If I had to sum up the totality of 2025 in a simple phrase, it would be, “blink and you’ll miss it.”

Indeed, this year has come and gone just as fast as any I’ve ever seen. While that isn’t really true on paper, it certainly feels that way, although I’ve been told that the older you get the faster time seems to move something that only adds to the cruelty of mortality, but I digress.

Honestly, dear readers, now that we’re at the end of the year and on the cusp of a new one, I find myself missing the optimism I had going into 2025.

I have to say, 2024 was a hype year politically that really did a lot to calm the cynic in me down and look towards a better year.

A lot of that had to do with the incredible upset that Donald Trump pulled off during the last presidential race. After all, we had just gotten out of a very long and tiresome administration courtesy of Joe Biden, and we were all forced to sit and watch Biden and the powers that be try to simply gift the oval office to Kamala Harris, in what was undoubtedly one of the worst breaches of liberty and subversion of the voters will that I have ever seen.

But none of that came to pass, and what we were left with was a turning of the tide that seemed to be inching back towards normalcy and indeed, whispers of real reform, when it came to tackling the national debt and the general waste, fraud, and abuse of government.

As you can tell, I couldn’t help but buy into the hype and for the first few months, I dare say we were all riding high, until we weren’t.

But just to give myself a little bit of credit here, I did write in my pre-New Year’s Day column last year that we would likely find out how solid and legitimate this new liberty promising coalition was going to be in practice.

“Granted, the Trump Administration isn’t going to be some well oiled liberty machine that is going to fulfill all of our most ardent desires. No, the cracks are already appearing, so you can be sure that a fair amount of infighting, arguments, foolishness, and even comedy is going to mark 2025,” I presciently wrote.

I added later in that column that “I think everyone knew that while the diverse coalition that Trump has built was integral to getting him elected, it is not going to be without some serious disagreements.“

Well, now that 2025 has effectively come and gone, we saw exactly what those disagreements were and how flimsy Trump’s pre election coalition actually was in practice. While this is far from a new thing, it did make for some pretty upsetting fractures that I was most excited for...