President Trump claimed recently that “they’re saying this is the best 10 months in the history of the presidency.”

Hmmm. Maybe the merry elves are saying that in the Oval Office when they tell Trump he is the best Santa ever. You never know about those elves. But one thing is for certain: 2025 will go down in the history books as one of the most consequential years in American history.

And that’s because, despite Time magazine getting it wrong, 2025 was the Year of Trump. Triumphant Trump. Trump unleashed. Towering Trump. Glowering Trump. Trump unhinged. Truth Social Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump.

You can’t legitimately dispute the impact he has had. From deporting thousands of illegal aliens to protecting the streets of U.S. cities with National Guard troops, there is no doubt that he is a most consequential president.

For those of us who labored for a decade to make the year of Trump happen, it started on a high note. After an astounding comeback election victory in 2024, the once and future president seemed to be putting together a Cabinet that conservatives could trust. Sean Duffy at Transportation, Linda McMahon at Education. Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Russ Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He even went outside the Republican Party to appoint Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and Bobby Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services.

But even from the start, there were warning signs that the surprisingly strong victory of Trump at the ballot box, and perhaps his bare survival of an assassination attempt the previous July, might have given the president a false sense of his own invincibility. That dynamic first reared its ugly head when Trump nominated controversial congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Sure, Gaetz was a fearless advocate of Trump’s America First agenda, and he had a law degree, but he was everyone else’s last choice to be the balanced arbiter of right and wrong. He had his own ethical improprieties under investigation by Congress and the Department of Justice and would have been widely viewed as an even more partisan attorney general than Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s self-described........

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