In another four days, we will have survived the first full year of Donald Trump's second term in office. That's right -- one down, only three more to go!

(Sigh.)

The defining feature of this past year has been -- just like it was in his first term -- the continuing cycle of being so aghast at Trump's planet-sized ego, flailing insecurities, and toddler-grade tantrums and thinking to oneself: "Well, it surely can't get any worse than this!" -- only to wake up the next morning, read the headlines, and find out that yep, it sure can get worse, in ways you would never have imagined in a million years, pre-Trump.

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Donald Trump is approaching his own Rubicon, it seems. The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. "Burning your bridges" is a slightly-different metaphor with a similar meaning. For Trump, the Rubicon he is contemplating crossing is invoking the Insurrection Act to send in U.S. armed forces to an American city.

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The Democratic Party -- and liberalism in general -- needs to take a stand. So far, they have mostly been reactive, fighting back against Donald Trump and his administration. Trump will do something outrageous, and Democrats then react to it. But there's no cohesive plan to any of it -- nothing that ties it all together into an actual political agenda. So it would behoove them to steal a page (actually a whole lot of pages) from the Republicans, and come up with a "Project 2029" document that lays out what their vision of the federal government would be, if they win the White House and Congress.

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It has been a week of stunning events and dangerous rhetorical excesses. Currently the political debate is divided over the question of when government officials can use deadly force against people who are protesting or ignoring orders from those officials. This question is steeped in politics, as it so often is. Whether a person deserves death at the hands of the state almost always has a political element to it, which is not exactly a new thing.

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In the midst of my yearly frenzy putting together the annual awards column, the "predictions for next year" part sometimes gets a little shortchanged. It's the last item on the "Part 2" list, therefore by the time I get to it I'm usually pretty loopy and have lost a certain amount of focus. But on the last week of 2025, my mind has been turning to thinking about what to expect next year again, so I thought I would just share some random thoughts I've been having, in no particular order.

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Welcome back to the second of our year-end awards columns! And if you missed it last Friday, go check out [Part 1] as well.

This article is mind-bendingly long enough, so we're not going to bother with any other introductory words at all. Instead, let's just get right to the awards, shall we?

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Welcome to our annual year-end awards! As always, we honor the memory of The McLaughlin show with our categories, and we want to thank the readers who responded to our calls for nominees for them all.

Also as always, it is long. Really, really, insanely long. You have been warned!

And also as always, we'll be back again next Friday for [Part 2].

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America heads into this year's holiday season with a cheerful discussion of whether or not we've committed war crimes. Just another random week in the Donald Trump era, folks! Sorry for being snide, but it's hard to juxtapose the whole "peace on Earth" holiday sentiment with the revelations coming from Washington this week.

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The United States of America is once again committing war crimes. In fact, the recent revelation in the Washington Post that there were two survivors of one of the military's missile attacks on small boats, and that a second missile was launched specifically to kill the survivors, was literally a textbook example of a war crime. The entire operation -- killing people who are in international waters who are not at war with the U.S. -- is probably a war crime as well, but with this particular example there is absolutely no doubt. But I for one am not going to hold my breath waiting for any of the people involved to be held to any sort of account for their actions.

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It seems that James Carville has seen the light, and as a result he's now channelling his inner Bernie Sanders. In an opinion piece in today's New York Times, Carville calls on Democrats to focus on what he calls "good old-fashioned economic populism, both in message and measure." In some ways, this is Carville circling back to an earlier time for him, since he was the one who came up with the slogan: "It's the economy, stupid" during Bill Clinton's first successful presidential campaign. You might call it Carville's "It's still the economy, stupid" moment.

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