Our Year From Hell
Mehdi on Trump's first 12 months in office, the DOJ targeting Don Lemon, and Mike Pompeo saying the quiet part out loud about the GOP's disregard for Palestinian lives.
On this day in 2017 and 2025, Donald Trump was inaugurated, first as the 45th president of the United States, and then as the 47th president. He hasn’t ruled out being sworn in for an (unconstitutional) third term on January 20, 2029.
Good morning! Mehdi here. I often say Trump years are like dog years. Well, today we mark an actual, real-life, real-world Trump full year in office. Twelve long months of lies, abuses, and scandals. The good news? Only 36 months to go!
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump’s hellish first year in power and how it was worse than we all thought it would be, the president prepares to send troops to invade Minnesota, and the DOJ targets ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon.
🚨 Don’t miss our LIVE in-person event in DC tonight: Join Rep. Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, Miles Taylor, Swin, and me for a powerful evening at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, to mark one year of Trump. It’s happening today!
In Defense of TDS
Remember TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome? That rather smug and annoying phrase deployed against anyone who dared to take Donald Trump both literally and seriously – as a threat to democracy, the rule of law, and, yes, basic human decency. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, it became the rhetorical equivalent of patting someone on the head and saying, calm down, dear. Don’t be hysterical. Don’t exaggerate. He’s not that bad.
Opponents of Trump, we were constantly told, had succumbed to irrational hysteria; to an inability “to distinguish between legitimate policy differences on the one hand and signs of psychic pathology on the other,” in the words of the late Charles Krauthammer, who originally coined the phrase Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Personally, I have lost count of the number of people – including in both progressive circles and minority communities – who told me throughout the course of 2024 that I was being alarmist, hyperbolic, melodramatic, in my repeated warnings about how Trump would use a second term in office to go after his political opponents, attack minorities, start new wars, and govern like an authoritarian. “We survived Trump once; we can survive him a second time,” was a line I heard again and again. I was told the ‘guardrails’ would hold. And the courts! And the (alleged) ‘adults in the room’!
Well, here we are. A year into his second term. Exactly 12 months to the day since Trump was inaugurated for a second time and declaimed he had been “saved by God to make America great again.” And it turns out, TDS was more a prognosis than a pathology. If anything, as my Zeteo colleague, the veteran political journalist John Harwood, recently observed: “The most dire pre-election warnings about how Trump would damage America and the world, dismissed as hysterical at the time, were in fact understated.”
A year into this car-crash of a presidency, it is blatantly obvious to anyone paying even the mildest of attention that the guardrails have vanished, the so-called adults in the room have been either fired or rolled over, and Donald Trump’s second term is now already unprecedented in terms of its cruelty, criminality, and chaos.
Do I really need to remind you?
This is a president who, in the space of 12 months, in just his first year back in office, has defied the Supreme Court, ignored more than 50 court rulings; tried to ban birthright citizenship; pardoned nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 rioters; called for the prosecution of his political opponents; opened a criminal investigation into the chair of the Federal Reserve; illegally invoked the Alien Enemies Act; threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act; empowered ICE to deport, detain, and kill US citizens; sent migrants to be tortured in El Salvador; suspended immigrant visas for applicants from 75 countries; illegally deployed the National Guard to Democratic-run cities against the objections of state officials; searched a reporter’s home and seized her phone and laptops; called for the sacking of late-night comedians; sued universities, media organizations, and tech companies; withdrew the US from 66 international treaties and organizations; withdrew the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords (again); bombed seven different countries on three different continents; conducted at least 35 airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific killing more than 100 people; kidnapped the president of Venezuela and declared himself ‘acting president’ of that country; greenlit an Israeli-made famine in Gaza; threatened to conquer or annex Greenland, Panama and even Canada; berated the president of Ukraine in the Oval Office; turned our European allies against us; prioritized white South Africans for refugee resettlement; fired the heads of independent agencies and purged inspectors general from government departments; refused to release the Epstein files; dropped the number of vaccines that are officially recommended for every child; accepted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar; increased his personal net worth by $3 billion; refused to rule out a third term; announced the shuttering of the Department of Education; dismantled USAID, contributing to the deaths of 600,000 people; and said the only limits on his presidential powers are his own “mind” and “morality.”