2025: A Year Defined By Trump Overreach & People-Powered Pushback
While the Trump Administration has sought to speedrun Project 2025, they've turned the country against them. This year has been a story of Trump's authoritarian actions and the inspiring backlash.
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Covering this year has been challenging as a journalist.
I’ve made it a priority to walk the line of accurately depicting the corrupt depravity being unleashed by the Trump Administration while not resorting to outrage bait and doomerism. I’ve sought to detail the damage President Trump and his team of sycophants have caused while also refusing to overestimate them or describe them as wielding power they do not yet have.
After all, one of the Trump Administration’s key tactics is to induce fear and make themselves appear stronger than they actually are.
As 2025 has progressed, it has become clear that, as much as this year has been defined by Trump’s overreach, it’s also been about his incompetence, increasing political weakness, and the resounding pushback from the American people.
The seemingly contradictory storylines of this moment have converged into a single, crystallized narrative: An unhinged, egomaniacal president is recklessly seeking to consolidate authoritarian power and enrich himself while unleashing economic and humanitarian harm on the American people, triggering legal, cultural, and political backlash that’s now weakening Trump and his party.
The scale of Trump’s overreach can be seen in the Trump Administration’s early efforts to speedrun Project 2025, which caused massive missteps that backfired rather quickly.
The Overreach
None of the moves the Trump Administration made were surprising to me, as someone who documented every single day of Trump’s first term and warned about Project 2025 since 2023. The Heritage Foundation-led plot to reshape the federal government into a tool of the far-right got off to a fiery and robust start.
On day one of his administration, Trump unleashed a flurry of executive orders that directly mirrored Project 2025. Trump immediately attempted to end Birthright Citizenship (unconstitutional), rescinded 78 executive actions from President Biden, declared a national emergency at the border, left the Paris Climate Accords, left the World Health Organization, ended federal DEI initiatives, declared there are only two genders, reinstated Schedule F, and more.
While the policies pursued weren’t surprising, I didn’t lose my capacity for shock and alarm as Elon Musk proceeded to literally take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy. I was expecting, and frankly more worried about, a Russell Vought-led effort at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) where he would methodically and quietly implement Project 2025’s goals behind the scenes. Musk’s early involvement with DOGE backfired, causing damage to his own companies, torpedoing the Trump Administration’s honeymoon phase, reportedly angering Vought, and beginning Trump’s consistent decline in approval.
But as I predicted, the Musk era didn’t last long, and Russell Vought then took over the DOGE cuts and the implementation of Project 2025. Now, under Vought’s leadership, the Trump Administration ends 2025 with 50% of Project 2025’s goals either enacted or pursued, according to the Project 2025 tracker.
Among the objectives, President Trump has reinstated Schedule F to strip civil service protections from federal workers, purged over 300,000 federal workers, moved to unilaterally dismantle agencies like the Education Department, pursued extreme immigration crackdowns, rolled back Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, withdrew from global multilateral agreements, signed anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders, and implemented environmental regulation rollbacks. All of this is straight out of Project 2025’s playbook.
President Trump has also sought to exploit unlawful emergency declarations seeking false justifications for expanding his power. Trump has deployed and threatened to deploy the military to Democratic-run cities under the guise of false crime emergencies, deported innocent immigrants under a false immigration emergency, and deployed globally destabilizing tariffs under a false economic emergency.
Trump has also unleashed masked ICE agents in unmarked cars who patrol the streets in cities across America, racially profiling and detaining people. His Department of Defense has ordered the extrajudicial killings of over 100 people on boats in the Caribbean.
Trump has launched phony investigations into his political targets, pressured media organizations to bend their coverage to his whim, and sought to reshape cultural institutions and universities into the MAGA image.
Amid this onslaught, at times it’s been hard to see the forest for the trees.
But if you refuse to give in to despair, you can see clearly that the biggest hindrance to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions has been his own incompetence. With every ill-advised action, there’s been an equal and opposite pushback.
The Backlash
The haphazard, foolish pursuit of Trump’s lawless vision of the presidency has resulted in over 100 court rulings at least temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s actions, according to The New York Times’ tracking tool.
There have been countless missteps and scandals, ranging from Signalgate to the Epstein cover-up to the overall reaction to Trump’s policies.
The Trump Administration and the Republican Party’s key legislative accomplishment is an incredibly unpopular law that amounts to the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history. Meanwhile, as President Trump raises prices on Americans, he’s treating the presidency like another asset on the Trump family balance sheet, blatantly enriching himself through his crypto schemes and real estate deals.
President Trump’s tariffs have ensured that inflation remains persistent. This comes after the slowest months of job growth since the pandemic in the Summer. 46% of Americans say the cost of living in the US is the worst it’s ever been, including 37% of Trump voters, according to a new Politico poll. I broke this down in a recent appearance on MS NOW.
Because of this, multiple polls have found President Trump’s approval at a second-term low of 36%, which is just 2 points higher than his all-time Gallup low of 34% in the aftermath of January 6. His approval among independents has been seen as low as 25%, and his approval among Republicans has tanked as low as the 70s. As you’ll see in this chart from G. Elliott Morris, Trump is underwater on all key issues:
Republicans are also consistently down in the generic ballot.
It’s not just polls that indicate these trends. The most important polls of all are elections, and they did not go Trump and the GOP’s way this year.
The 2025 off-year elections showcased massive Democratic wins and stunning Republican underperformances. In the November elections, Democrats notched decisive wins in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Maine, Georgia, and California, to name a few. Democrats saw double-digit wins in the Virginia and New Jersey governor races, and counties with heavy Latino populations saw double-digit swings to Democrats. We saw similar swings in special elections this year.
While Democrats notched huge wins heading into 2026, the MAGA coalition was fracturing.
Trump’s months-long fight to prevent the release of the Epstein files sparked cascading defections within the Republican Party. The firestorm over Tucker Carlson’s platforming of Nick Fuentes’s neo-Nazism has splintered the right, triggering resignations at the Heritage Foundation. Debates over H-1B visas after Trump’s defense of foreign workers triggered the “America First” crowd. And Trump’s overall political weakness led Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to break with the president on everything from affordability to Israel to the Epstein files before she announced her retirement from Congress.
A new NBC News poll showcased the splintering of MAGA, with traditional Republicans and MAGA identifying Republicans now standing at 50/50:
Trump’s nationwide gerrymandering push has also met unexpected resistance from within his own party, with Indiana being the latest state to reject mid-decade redistricting.
This backlash from the American people and increasing defiance from Republicans is an indicator of this essential truth: President Trump has entered his lame duck era. The worry that he would run for a third term and pursue a dictatorship has weakened with each passing day. Trump can barely hold his coalition together, and his political weakness is sparking new acts of defiance.
President Trump and his team clearly misread their 2024 election win as an overall cultural mandate, and not an affordability mandate. So, they’ve spent this year overplaying their hands and worsening the core issue they were elected to resolve. Now, it’s backfiring on them.
The Trump era is far from over, and there’s still a lot of damage the Trump Administration will do before it’s over, but one thing we can say for sure is that President Trump is now failing in more ways than he’s succeeding. The American people are beginning to see through the con in increasing numbers, and the Republican Party is paying the price at the ballot box.
We’ll see what 2026 brings, but I believe the tide began to turn in 2025.
