democracy

WASHINGTON — Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said Friday she’s confident of her country’s eventual transition to democracy after the U.S. military ousted former President Nicolás Maduro.

But when pressed, she took pains to avoid giving any details on her plans to return home or any timetable for elections in Venezuela.

Her remarks reflect how President Trump’s endorsement of a Maduro loyalist to lead Venezuela for now has frozen out the nation’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning crusader for democracy. Still, Machado has looked to get closer to Trump, presenting her Nobel medal to him a day earlier at the White House.

As Machado was meeting with Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Venezuela to meet with acting President Delcy Rodríguez, further confirmation that Maduro’s longtime second in command was the woman the White House preferred to see managing Venezuela for now.

Speaking to reporters at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, Machado said she was “profoundly, profoundly confident that we will have an orderly transition” to democracy that would also transform Venezuela’s self-proclaimed socialist government long hostile to the U.S. into a strong U.S. ally.

She rejected the notion that Trump chose to work with Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president, over her opposition movement, whose candidate was widely believed to have won the 2024 presidential election.

“This has nothing to do with a tension or decision between Delcy Rodríguez and myself,” she said. But she stopped short of elaborating, instead pivoting to vague assertions about her movement’s popular mandate and the government’s dismal human rights record.

In apparent deference to Trump, she provided almost no details Friday about what they discussed or even what she thought the U.S. should do in Venezuela.

“I think I don’t need to urge the president on specific things,” she said.

Machado traveled to Washington looking to rekindle the support for democracy in Venezuela that Trump showed during his first administration. She presented him with the prize she won last year, praising him for what she said was his commitment to Venezuela’s freedom. The Nobel Institute has been clear, however, that the prize cannot be shared or transferred.

Trump, who has actively campaigned to be awarded the prize, said Machado left the medal for him to keep. “And by the way, I think she’s a very fine woman,” he said. “And we’ll be talking again.”

But her efforts have so far done little to alter the Trump administration’s perception that Rodríguez is best prepared to stabilize the South American nation.

Trump has pressed ahead with plans for American oil companies to revive Venezuela’s crumbling energy infrastructure and is exploring the possibility of reopening the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, which he closed during his first administration.

Trump has said it would be difficult for Machado to lead because she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

Machado crisscrossed Venezuela ahead of the 2024 presidential elections, rallying millions of voters looking to end 25 years of single party rule. When she was barred from the race, a previously unknown former diplomat, Edmundo Gonzalez, replaced her on the ballot. But election officials loyal to the ruling party declared Maduro the winner despite ample credible evidence to the contrary.

Machado, revered by millions in Venezuela, went into hiding but vowed to continue fighting until democracy was restored. She reemerged months later to pick up her Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, the first time in more than a decade that she had left Venezuela.

Goodman and Debre write for the Associated Press. Debre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina. AP writer Meg Kinnard contributed to this report.

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit demanding California turn over its voter rolls, calling the request “unprecedented and illegal” and accusing the federal government of trying to “abridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots.”

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee based in Santa Ana, questioned the Justice Department’s motivations and called its lawsuit demanding voter data from California Secretary of State Shirley Weber not just an overreach into state-run elections, but a threat to American democracy.

“The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose,” Carter wrote. “This risk threatens the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy.”

Carter wrote that the “taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece by piece until there is nothing left,” and that the Justice Department’s lawsuit was “one of these cuts that imperils all Americans.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

In a video she posted to the social media platform X earlier Thursday, Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon — who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — said she was proud of her office’s efforts to “clean up the voter rolls nationally,” including by suing states for their data.

“We are going to touch every single state and finish this project,” she said.

Weber, who is California’s top elections official, said in a written statement that she is “entrusted with ensuring that California’s state election laws are enforced — including state laws that protect the privacy of California’s data.”

“I will continue to uphold my promise to Californians to protect our democracy, and I will continue to challenge this administration’s disregard for the rule of law and our right to vote,” Weber said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office called the decision another example of “Trump and his administration losing to California” — one day after another court upheld California’s congressional redistricting plan under Proposition 50, which the Trump administration also challenged in court after state voters passed it overwhelmingly in November.

The Justice Department sued Weber in September after she refused to hand over detailed voter information for some 23 million Californians, alleging that she was unlawfully preventing federal authorities from ensuring state compliance with federal voting regulations and safeguarding federal elections against fraud.

It separately sued Weber’s counterparts in various other states who also declined the department’s requests for their states’ voter rolls.

The lawsuit followed an executive order by President Trump in March that purported to require voters to provide proof of citizenship and ordered states to disregard mail ballots not received by election day. It also followed years of allegations by Trump, made without evidence, that voting in California has been hampered by widespread fraud and voting by noncitizens — part of his broader and equally unsupported claim that the 2020 presidental election was stolen from him.

In announcing the lawsuit, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in September that “clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” and that the Justice Department was going to ensure that they exist nationwide.

Weber denounced the lawsuit at the time as a “fishing expedition and pretext for partisan policy objectives,” and as “an unprecedented intrusion unsupported by law or any previous practice or policy of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The Justice Department demanded a “current electronic copy of California’s computerized statewide voter registration list”; lists of “all duplicate registration records in Imperial, Los Angeles, Napa, Nevada, San Bernardino, Siskiyou, and Stanislaus counties”; a “list of all duplicate registrants who were removed from the statewide voter registration list”; and the dates of their removals.

It also demanded a list of all registrations that had been canceled due to voter deaths; an explanation for a recent decline in the recorded number of “inactive” voters in California; and a list of “all registrations, including date of birth, driver’s license number, and last four digits of Social Security Number, that were canceled due to non-citizenship of the registrant.”

Carter, in his ruling Thursday, took particular issue with the Justice Department’s reliance on federal civil rights laws to make its case.

“The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data. This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation,” Carter wrote.

Carter wrote that the legislation in question — including Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 — was passed to defend Black Americans’ voting rights in the face of “persistent voter suppression” and to “combat the effects of discriminatory and unfair registration laws that cheapened the right to vote.”

Carter found that the Justice Department provided “no explanation for why unredacted voter files for millions of Californians, an unprecedented request, was necessary” for the Justice Department to investigate the alleged problems it claims, and that the executive branch simply has no power to demand such data all at once without explanation.

WASHINGTON — Approaching the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the official plaque honoring the police who defended democracy that day is nowhere to be found.

It’s not on display at the Capitol, as is required by law. Its whereabouts aren’t publicly known, though it’s believed to be in storage.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers’ lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.

Determined to preserve the nation’s history, some 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have taken it upon themselves to memorialize the moment. For months, they’ve mounted poster board-style replicas of the Jan. 6 plaque outside their office doors, resulting in a Capitol complex awash with makeshift remembrances.

“On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” reads the faux bronze stand-in for the real thing. “Their heroism will never be forgotten.”

Jan. 6 void in the Capitol

In Washington, a capital city lined with monuments to the nation’s history, the plaque was intended to become a simple but permanent marker, situated near the Capitol’s west front, where some of the most violent fighting took place as rioters breached the building.

But in its absence, the missing plaque makes way for something else entirely — a culture of forgetting.

Visitors can pass through the Capitol without any formal reminder of what happened that day, when a mob of President Trump’s supporters stormed the building trying to overturn the Republican’s 2020 reelection defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. With memory left unchecked, it allows new narratives to swirl and revised histories to take hold.

Five years ago, the jarring scene watched the world over was declared an “insurrection” by the then-GOP leader of the Senate, while the House GOP leader at the time called it his “saddest day” in Congress. But those condemnations have faded.

Trump calls it a “day of love.” And Johnson, who was among those lawmakers challenging the 2020 election results, is now the House speaker.

“The question of January 6 remains – democracy was on the guillotine — how important is that event in the overall sweep of 21st century U.S. history,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University and noted scholar.

“Will January 6 be seen as the seminal moment when democracy was in peril?” he asked. Or will it be remembered as “kind of a weird one-off?”

“There’s not as much consensus on that as one would have thought on the fifth anniversary,” he said.

Memories shift, but violent legacy lingers

At least five people died in the riot and its aftermath, including Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by police while trying to climb through a window toward the House chamber. More than 140 law enforcement officers were wounded, some gravely, and several died later, some by suicide.

All told, some 1,500 people were charged in the Capitol attack, among the largest federal prosecutions in the nation’s history. When Trump returned to power in January 2025, he pardoned all of them within hours of taking office.

Unlike the twin light beams that commemorated the Sept. 11, 2001, attack or the stand-alone chairs at the Oklahoma City bombing site memorial, the failure to recognize Jan. 6 has left a gap not only in memory but in helping to stitch the country back together.

“That’s why you put up a plaque,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa. “You respect the memory and the service of the people involved.”

Police sue over Jan. 6 plaque, DOJ seeks to dismiss

The speaker’s office over the years has suggested it was working on installing the plaque, but it declined to respond to a request for further comment.

Lawmakers approved the plaque in March 2022 as part of a broader government funding package. The resolution said the U.S. “owes its deepest gratitude to those officers,” and it set out instructions for an honorific plaque listing the names of officers “who responded to the violence that occurred.” It gave a one-year deadline for installation at the Capitol.

This summer, two officers who fought the mob that day sued over the delay.

“By refusing to follow the law and honor officers as it is required to do, Congress encourages this rewriting of history,” said the claim by officers Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges. “It suggests that the officers are not worthy of being recognized, because Congress refuses to recognize them.”

The Justice Department is seeking to have the case dismissed. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and others argued Congress “already has publicly recognized the service of law enforcement personnel” by approving the plaque and displaying it wouldn’t alleviate the problems they claim to face from their work.

“It is implausible,” the Justice Department attorneys wrote, to suggest installation of the plaque “would stop the alleged death threats they claim to have been receiving.”

The department also said the plaque is required to include the names of “all law enforcement officers” involved in the response that day — some 3,600 people.

Makeshift memorials emerge

Lawmakers who’ve installed replicas of the plaque outside their offices said it’s important for the public to know what happened.

“There are new generations of people who are just growing up now who don’t understand how close we came to losing our democracy on Jan 6, 2021,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the Jan. 6 committee, which was opposed by GOP leadership but nevertheless issued a nearly 1,000-page report investigating the run-up to the attack and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Raskin envisions the Capitol one day holding tours around what happened. “People need to study that as an essential part of American history,” he said.

“Think about the dates in American history that we know only by the dates: There’s the 4th of July. There’s December 7th. There’s 9/11. And there’s January 6th,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-calif., who also served on the committee and has a plaque outside her office.

“They really saved my life, and they saved the democracy and they deserve to be thanked for it,” she said.

But as time passes, there are no longer bipartisan memorial services for Jan. 6. On Tuesday, the Democrats will reconvene members from the Jan. 6 committee for a hearing to “examine ongoing threats to free and fair elections,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York announced. It’s unlikely Republicans will participate.

The Republicans under Johnson have tapped Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia to stand up their own special committee to uncover what the speaker calls the “full truth” of what happened. They’re planning a hearing this month.

“We should stop this silliness of trying to whitewash history — it’s not going to happen,” said Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., who helped lead the effort to display the replica plaques.

“I was here that day so I’ll never forget,” he said. “I think that Americans will not forget what happened.”

The number of makeshift plaques that fill the halls is a testimony to that remembrance, he said.

Instead of one plaque, he said, they’ve “now got 100.”

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

Washington’s unprovoked aggression against Venezuela, and the likely coming ground attack, are an attempt at reimposing “proud, stable democracy” in the country, in the words of the US front surrogate, Maria Corina Machado.

When you decode the meaning of those words and the pretexts put forth for US aggression, you will find a remarkable culture of terrorism and gangsterism on display. Let us take a look.

The initial pretext was that Venezuela was an exporting “narco-terrorist” state. The knowingly fraudulent story did not merit even laughter by US intelligence agencies and the DEA. In the DEA’s most recent report, Venezuela is mentioned in only a single paragraph. In fact, Venezuela did not merit even a single mention in the one-hundred pages long 2025 UN World Drug Report, just like the EU’s own annual drug assessment report.

Nevertheless, Western media still incessantly report the fabricated charges without comment, while omitting the conclusions from Western intelligence, since it reached the wrong conclusion. The servility could not be more startling.

US propaganda then had to shift its main focus back to its staple: Maduro the dictator must be removed. “Maduro ramps up repression in Venezuela,” noted CNN, which failed to mention that the country is, after all, under a multi-pronged attack by a superpower.

CNN did not mention, either, that no opposition funded and directed by a hostile superpower would ever be tolerated in the West’s best friends, like Egypt, Israel, the Philippines and so on. Countries that routinely murder – not just imprison – their opposition under far less onerous circumstances.

The thought that such “opposition” would parade the capital calling for the overthrow of the government in any of these states is plainly absurd. However, that is exactly what happened in Venezuela, with CIA-sponsored figurehead Juan Guaido in 2019. It is Venezuela alone that must live up to such standards.

The idea that democracy promotion could be the real motivation behind the hostility is too ridiculous to merit even a comment. After all, the West lends its full support and sends hundreds of billions in arms to ICJ- and ICC-indicted Israel, Saudi Arabia (which doesn’t even pretend to have elections), Egypt and so on.

Incidentally, for those interested in actual election fraud in Latin America, there is certainly no shortage of issues to be concerned about. Namely, the election manipulations that are run out of Washington, which is by far the league leader.

Just to pick some examples known to all media offices – though few, if any, care: Trump was effectively “bribing Honduran voters” to “restore [the] narcotrafficking government to power”. Trump demanded that they vote for Tito Asfura, the colleague of the indicted narco-trafficker he just pardoned, Juan Orlando Hernández. Or else the US would withhold aid to the country, effectively “threatening to destroy the Honduran economy unless the country elects the oligarch-run National Party”. “Trump deployed the same strategy in Argentina’s October 2025 midterm elections,” in which he threatened to withhold a $20 billion bailout, “successfully strong-arming voters there into backing the party of the country’s mentally unstable president, Javier Milei.”

With a naval armada outside their shores to display what will happen if countries disobey, Washington thus sends the appropriate message: “you are free to choose as long as it is the right guys; otherwise you will starve.”

Thus, no reason for going to war with Venezuela worthy even of consideration from anyone with two functioning brain cells has been put forth.

The actual reason is explained openly by the aggressors themselves. In Trump’s own words: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.” More recently, perhaps tired of the “narco-terrorism” script, Trump conceded that he wants “the oil and land rights.”

Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar boasted that “Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity.”

This pitch was further explained by Washington’s minion Machado in a speech to the America Business Forum. As soon as she leads a “proud, stable democracy” there will be a “massive privatization program,” offering “a $1.7 trillion opportunity.” “We will open markets … And American companies are in, you know, a super strategic position to invest. … This country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies,” which “are going to make a lot of money.”

The only criticism found in the political and media establishment against an attack, then, is tactical concerns. Will it work? Will Trump get away with aggression?

Thus, coup plotter Elliott Abrams explained that Venezuela “previously was” a democracy, and “has a long democratic history,” with which he must mean as a US-run junta and staged colony, if words have any meaning whatsoever. If aggression is successful, “oil production can start rising again … As it was before the Chávez-Maduro years, Venezuela can be a major supplier of oil to the United States and a partner in Latin America.” Hopefully “Cuba, and Nicaragua” will fall too, but aggression could hurt American “clout on the international stage.” Abrams concludes by complaining that the “economic and diplomatic pressure we put on Maduro in the first term was simply not enough.”

“For 26 years, the U.S. has tried to restore democracy in Venezuela through negotiations, concessions, sanctions and a combination of carrots and sticks. Nothing has worked,” noted former OAS ambassador and Harvard lecturer Arturo McGields.

An illegal economic siege, eradicating perhaps 75% of the country’s GDP, and which has killed tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians, a failed mercenary invasion, and numerous coup attempts are not wrong in principle, only tactically unfortunate, since none of it “has worked.”

The euphoria liberals display at this show of sadism is quite revealing. For example, Rebecca Heinrichs pointed out that Cuba could fall if Venezuela is sufficiently squeezed. ”If you pressure” Venezuela “so much” and eliminate “80 to 85% of the revenue” through the illegal naval blockade imposed on them, then ”you are immediately going to have further crises” for the civilian population, and ”they are going to feel that pressure even more, and they will blame Maduro” – Cuba-style, in other words.

James Story, one of the key architects of the illegal regime change operations against Venezuela in recent years, wrote an op-ed repeating all the standard propaganda charges. Story gloated that the recent oil blockade on Venezuelan exports “is a more effective and acceptable way” of overthrowing the government, since “squeezing this revenue stream would” starve the population sufficiently so as to “recognize that life without him [Maduro] in power is preferable to him remaining”.

You will notice the transparent hypocrisy, since the US a month prior to its “total and complete blockade” on Venezuela denounced “Iran’s use of military forces to conduct an armed boarding and seizure of a commercial vessel in international waters [which] constitutes a blatant violation of international law, undermining freedom of navigation and the free flow of commerce”.

It is not that Western journalists do not know about Washington’s propaganda plot when it condemned Iran only to then conduct global piracy itself, since it was publicly reported. Rather, connecting the dots would expose the media as totally servile to state propaganda, and give the game away.

To be sure, there is nothing that causes more outrage than Venezuela supposedly collaborating with the “enemy states.” Even if the charges are true, this illustrates the leading principle that must be accepted if you wish to be part of the debate: no country, however weak, has the right to defend itself against unprovoked Western aggression.

Thus, Elliot Abrams demanded the US attack Venezuela due to its supposed “cooperation with China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia, which gives countries hostile to U.S. interests a base of operations on the South American mainland,” with weapons that can “reach U.S. territory from Venezuela”. Abrams has no issues with the “legality” of such strikes, only “doubts about the chances of success.” “Merely starving” the country “will not be enough: it must be forced out of power with military strikes, which will throw the regime’s support structures, including in the military, into disarray and make them fear for their own futures.”

No doubt the Nazi press “criticized” Operation Barbarossa on the same grounds before invading the Soviet Union. Their ideological heirs have learned that “starving” the population is not enough to win; they must smash their opponents “and make them fear for their own futures.”

In fact, without a hint of irony, we read that it is Venezuela with “Castro’s Cuba” who are “attacking” the US “asymmetrically” in Machado’s words – not the other way around, of course. The goal of US aggression is to open “an extraordinary frontier for US investment in energy, infrastructure, technology and agriculture.”

In short, Washington and its allies cannot tolerate that Venezuela is “associated with” those that the Mafia Don has prohibited, as liberal media darling David Frum put it. So the “goal is to restore the Venezuelan democracy that existed before [Hugo] Chávez and Maduro” – which, again, must refer to the US-directed junta and staged oligarchy.

This is what is called “public debate,” in which the outermost “critics” warn that Western aggression simply may not succeed, while the hawks joyfully celebrate that “military strikes” can “make them fear for their own futures.”

The deep totalitarian streak in Western intellectual culture is beautifully illustrated by these statements, as well as the reactions to them: nil.

Loyal and brainwashed Westerners cannot notice that the same type of arguments could just as well be used by Putin if he wished to invade Sweden, Ayatollah Khamenei to invade Israel or Xi Jinping to invade Taiwan.

This shows that Western intellectuals reflexively view world order and violence the same way they claim Putin does: “we have our sphere of influence, and must boss it as we please.” Such simple observations cannot be uttered in cultivated circles, no matter how obvious they may be.

Through such means, the Western media have effectively become servants of one of the century’s textbook examples of an unprovoked campaign of aggression against a sovereign state.

Andi Olluri is a freelance writer on propaganda and foreign affairs, publishing mostly in European and occasionally in American leftist papers. In his professional life, he does research in epidemiology and evidence-based medicine, studying at Sahlgrenska Academy University Hospital (Gothenburg, Sweden).

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

Is there a dumpster somewhere to torch and bury this year of bedlam, 2025?

We near its end with equal amounts relief and trepidation. Surely we can’t be expected to endure another such tumultuous turn around the sun?

It was only January that Donald Trump moved back into the White House, apparently toting trunkloads of gilt for the walls. Within weeks, he’d declared an emergency at the border; set in motion plans to dismantle government agencies; fired masses of federal workers; and tariffs, tariffs, tariffs.

Demonstrators at a No Kings rally in Washington, protesting actions by President Trump and Elon Musk.

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)

By spring, the administration was attacking Harvard as a test case for strong-arming higher education. By June, Trump’s grotesquely misnamed Big Beautiful Bill had become law, giving $1 trillion in tax cuts to billionaires and funding a deportation effort (and armed force) that has fundamentally reshaped American immigration law and ended any pretense about targeting “the worst of the worst.”

Fall and winter have brought questionable bombings of boats in the Caribbean, a further backing away from Ukraine, a crackdown on opposition to Trump by classifying it as leftist terrorism and congressional inaction on healthcare that will leave many struggling to stay insured.

That’s the short list.

It was a year when America tried something new, and while adherents of the MAGA movement may celebrate much of it, our columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak have a different perspective.

Here, they renew their annual tradition of looking at the year past and offering some thoughts on what the new year may bring.

Chabria: Welp, that was something. I can’t say 2025 was a stellar year for the American experiment, but it certainly will make the history books.

Before we dive into pure politics, I’ll start with something positive. I met a married couple at a No Kings rally in Sacramento who were dressed up as dinosaurs, inspired by the Portland Frog, an activist who wears an inflatable amphibian suit.

When I asked why, the husband told me, “If you don’t do something soon, you will have democracy be extinct.”

Crowds participate in No Kings Day in downtown Los Angeles in October.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

I loved that so many Americans were doing something by turning out to not just protest policies that hit personally, but to rally in support of democracy writ large. For many, it was their first time taking this kind of action, and they were doing it in a way that expressed optimism and possibility rather than giving in to anger or despair. Where there is humor, there is hope.

Barabak: As in, it only hurts when I laugh?

In 2024, a plurality of Americans voted to reinstall Trump in the White House — warts, felony conviction and all — mainly in the hope he would bring down the cost of living and make eggs and gasoline affordable again.

While eggs and gas are no longer exorbitant, the cost of just about everything else continues to climb. Or, in the case of beef, utility bills and insurance, skyrocket.

The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts is another of the long-standing institutions Trump has smeared his name across.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Meantime, the president seems less concerned with improving voters’ lives than smearing his name on every object he lays his eyes on, one of the latest examples being the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

(The only place Trump doesn’t want to see his name is in those voluminous Epstein files.)

I wonder: Why stop there? Why not brand these the United States of Trump-erica, then boast we live in the “hottest” country on Planet Trump?

Chabria: Stop giving him ideas!

You and I agree that it’s been a difficult year full of absurdity, but we’ve disagreed on how seriously to take Trump as a threat to democracy. As the year closes, I am more concerned than ever.

It’s not the ugly antics of ego that alarm me, but the devastating policies that will be hard to undo — if we get the chance to undo them.

The race-based witch hunt of deportations is obviously at the top of that list, but the demolition of both K-12 and higher education; the dismantling of federal agencies, thereby cutting our scientific power as a nation; the increasing oligarchy of tech industrialists; the quiet placement of election deniers in key election posts — these are all hammers bashing away at our democracy.

Now, we are seeing overt antisemitism and racism on the MAGA right, with alarming acceptance from many. The far right has championed a debate as dumb as it is frightening, about “heritage” Americans being somehow a higher class of citizens than nonwhites.

Vice President JD Vance speaks at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

(Gerald Herbert / Associated Press)

Recently, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech in which he announced, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” and Trump has said he wants to start taking away citizenship from legal immigrants. Both men claim America is a Christian nation, and eschew diversity as a value.

Do you still think American democracy is secure, and this political moment will pass without lasting damage to our democratic norms?

Barabak: I’ll start with some differentiation.

I agree that Trump is sowing seeds or, more specifically, enacting policies and programs, that will germinate and do damage for many years to come.

Alienating our allies, terrorizing communities with his prejudicial anti-immigrant policies — which go far beyond a reasonable tightening of border security — starving science and other research programs. The list is a long and depressing one, as you suggest.

But I do believe — cue the trumpets and cherubs — there is nothing beyond the power of voters to fix.

To quote, well, me, there is no organism on the planet more sensitive to heat and light than a politician. We’ve already seen an anti-Trump backlash in a series of elections held this year, in red and blue state alike. A strong repudiation in the 2026 midterm election will do more than all the editorial tut-tutting and protest marches combined. (Not that either are bad things.)

A stressed-out seeming poll worker in a polling station at Los Angeles’ Union Station.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

The best way to preserve our democracy and uphold America’s values is for unhappy citizens to register their dissent via the ballot box. And to address at least one of your concerns, I’m not too worried about Trump somehow nullifying the results, given legal checks and the decentralization of our election system.

Installing lawmakers in Congress with a mandate to hold Trump to account would be a good start toward repairing at least some of the damage he’s wrought. And if it turns into a Republican rout, it’ll be quite something to watch the president’s onetime allies run for the hills as fast as their weak knees allow.

Chabria: OMG! It’s a holiday miracle. We agree!

I think the midterms will be messy, but I don’t think this will be an election where Trump, or anyone, outright tries to undo overall results.

Although I do think the groundwork will be laid to sow further doubt in our election integrity ahead of 2028, and we will see bogus claims of fraud and lawsuits.

So the midterms very well could be a reset if Democrats take control of something, anything. We would likely not see past damage repaired, but may see enough opposition to slow the pace of whatever is happening now, and offer transparency and oversight.

But the 2026 election only matters if people vote, which historically is not something a great number of people do in midterms. At this point, there are few people out there who haven’t heard about the stakes in November, but that still doesn’t translate to folks — lazy, busy, distracted — weighing in.

If proposed restrictions on mail-in ballots or voter identification take effect, even just in some states, that will also change the outcomes.

But there is hope, always hope.

Barabak: On that note, let’s recognize a few of the many good things that happened in 2025.

MacKenzie Scott donated $700 million to more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, showing that not all tech billionaires are selfish and venal.

The Dodgers won their second championship and, while this San Francisco Giants fan was not pleased, their seven-game thriller against the Toronto Blue Jays was a World Series for the ages.

And the strength and resilience shown by survivors of January’s SoCal firestorm has been something to behold.

Any others, beside your demonstrating dinos, who deserve commendation?

Pope Leo XIV waves after delivering the Christmas Day blessing from the main balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.

(Gregorio Borgia / Associated Press)

Chabria: Though I’m not Catholic, I have been surprisingly inspired by Pope Leo XIV.

So I’ll leave us with a bit of his advice for the future: “Be agents of communion, capable of breaking down the logic of division and polarization, of individualism and egocentrism.”

Many of us are tired, and suffering from Trump fatigue. Regardless, to put it in nonpapal terms, it may be a dumpster — but we’re all in it together.

Barabak: I’d like to end, as we do each year, with a thank you to our readers.

Anita and I wouldn’t be here — which would greatly please some folks — but for you. (And a special nod to the paid subscribers out there. You help keep the lights on.)

Here’s wishing each and all a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

We’ll see you again in 2026.