Welcome back to our series of years in review, 2025. I feel exhausted. I feel we should all have a bumper sticker.

2025. I mean, how do you sum it up? You know, Ukraine, Gaza, AI, pardons, corruption, deportations, mass deportations,

doge, retribution, capitulation, affordability, tariffs, Jeffrey Epstein files, extra-traditional

murders, oligarchs, the age of grift, guilt, and desecration.

A hell of a year.

Let's get to it.

Thank you. You know what? I'm exhausted already.

Tom Nichols, we've been talking about this all year.

We've come to the end of the year.

I suppose the good news is we made it through 2025.

Did we make it through 2025?

Did we make it through 2025. Did we make it through 2025? Did we, did we make it through 2025 intact? What do you think? Help me out here. We did. We did. And with a lot of damage to our republic, to the world, a lot of damage to our national heritage. But if you would ask me at this point in 2024, what I expected, I expected worse.

So, you know, in that sense, I'm going to say, thank God for small favors and that things

haven't been worse. But it was a complete, you know, it was a complete mess of a year. I mean, it was just a, you know, what's, I mean, it's a shit show. I'm sorry. I hate to start, start off the, with a, you know, with an epithet, but. We're not going to make it through. we're not going to make it through we're not going to

make it through without getting the explicit ratings so we might as well get it out of the way right

away um let me just to disagree with you actually i think it was worse than i expected not because

trump was worse than i expected i mean you and i were out there with our trump derangement

syndrome warning how terrible it was going to be.

What made it worse, and I think the only thing that was surprising was the capitulations,

the obeying in advance, all of the guardrails, and including in civil society that we expected to stand up against him, didn't. And I think it started before the inauguration. I mean, I remember the

day that I picked up my phone and read that ABC had decided to pay Donald Trump off for this

complete bullshit libel case. And I thought, what the hell is with that? And that was just sort of

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