Yes, Things Are Really This Bad

Slivers of hope after one year of Trumpian chaos.

It’s been a year of lowlights. One year ago today, Donald Trump re-entered office promising “revenge” and “retribution.” Unlike his pledges to lower costs, fix health care, and end all wars, unfortunately these are promises he’s actually followed through on.

This administration is designed for chaos. The playbook is to spin out so many lies, and fight on so many fronts at once, that the opposition can’t possibly keep up. They want to beat you down, to exhaust you, to make you give up. Because, as we’ve seen, pushback works. And Trump wants less of it so he can implement his authoritarian agenda free of those pesky checks and balances our founders were so adamant about.

It’s incumbent on the rest of us, then, not to lose sight of what’s going on; to see the whirlwind of corruption, abuse of power, and lies of this administration. We cannot reject or ignore the evidence of our eyes and ears.

What follows is a list of the worst of the worst from Trump’s first year in office. As tempting as it can be to look away, if we still value American democracy, we cannot afford to.

The horror of ICE.

Our era is going to be remembered as one in which masked, poorly trained, unaccountable agents of the state were unleashed to roam the streets, whisking Americans away and running roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens and immigrants alike. The killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis last week was the most recent and shocking of these abuses, and Trump administration officials are already promising “more bloodshed.” In other cities across the country, we’ve seen at least nine people shot by ICE since September, according to The New York Times, and countless others brutalized with clubs, pepper bullets, large canister rounds, and more.

We also learned a new name for terror: CECOT. By shipping hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to this foreign torture prison under the jurisdiction of Trump’s dictator buddy Nayib Bukele, the administration sent a signal that no one is safe. Trump mused about shipping Americans there. Innocent people like the gay makeup artist Andry Hernández Romero were swept up in the cruelty, forced to spend months in confinement, facing sexual and physical abuse. When US courts tried to intervene, Bukele and Trump taunted and ignored them.

Venezuela and Greenland.

Trump kidnapped and publicly humiliated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, only seemingly to leave in power his gang of Chavistas. His stated rationale for the action, and his broader policy toward Venezuela as a whole, seems to be: “We take the oil.” For good measure, he coerced opposition leader María Corina Machado into handing over her Nobel Peace Prize, alienated the international community, and caused several near-collisions between passenger airliners and US military planes operating in the area. How all of this contributed to Trump’s “America First” mantra is unclear.

Now he’s menacing Greenland, and is apparently serious about his threat to take military action against it. He wrote a pouty letter to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre for refusing to give him the aforementioned Peace Prize, and he’s sent his henchmen to Greenland to ratchet up the pressure. In response, record protests have broken out to register public opposition to this blatant expansionism, and European nations have sent troops. Now, the administration is threatening Iceland, too. Who’s next is anyone’s guess.

The January 6 pardons.

The insurrection of January 6, 2021 was the most publicly documented crime in American history. In the years that followed, prosecutors diligently compiled evidence, and brought cases against some 1,500 defendants. Many of them are well-established criminals with gang ties, and the worst were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their actions.

Then, on his first day in office, Trump offered them all a blanket pardon. Since then, some have shown up inside Congress, and dozens have been charged with new felonies. All of this sends a clear signal from the top down: If you stand up for the boss by whatever means necessary, he’ll take care of you.

Signalgate.

Pete Hegseth, the weekend TV show host who Trump made Secretary of Defense, started his term with a bang. He included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal chat discussing top-secret plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen. When Goldberg dutifully reported the story, key administration officials threatened him with legal action. Nobody resigned, and Hegseth never apologized. All of this coming from Trump, who built his political career on attacking Hillary Clinton for the possible exposure of classified materials, and who keeps secret documents piled in his bathroom.

The Zelensky meeting.

In 2016, Trump asked Russia for help defeating Hillary Clinton. In 2018, he sided with Vladimir Putin over the US’s intelligence agencies. Then, in 2025, he and JD Vance ambushed Zelensky in the Oval Office for showing a lack of “gratitude” for US support. Trump accused Zelensky of “gambling with World War Three” and Vance asked, “Have you said thank you once?”

The spectacle instantly made headlines around the world, undermining Ukraine’s position and signaling to all of America’s allies that the world’s greatest power could no longer be counted upon to rally to their defense. If and when we get a president who understands the stakes of the conflict and where the US’s security interests lie, some of our international relationships can begin to be repaired. But our allies won’t forget a betrayal of this magnitude; the damage to US credibility is done.

The Qatari jet.

In 2016, Trump said: “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people.” Yet he proceeded to govern with brazen corruption. Just this term, he’s enriched himself to the tune of at least $3 billion. His family is vacuuming up foreign money via the Trump-controlled World Liberty Financial and a new pay-for-play Georgetown club that costs $500,000 to join.

Amid all this, Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million jet from Qatar stood as a symbol of his seemingly bottomless corruption. Government experts warned that the plane would cost $1 billion to dis- and re-assemble for security purposes; Trump didn’t care. The message from all of this couldn’t possibly be clearer: This administration is for sale.

Censorship.

Trump spent years decrying government “censorship.” His erstwhile co-president Elon Musk bought Twitter over conspiracy theories about censorship, and proceeded to turn it into a MAGA propaganda machine. Naturally, upon reassuming office, Trump unleashed a campaign of actual censorship against his enemies.

He had his FCC Chair Brendan Carr bully Disney into taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air for a time. He rattled off executive orders threatening to punish the nation’s top law firms and universities for operating independently of the government’s wishes. Sadly, many of them rushed to comply with the president’s edicts.

The Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein died under suspicious circumstances while Trump was president. Trump made a Cabinet secretary out of the man who cut Epstein his original sweetheart deal in the mid-2000s. Trump has been photographed again and again with Epstein, and said in 2003 that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” All of this came to a head in the past year.

We saw the administration stonewall on releasing the Epstein files, putting out useless binders full of information that was already public, and sending Congress home to avoid releasing the files. The federal government moved Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushy “club fed” facility in exchange for friendly testimony about Trump (“a gentleman in all respects”).

We learned that Trump wrote a creepy birthday note to Epstein inside of a crude drawing of a woman, winking at their shared appreciation for the fact that “enigmas never age.” And seemingly all of the president’s daily distractions now seem aimed at averting public attention from these issues.

DOGE.

Before accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files and fleeing Washington, Elon Musk broke the federal government, destroyed hundreds of thousands of federal workers’ livelihoods, cut government services for millions of Americans, and cost as many as 14 million lives around the world by slashing foreign aid.

This is all because of Trump. Musk gave his campaign efforts a record-setting $250 million, and was rewarded with special government employee status heading DOGE. Even after this administration has left office, it will take generations to recover from the destruction wrought by this duo—if we ever recover at all.

Tariffs and trade wars.

The Trump administration desperately doesn’t want to talk about how prices are rising, and how that’s Trump’s fault. He’s spent the year implementing on-again, off-again tariffs on all kinds of goods, seemingly at random. Predictably, other countries have responded in kind, causing prices inside the US to skyrocket, and forcing business owners to make impossible decisions.

Kimberly, a licensed customs broker who manages import shipments for US businesses, shared her horror story of having to face surprise $75,000 invoices, thanks to the tariff regime. Erik, who owns a small construction contracting company in Florida, is staring down layoffs. And Chris Gibbs, an Ohio farmer who raises corn, wheat, and soybeans, is for the first time in his life planting his crops in a climate of total uncertainty. That’s all Trump’s fault.

A throughline has come into view amid all of this destruction and chaos: Pushback works. Bravery works. Trump and his lackeys didn’t expect mass mobilization in response to their campaign of retribution; what they got was No Kings, and a sustained protest movement that refuses to be cowed by the administration’s threats and intimidation. Seven million people turned out in all, the largest single-day demonstration in our nation’s history.

Trump’s poll numbers are cratering rapidly, particularly on prices and the economy, where he promised quick and easy fixes for the American people. Even on immigration, Trump’s signature issue, the public is starting to sour on the thug tactics being used by his ICE goons. The more grotesque displays of violence they put on camera, the more people fight back.

And Trump’s seemingly insatiable desire to attack one sovereign country after another is just further compounding the sense of government-by-disaster that hangs like a stormcloud over this whole administration. These are real signs of hope, and they should be the starting point for a new and sustained campaign of unrelenting, principled pushback as we head into year two—in defense of our country and our Constitution.

The Trump administration has more chaos in store for us, and it won’t hold back just because the nation is starting to wake up to its cruelty and incompetence. The choice is what we as a polity do in response to keep alive the hope of something better, and what action we take to bring that future into being. Anything less amounts to an act of surrender to the forces of authoritarianism. And surrender cannot be an option.

America is exceptional because, down through history, her people have chosen to stand up and face down hard challenges, rather than slink away from the fight. We were born out of a refusal to accede to British colonial rule, and spent the ensuing 250 years slowly but surely making this union more perfect, and expanding democracy’s blessings to more and more people.

The Trumpian project is an existential threat to all of that. But we’ve faced down existential threats before, and won. We can do it again.

Home of the Brave is an initiative dedicated to exposing this administration’s corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.