime, and prayerfully, replace it in 2028 with something we could actually call a multiracial democracy.

Housekeeping

We have a lot of big things coming up on The Joy Reid Show, including my sit-down with now mayor Zohran Mamdani (the sit-down was in December, before his inauguration), and also our The Basement interview with the head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Salam al-Maryati. The Mamdani interview premieres January 6th here on Substack or on our YouTube channel (as well as wherever you get your podcasts.) We’re also interviewing several of the hero police officers who faced down Trump’s goons on January 6, 2021. That show airs live on The Joy Reid Show on January 5th. And we have so much more coming up this year, so we hope you will subscribe, support and share!

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