“In 2025, I thought I was keeping a record. By December, I realized I was keeping watch.”
Introduction
This is a review of what I wrote on my blog and Substack In 2025: The erosion of democracy. I transitioned from documenting politics to observing the erosion of democratic principles amidst Trump’s second term. Through over 300 pages of essays, my posts highlighted the gradual decay of truth. They also illustrated the rise of authoritarianism. Additionally, they showed the weaponization of neutrality. The fictional correspondent, Skyler Fusaro, served as a reminder of memory’s importance and civic resistance. The year illustrated a struggle against forgetting, emphasizing that preservation of history and truth is crucial for democracy’s survival.
The Beginning
When I began writing in January 2025, I thought I was documenting policy and politics. By December, I understood that what I had really been recording was erosion. The year didn’t break apart in a single moment. It dimmed — quietly, bureaucratically, and persistently.
Over twelve months, I published more than 300 pages of essays on my blog and Substack, later collected as 2025. At the time, I saw them as dispatches from a second Trump term. Now that I look back, they read more like a civic diary. They serve as a record of how democracies forget. They also show how memory resists.
I wasn’t writing alone.
Skyler Fusaro1— a fictional correspondent I created decades ago — returned in 2025 with letters from the 2060s. Her voice arrived not as prophecy, but as moral echo. She wrote from a future still shaped by our choices. She wanted to remind me that memory itself can be an act of repair.
What follows is a look back at that year. It is explored through ten ideas that surfaced repeatedly. These ideas appeared across essays, letters, protests, and silences. The ideas that emerged will be integrated into Volume 2 of The Trump Files, that was published in 2022. The first volume documented Trump’s first term in office. At the time of publication, I did consider what if Trump were to be elected again. I never thought he would. I believed he be barred from holding office.
We were wrong.
1. Truth Is Democracy’s Oxygen
“When truth becomes optional, power fills the vacuum.”
Trump’s second term revealed that authoritarianism doesn’t start with violence. It begins with exhaustion. Repetition. Contradiction. The steady wearing down of shared reality. In essay after essay, I returned to the same warning: when facts lose their status as common ground, democracy suffocates.
Skyler later described it this way: truth doesn’t disappear all at once — it erodes dataset by dataset. That sentence now feels like the thesis of the year.
2. Power Performed Is Power Protected
“The presidency became a set. Outrage became the script.”
Trump didn’t govern — he staged. The essays collected under From Reality TV to Political Theater showed the migration of techniques. These techniques were learned on The Apprentice and they moved seamlessly into the White House. Conflict kept the cameras rolling. Humiliation kept audiences loyal. Truth became secondary to attention.
The danger wasn’t simply spectacle. It was normalization. When politics becomes entertainment, citizens become viewers — and viewers don’t hold power accountable.
3. Forgetting Became Policy
“Neutrality was the costume of amnesia.” — Skyler Fusaro
Bill Torpy’s reporting on ICE’s Atlanta basement exposed something darker than misconduct: intentional suffering as policy. People held without beds, showers, or sunlight. Mothers separated from children. Lawyers describing it plainly — pressure them enough, and they give up.
The most chilling part wasn’t what happened there. It was how little outrage followed.
5. Technocracy Replaced Stewardship
“Efficiency became the alibi for control.”
As Trump aligned himself with technocratic power, public institutions were hollowed out. Scientists were fired. Research funding vanished. Entire agencies were reshaped to obey rather than inquire.
“Sometimes tyranny doesn’t kick down the door. It walks in through hiring.” — Skyler Fusaro
The “ICE Generation” letters captured the quiet mechanics of power: job fairs, bonuses, recruitment drives. Thousands signed up. Not all were cruel. Many just needed work. But bureaucracy doesn’t ask for ideology — only obedience.
The first two weeks of felon Trump’s term has been horrendous. If you haven’t read any thing by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, I hope this article by her will give you some solace. Her work is crucial for understanding autocratic and fascist dynamics in the United States. Her Substack site, Lucid, and her recent book, Strongmen, are especially valuable. What follows is today’s Substack post. She writes:
It seems like the plot of a political thriller. We are living through a new kind of coup. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has taken over the payment and other administration systems. These systems allow the American government to function. He has locked out federal employees from computer systems. Many of Musk’s collaborators in this endeavor previously worked for his private companies and/or helped him take over Twitter.
Musk is subject to no Congressional or other oversight. He seems to have no real official function. His only role is as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. This is a plunder operation named after the cryptocurrency DOGE.
This was one of the year’s hardest lessons: systems don’t need villains. They need paperwork.
7. Science Was Treated as Dissent
“Data became dangerous.”
From climate research to COVID reporting, evidence itself became suspect. Federal websites erased datasets. Scientists were muzzled. Grants disappeared. Truth was rebranded as bias.
In one essay, “Impact of Trump Policies on U.S. Science and Integrity” I detail the deliberate silencing of scientists, mass layoffs, and data deletion. The undermining of evidence-based policy shows a deeper attack on epistemology itself. It signifies the state’s abandonment of truth as a public good. This continues the book’s through-line that democracy dies when fact becomes fiction
A society that distrusts its scientists eventually distrusts its future.
8. History Was Trying to Warn Us
“History doesn’t repeat. It instructs” Timothy Snyder
The parallels were unmistakable. Strongmen don’t rise alone; they’re escorted by enablers. From Orbán to Putin, the patterns were familiar — grievance, spectacle, loyalty tests, institutional corrosion.
What made 2025 unbearable was not ignorance, but recognition without action.
9. Resistance Remembered Itself
“Protest was not chaos. It was conscience.”
The first No Kings protest was on June 14, 2025. On October 18, millions stood beneath a simple banner: No Kings. No violence. No spectacle. Just presence. For one day, citizens stopped waiting to be governed and remembered that democracy lives in bodies as much as ballots. A third No Kings is planned for sometime in March 2026.
Skyler Fusaro was never meant to predict the future. She was meant to preserve moral memory. Her letters transformed fiction into a civic tool. This tool allowed one to step outside the moment. It provided a way to see its consequences clearly.
The inclusion of Skyler Fusasro’s letters — written from 2060s Atlanta — serves as meta-commentary. It highlights how fiction can preserve collective memory when official history is censored. The future-voice allows reflection on the moral consequences of forgetting, transforming speculative correspondence into a method of civic remembrance and resistance
Sometimes the future has to write back so the present can hear itself think.
A Year of Witness
Looking back, 2025 feels less like commentary. It resembles more of cartography — a map of where power hid. It’s also a map of where conscience survived. It traced decay, yes. But it also traced resilience: in classrooms, in protests, in stubborn acts of record-keeping.
Skyler’s final letter of the year ended with this line:
“Every archive you kept helped us find our way back.”
That is the quiet work of writing in times like these — not persuasion, not prophecy, but preservation.
“The danger of 2025 was not just Trump’s power, but our temptation to forget. The hope lies in record-keeping. It is in letters and archives. It is in remembering who we were when the lights began to dim.”
The future is still watching.
Footnotes
Some of the pieces that follow are written by Skyler Fusaro. Skyler is a fictional correspondent — a historian writing from the 2060s in Atlanta — a voice I created years ago to help me think beyond the immediacy of events. She writes from the other side of consequences. Her letters are not predictions. They are reflections — attempts to understand how decisions made in our present shape the moral landscape of the future. I began exchanging letters with Skyler during the first Trump administration. In 2025, as the country entered a second Trump term, her voice returned with urgency. While I wrote from inside unfolding events, Skyler wrote back from a future still living with their aftermath. That dialogue — between witness and memory — became one of the most meaningful threads in my work this year. Skyler’s letters are grounded in history, ethics, and imagination. They allow me to ask a different set of questions: What will people say about this moment when the noise has faded? What will they wish we had named sooner? What will they thank us for remembering? These letters appear alongside my nonfiction essays as a form of civic reflection. They are meant to slow us down, widen the frame, and remind us that democracy is not only governed forward — it is understood backward. ↩︎
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