Column: After a bruising election year in America what will 2025 bring?
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- Farewell to a year and an all-eclipsing presidential campaign like no other.
- Two columnists extend an open hand to Trump, but warn against turning a blind eye
SACRAMENTO — How do you summarize — or make sense of — 2024? It’s been a year of upheaval, division, winners and losers. And perhaps most disturbingly, a year that has exposed fault lines in American democracy that at times seem too wide to cross.
Our columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak continue a tradition of closing out December with a little perspective and a dash of crystal-balling for what lies ahead. As we enter 2025, here’s how they’re leaving behind the old and ushering in the new.
Chabria: The word I am hearing most as we head into the New Year is exhaustion. Many of us can’t even remember the big events of 2024 outside of a presidential campaign like no other. But we’ve had them: In March, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine continued, and a Syrian dictator recently unexpectedly toppled. Taylor Swift finally stopped touring, and Sean “Diddy” Combs was arrested on sex trafficking charges. We even had a summer Olympics in Paris, which seems about 300 years ago.
But all of that was eclipsed by a presidential election that has left half of America cheering and half of America reeling; at the end of the day, the popular vote was nearly evenly split, with neither candidate reaching 50%. So much for a mandate.
If exhaustion is the word to close out 2024, I’m nominating “commitment” as the word for 2025. How committed are Republicans to implementing Trump’s campaign promises to fundamentally remake America by kicking out immigrants and implementing conservative social policies such as further restricting abortion access? And how committed and capable are Democrats of regrouping and opposing those plans?
What do you think? How are you feeling as the year ends?
With Donald Trump’s victory and California’s center-right shift on election day, the Democrat has begun popping up more in the red reaches of the state. It is something he should have done long ago.
Barabak: I’m feeling both hunky and dory, but that’s because I don’t let things beyond my control — earthquakes, asteroids, crushingly disappointing election results — get me down. But this isn’t a self-help column, or a prescription for better (or impervious) living. So I’ll stick to our brief, which is assessing the year past and looking ahead.
If I were to choose a word for 2025, I suppose I’d go with “curious.” As in curious to see what 2025 brings with a president hellbent on disruption (war with Panama, anyone?), operating with, as you suggest, the most tenuous-to-nonexistent of mandates.
In my view, Trump was elected mainly to tame inflation — bringing down the oft-discussed price of eggs and bacon, for starters — and securing the country’s southern border with Mexico. We could search high and low and we’d probably find precisely zero people in America who voted for Trump because they wanted the U.S. to take control of Greenland.
I won’t deny there’s a deep-seated unhappiness with government and politicians, a widespread feeling the status quo isn’t working and an eagerness to see Washington — and Sacramento, for that matter — shaken up. But randomized, unceasing chaos? We’ll see how that goes down. If you think the 2024 campaign was wild — a switcheroo of Democratic nominees, two attempts on Trump’s life, too many weird campaign-trail moments (Hannibal Lecter! Arnold Palmer’s penis!) to possibly list here — well, buckle up.
Chabria: True words, Mark. We are in for a ride. As you and I have spoken about in the past, what’s best for America and democracy is giving our incoming president both respect and a chance. But I also think it’s critical that we remember that Trump has a history of lying and lawbreaking, as evidenced by both his criminal convictions and his loss in a sexual-abuse civil lawsuit to E. Jean Carroll.
His actions show us that he is not a man to be trusted. But we are in the strange days of rewriting recent history to soften the unpleasant parts, while also gearing up to repeat them.
A shocking series of murders stunned the rural California mountain town of Placerville in the 1980s. Authorities were under intense pressure to solve the cases, and for a while it seemed they did. But Times reporters Anita Chabria and Jessica Garrison spent more than a year reexamining the crimes and found troubling questions about both justice and the justice system.
For example, Trump’s once-and-future “border czar,” Thomas Homan, said he plans on not just bringing back policies that separate families, but giving American-born children (and therefore citizens) of undocumented immigrants the painful option of being separated from parents or being deported with them.
Some Trump supporters have said they like his brash talk, but believe it’s no more than posturing. This coming year will be revelatory on that front. Whether you trust Trump now or not, we’re about to find out if he’s all talk.
But it’s not just Trump. We’ve seen those around him, most notably Elon Musk, grab power and move swiftly to cram their self-serving agendas down our throat.
Barabak: A candidate elected as the populist tribune of the aggrieved working class surrounds himself with a team of billionaires and names foxes to guard government henhouses and dismantle programs serving many of those very same hard-pressed voters.
But I don’t want to be too much of a churl.
For years, the legendary Washington Post political cartoonist Herbert Block, aka Herblock, drew Richard Nixon with a menacing five o’clock shadow. After Nixon was elected president in 1968, Herblock drew a freshly shorn Nixon, on the theory that every new president deserves “a clean shave.” (I’m not that old, folks. I just read a lot of history. And assorted political trivia.)
The California Labor Federation shunned partisanship in favor of a campaign focusing on hard work and noting the lack of congressional accomplishment. The strategy helped flip a handful of House seats.
So there is something sporting and noble about a fresh start and leaving bygones in the past, as you suggest.
That said, we agree there’s a danger in too much memory-holing — especially if you’re expecting an emboldened 78-year-old twice-impeached, feloniously convicted leopard to suddenly change spots. Let’s hope for the best, but not be delusional or too quick with the whitewash. We saw how Nixon’s presidency turned out.
On a more cheerful note, you were quite taken with Beyoncé’s NFL halftime performance at the Ravens-Texans Christmas showdown.
Chabria: As were we all! Beyoncé is queen of her craft, and reminded us all what fun looks and sounds like. We can all use a dose of that right now.
But Beyoncé is also a reminder about the importance of knowing yourself and standing your ground. Of all the many forgotten history lessons of recent years, hers is one of the few with a happy ending. In 2016, after she appeared on the Country Music Assn. Awards, there was backlash to her supposedly wading outside her genre and into the boot-stomping, flag-waving — very white — world of country.
Flash forward to her recent NFL appearance and the release of her country album, “Act II: Cowboy Carter,” and it’s quite clear, she persisted.
Sometimes, resisting is simply persisting, one day at a time.
So with that in mind, and with journalism under attack, I’ll end this year with a thank you. To all the readers who have stuck with Mark and me through this election, I appreciate your willingness to hear our perspectives. I won’t speak for Mark, but for myself, I generally don’t care about Republican or Democrat, but I do care about writing with compassion and truth.
So whatever comes next, my New Year’s resolution is to persist in staying true to those core principals. Any final thoughts from you, Mark?
California law enforcement is in the midst of a culture war, as experts inside and outside the system question a commonly used police interrogation method that they say can lead to false confessions and wrongful convictions.
Barabak: Just a question: Will you think less of me as a colleague and human being if I confess I hadn’t the slightest clue about Beyoncé’s halftime performance until you mentioned it? I guess I was too deeply burrowed in my history books, absorbing political trivia.
But, like you, I want to thank our readers for sticking with us and echo that sentiment as regards compassion and truth. I also hope we managed to inform and occasionally entertain you along the way. And a special thanks to the paid subscribers among you, for helping keep the lights on.
We’d both like to wish each and every one of you — Democrat, Republican, libertarian, vegetarian — a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
We’ll see you in 2025.
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