The Washington Roundtable’s 2025 in Review
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
The Washington Roundtable discusses what surprised them in 2025, reflecting on the major shock-and-awe events that defined the first year of Donald Trump’s second term: the capitulation of major law firms, universities, and media companies; the evisceration of foreign aid; the sudden threats of war against Venezuela; and much more. The panel also considers the shape and state of resistance to Trumpism in 2025. “There is this tug-of-war going on about what kind of country we will be by the end of this process,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “It’s not just about how the big institutions will behave—it’s also about how regular people behave every day when they see things that are unbearable.”
This week’s reading:
- “The Curse of Trump 2.0,” by Susan B. Glasser
- “Will Trump Torpedo North American Trade?” by Stephania Taladrid
- “How the Kennedy Center Has Been Transformed by Trumpism,” by Katy Waldman
- “The Trump Administration’s Chaos in the Caribbean,” by Jonathan Blitzer
- “Is the Supreme Court Unsure About Birthright Citizenship?” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
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The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in The New Yorker for lively conversations about the big questions in American politics. Join the magazine’s writers and editors as they put into context the latest news—about elections, the economy, the White House, the Supreme Court, and much more. New episodes are available three times a week.
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the political scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. |
| 0:12.1 | I'm Susan Glasser and I'm joined by my colleagues Evan Osnose and Jane Mear. |
| 0:16.3 | Hi, Evan. Good morning, guys. |
| 0:18.0 | Hey, Jane. Hey, Susan. |
| 0:19.8 | Great to be with you both. |
| 0:25.1 | Well, here we are at the end of the year, and Donald Trump is in pitch mode. |
| 0:31.3 | This week in Pennsylvania, he went back out on the road for the first time in a long time |
| 0:35.9 | to give the first in a series of what his |
| 0:38.2 | advisors claim will be campaign-style speeches meant to focus on affordability. But instead, |
| 0:44.6 | and to almost no one's surprise, Trump went off script. For 97 minutes, he went on and on and |
| 0:51.5 | on. He insisted that Americans were doing better than you have ever done before, |
| 0:55.6 | said inflation in fact was no longer a problem and called, as he has before, affordability, a democratic |
| 1:01.8 | hoax. He then went on to blame Joe Biden for the economy. Again, shocker there, ranted against immigrants, |
| 1:09.6 | and insisted that no child needs 37 dolls, raising the question of what exactly Christmas was like in the Trump family household. |
| 1:19.2 | The point is, and we know what the point is, it's just what we've come to expect from Donald Trump. |
| 1:26.2 | Ten years into this. |
| 1:31.0 | Predictable chaos. But as we bring this first year of his second term to a close, I think a question is coming for all of us, |
| 1:38.0 | which is, what do we do in a world where we're constantly shocked and never surprised? |
| 1:43.6 | From the outrageous rhetoric in his |
| 1:45.8 | speeches to the basic disregard for the rule of law, the breaking of institutional norms, |
| 1:52.7 | rules, traditions, Donald Trump still manages to shock us, it seems to me, but he so rarely |
| 1:59.3 | surprises us. Now, we thought we'd try to do something |
... |
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