The weirdness of 2025 has left me with no choice but to take a different approach from the usual end-of-year review and farewell. To begin with, I’m not even sure what year it really was.
When it came to US foreign policy, 2025 felt like a replay of 2003. That year saw the US and UK invade Iraq under the fabricated premise of ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ This phrase has now resurfaced in American media (mainly Fox News) and far-right podcasts to justify US military strikes against Venezuela. The false justifications followed public outcry over the unlawful and deadly targeting of Venezuelan fishing boats, on suspicion – without evidence – of drug trafficking into the US. For a clever montage highlighting how the government in 2003 used the exact same rhetoric for false pretexts for war as today’s US government and media mouthpieces, I recommend this recent episode of The Daily Show.
Or have we simply repeated 1992? That was the year US president George H. W. Bush, at the Rio Earth Summit, announced that ‘growth is the engine of change,’ making it clear that the US would not sign any biodiversity treaty. Bush reportedly said at Rio: ‘the American way of life is not up for negotiation.’ Sound familiar? Quotes from the current White House occupant during 2025 include: ‘Climate change is a con job – the greatest con job’ and ‘Our country is on the verge of a comeback, the likes of which the world has never witnessed.’
Stepping further back in time, 2025 could easily be mistaken for 1942, when President Roosevelt bypassed Congress and used his executive powers to incarcerate 120,000 people of Japanese heritage – two-thirds of them US citizens. In 2025, ICE deported an estimated 340,000 immigrants, with some 65,000 still being held in detention centres.
I don’t wish to fall onto the adage about history repeating itself. The assumption there has been of centuries passing and people not learning from the mistakes of history. These 2025 throwbacks are within the twentieth century, some in my living memory. The awful craziness of the past year is the result of wilful ignorance.
Of course, these examples come from the US, which brings me to the other side of this peculiar year: the ways in which the US government is leaving its mark on the rest of the world. I hesitate to revisit the endless list of presidential lies, acts of corruption, hate-fuelled attacks on individuals and countries and the somersaulting of international markets, food security and military alliances. Worse still, even though I live outside the US – in England and France – 2025 was saturated with reports of these events starring you know who. Hardly a day went by without his raspy voice and orange face – and the mute button only works with television. His childish intonation would even be in my head when I read him quoted in the newspapers. In France, the Ouest-France/Tagaday barometer declared the US president the most ‘médiatisée’ person of 2025.
This is why 2025 was such a difficult year to live through – a year so strange and unpleasant that I cannot find the right words for goodbye – ‘Good riddance’ seems too simple and direct. I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. In this week’s New Yorker, Susan Glasser notes ‘In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.’
Instead, I offer: ‘Hello and welcome, 2026. I do hope you’re a better year than your cousin 2025, who’s spinning and raging out the door like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon.’
Living in this mindful moment, I sit back and embrace the transition into the new year without judgement or expectation, appreciating the emptiness of this quiet pause in time.
Paola Trimarco 