The Democratic National Committee's effort to analyze what went wrong in the 2024 election was always kind of a joke from the start. Soon after the effort was announced, it was revealed that it would not be looking into two crucial questions from 2024, namely Joe Biden's decision to run for re-election when he obviously was not up to the task, and what happened after he (finally) decided to end his campaign and Kamala Harris was anointed the official party candidate (without any primaries or any sort of selection process at all). Those are some pretty big things to decide to ignore, you've got to admit.

Even so, perhaps it would have contained some valuable information for the Democratic Party heading forwards. But D.N.C. Chair Ken Martin just announced that he was reversing his earlier promise to make the post-mortem report public, and that it would remain secret instead. This does not exactly signal confidence, to state the obvious.

But the biggest problem with the report, from all accounts, is even bigger than flat-out ignoring, you know, what actually went wrong in 2024. Because apparently the report also didn't even bother to examine what was wrong with the Democratic Party brand either. The information in the report was limited to small-ball analyses of the process of the election -- what advertising and get-out-the-vote money was spent, how it was spent, and how effective it was. This completely sidesteps the question of what policies the party stands for -- or should stand for, going forward.

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As I contemplate (for this Friday's year-end awards column) making predictions for the next year in politics, I have to wonder what will happen to Mike Johnson in 2026. Will he still be speaker of the House at this point next year? Or will the House Republicans have ousted him in favor of someone else?

Normally, this wouldn't even be a valid question, since leadership jobs in Congress are usually only up for reconsideration at the start of each new Congress -- which means the January following a congressional election. If these were normal times (and if the Republican Party were a normal political party), then Johnson's job would be considered safe until at least January of 2027. But of course these are not normal times.

The Republican Party has gone through a succession of House speakers over the past decade or so, and each speaker has either resigned in frustration with his own party or been kicked out by a "no confidence" vote. So it's not exactly idle speculation to consider whether one of these two possibilities might happen to Johnson in the upcoming year.

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This is the last legislative week scheduled for Congress in this calendar year. This means that if nothing gets done, the expanded Obamacare subsidies will indeed expire starting on New Year's Day -- which will negatively affect over 20 million Americans. In some cases, they will see their premiums double or even triple. As things stand, a last-minute solution to the problem does not seem at all likely.

Republicans are not showing much in the way of interest in striking any sort of deal or compromise with the Democrats. This lack of urgency means there will likely not be some frenzy of activity later this week that puts a bill on Donald Trump's desk before everyone goes home for vacation. So the subsidies will expire on schedule, as 20 million people go over the cliff.

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We're at the halfway point in awards season, with the first round done and the second still to go. So today I am asking once again for nominations for the second round of our year-end awards.

Cast your mind back over the whole year (which, since Trump was in charge, seemed like a much longer time period than that!) and nominate your own candidates for the following list of categories. There are a bunch of them, as always, so there should be a category that fits for most of the important people and events of the year.

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Welcome to our annual year-end awards! As always, we honor the memory of The McLaughlin Group 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].

That's really all we need as an introduction. I mean, it's long enough already! So buckle up boys and girls, here we go....

   Biggest Winner Of 2025

We're going to start off with a very cheerful award, because the Biggest Winner Of 2025 goes to none other than the Democratic Party. I had already picked this out, but I'm going to paste in a nomination sent by reader Kick, because it lists some good details:

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Some of you may have been wondering whether this was even going to happen this year, but here we are, happy to welcome you once again to our year-end begging season (where I shamelessly ask you to send me your hard-earned money to support this site and keep the lights on for the upcoming year).

The reason I held off launching this pledge drive until now is that I was feeling incredibly embarrassed and ashamed of myself because an entire year had gone by (once again) without the website being updated and rebuilt. So our big news: this is now underway! Woo hoo!

Somehow I just couldn't bring myself to ask for more money without finally making good on this long-standing promise, which is why I held off on this announcement until today. Last year, I had actually picked out a web developer and started the process, but he quickly left for foreign shores and "ghosted" me, so it wound up not going anywhere (and leaving me awfully frustrated).

But now I have settled on a new web developer, and the plan is to get a test site up and running before the end of the year. I will then publish a link to this site, so readers can go and try it out, while it is still amorphously under development. This way, you'll have a chance to offer up feedback on what you like, what you hate, or what you want to suggest for additional features.

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I have been very busy all week getting ready for Friday (and a few other things), so I didn't have the time today to write a new article. So I'm re-running an article from early January that was one of the first things I reviewed, when I began looking back over the year that was. It was written a few weeks before Trump took office again, and most of the predictions in it stand the test of time admirably well.

And here's a "watch this space" teaser for everyone -- tomorrow there will be a big announcement here! I'm not going to say what, but I hope everyone will be pleasantly surprised by it, that's all I will say for now. Stay tuned!

Originally published on January 1st, 2025

Donald Trump's "Day One" in office is now less than two weeks away. He promised American voters a lot of action on his first day, but in the past few weeks he seems inordinately focused on some rather odd (one might say: "downright bizarre") goals. He has become a big fan of expanding America in what can only be called imperialistic fashion -- adding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to the American map. Today he floated a new idea, this one not a land-grab but instead of a sort of water-grab: he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," for no particular reason (other than to annoy Mexico, one assumes).

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By the time I finish writing this and post it, Donald Trump may have begun speaking to an adoring crowd in Pennsylvania. He is holding a rally there (the first one he's held in quite a while) that will be a de facto kickoff to the Republicans' midterm campaign strategy. Since the party can't run on anything that directly contradicts Trump's positions (because he has such an ideological stranglehold on Republicans), no doubt plenty of GOP politicians will be watching this rally for clues as to what will be acceptable for them to focus on in next year's campaign.

Trump is scheduled to speak about the economy today. Democrats have already seen big successes at the ballot box by running against Trump's economy, and they look exceedingly likely to double down on this strategy throughout all of next year. So Trump will in essence be unveiling the counterargument from the Republican side of the aisle.

Trump's problem is that he's got an incredibly weak hand to play. Which, of course, is all his fault. To extend the metaphor, Trump doesn't just have an incredibly weak hand, he dealt this hand to himself by stacking the deck and choosing which cards he was going to get. So it is impossible to feel sorry for the weak position he's in, since he caused it all to happen. Almost all of it was self-inflicted.

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It's that time of year again! Time to review the past 12 months and hand out awards to those who have earned them.

It's been an eventful year, of course, so many of these categories will have multiple possible winners. Listed below are the categories for the first installment, which will run this Friday. We'll open the nominations up for the second part next week.

And, as always, feel free to interpret the categories however you wish. A lot of these categories could be for a positive thing or a negative thing, depending on how you see it. I've got a lot of work to do this week to review everything from the whole year, so I need all the help I can get. So think back over the whole course of 2025 and let me know who or what you think deserves an award for the following categories:

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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.

America is supposed to be above committing war crimes, of course. We're theoretically supposed to be better than that. In fact, here are a few pertinent quotes about that very subject:

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