The end of the year seems like when many take the time to take stock of the status of life in general. I try not to do that because it seems a bit pointless (like new year resolutions – why not start good habits at other times?) but since one cannot avoid that because the media is full of such articles, one might as well give in. One thing that I find helpful at this time of years are lists of good films released during the year in which I occasionally find something I missed and can mark for future viewing.

The biggest contributor to this horrible year is of course the ongoing carnage in Gaza, a tragedy of immense proportions carried out by Israel with the overt support of the US and the acquiescence of Canada and many countries in Western Europe, all of whom could do something to stop it if they chose. Then we have the ongoing war in Ukraine plus lesser known conflicts in Somalia and Yemen which are taking a terrible toll on civilian lives, as all military conflicts do. The massacre in Bondi Beach and the continued mass shootings in the US all add to the sense of a general lack of a sense of a common humanity. It has been such a bad year that there may well be other major awful things that I have forgotten to list.

Adding to all this and making things worse is of course the pestilence known as Donald Trump. As Susan Glasser writes, “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.” He seems to be stoking the flames for more conflict by attacking Venezuela, clearly laying the groundwork for a full-fledged military assault or fomenting a coup. He also seems to have this weird desire to promote himself as the protector of Christianity and white people worldwide, as seen by his bombing of Nigeria, his preferential treatment of white Afrikaners in South Africa, and his tirades and attacks on immigrants of color in the US. And then we have his use of the department of justice and the FBI as his personal organizations for seeking revenge, and the conversion of ICE and CBP agents into heavily armed paramilitary secret forces equipped with masks and unmarked vehicle to terrorize people like the death squads did in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the heyday of military juntas in those countries.

Writing in the Guardian, David Smith lists all the things that Trump has done to take life hell for so many this year, saving me the task of doing so.

Smith concludes by saying what I have seen repeated many times by other commentators, that Trump and the GOP are increasingly unpopular and headed for a drubbing in the mid-term elections to be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

But as 2025 draws to a close with Trump struggling to stay awake at meetings, the prevailing image is of a driver asleep at the wheel. Opinion polls suggest that Americans are turning against him. Republicans are heading for the exit ahead of congressional contests next November that look bleak for the president’s party.
…

Last month a poll by Gallup showed Trump’s job approval rating down to 36%, the lowest of his second term, while disapproval had risen to 60% (his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol). Notably his approval rating was underwater on crime (43%), foreign affairs (41%), foreign trade (39%) and immigration (37%).
The polls suggest that groups who moved towards Trump in 2024 – including young voters and Latino voters – are now deserting him and returning to the Democratic fold, animated by jobs, inflation and healthcare.

I try not to put too much stock in these predictions, since they likely contain a large dollop of wishful thinking by those who cannot bear to think of three more years of this. But even if this scenario does come true and Republicans take a huge beating and Democrats take back control of at least one of the two congressional bodies, making Trump (in the curious language of US politics) a ‘lame duck’ president, that may not end the nightmare.

Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “With Donald Trump, ‘lame duck’ may just be another word for nothing left to lose. He will still have vast, unchecked powers, which he’s already made clear that he will exercise in the rawest, most reckless way possible.

“He’s figured out what he can do with the power of pardoning – for my friends everything, for my enemies the law. He’s pardoning major drug kingpins and corrupt politicians right and left before he’s officially a lame duck. How does Donald Trump behave when he has nothing politically left to lose? That’s a question I’m not sure that we’ve gotten our heads around.”

For me, the most hopeful sign is the resurgence of popular resistance to Trump on a large scale that spans generations and classes and ethnicities. Nothing makes people more aware of the rights that they claim to cherish than seeing them being taken away by an authoritarian. Those rights, even if they are enshrined in law and the constitution, mean nothing unless people are willing to fight to preserve them. As Judge Learned Hand once said, “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

I hope that more and more people realize that the only real counterbalancing power to the erosion of civil and fundamental rights by creeping authoritarianism and incipient fascism is mass resistance.