Opinion: Politics past will haunt Washington in 2025. It won’t be pretty

To look back over the politics of the past year is to see a preview of the coming one. It’s not pretty.

Donald Trump, as president again, will of course dominate the news in 2025, but he did so as well in 2024 (and as far back as I can remember, it seems). A year ago, he’d so reestablished his death grip on the Republican Party post-Jan. 6 that he essentially wrapped up its presidential nomination in January, after back-to-back knockouts in Iowa and New Hampshire. A baker’s dozen Republicans had the temerity to get in the race, but they didn’t really run against him.

Opinion Columnist

Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.

“Fear [of Trump] is so palpable” among Republicans, lamented one, former House Speaker Paul Ryan. That’s truer than ever now, after Trump’s improbable comeback from defeat and disgrace.

He moseyed through a campaign first against President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris, doubling as a criminal defendant and taking time out for one trial and legal battles over three other indictments. He became the first U.S. president convicted of felonies, but parlayed a platform of victimhood and retribution to election.

Trump will also dominate Congress in the new year, given that both the Senate and House will have Republican majorities. Yet their margins are so slim, and divisions so deep, that neither they nor Trump will really have control. Legislation will be hard won or, in many cases, not won at all. That’s good news, considering Republicans’ talk of more deep tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and of spending cuts in programs all Americans rely on.

We got an early feel for the chaos ahead during Congress’ humiliating lame-duck finale over government funding this month. House Republicans, in nearly provoking a Chrismukkah federal shutdown, reprised the dysfunction and factionalism that plagued them all year and made for the least productive Congress since the Depression (not least because of their failed obsession with impeaching Biden). Having first made U.S. history by ousting a speaker in the just-concluded Congress — former Bakersfield Rep. Kevin McCarthy — some House Republicans (and allies in Trumpland) are already predicting that Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana won’t survive the new one.

But Congress’ clownish closing wasn’t all Johnson’s fault. It mostly owed to the ham-handed 11th-hour meddling of Trump and unelected “First Buddy” Elon Musk.

First Musk blew up a bipartisan funding bill — “a crime,” he called it on X, spreading falsehoods about its content and going so far as to threaten Republican lawmakers’ reelections. (Adding to his prior threat against Republican senators who oppose Trump’s Cabinet nominees.)

Then Trump, not one to let the guy riding shotgun grab the reins, demanded that Republicans vote against any budget bill that didn’t also repeal the nation’s debt limit. In the end, they actually defied him, passing a bill that was silent about the debt limit.

But the debt ceiling wrangling will resume soon; the Treasury Department said Friday that it would near the borrowing limit in January, which would require it to take “extraordinary measures” until Congress and the president act.

I’ve long argued for getting rid of the debt limit, a World War I-era anachronism, but not for the same reasons as Trump. Mine: The debt limit does nothing to limit spending — Congress and presidents have already approved the funds. It merely lets lawmakers, Republicans mostly, preen as fiscal conservatives by voting no, inviting chaos in the process, despite their past votes for the spending and tax cuts that accounted for the debt (knowing most Democrats will vote aye and prevent default). Trump’s reason? He wanted to avoid a debt limit fight next year when his priorities — tax cuts and open-ended spending for mass deportations — would add to the red ink.

Whatever the rationale, repealing the 107-year-old debt limit law isn’t something Congress should deal with in a last-minute lame-duck rush. And the fact is, Republicans don’t want to forfeit their demagogic prop. They proved it by saying no to Trump.

Next season’s showdown will be just one skirmish in an emerging multifront “MAGA civil war,” as Axios put it. In particular, look for immigration policy fights pitting immigrant-friendly Silicon Valley tech bros against “America First” anti-immigrant hard-liners.

Again, we got a pre-inaugural preview: Entrepreneur-provocateur Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s choice along with Musk to advise him on slashing both federal spending and regulations, incited a Christmas Day MAGA brouhaha — and anti-India invective — on social media when he called for admitting more skilled foreign workers to the United States. American culture, he posted, has for too long “venerated mediocrity over excellence.” When Musk sought to mediate, the South Africa-born mega-billionaire likewise became a target of xenophobic vitriol.

Speaking of Musk, stay tuned for the inevitable clash of egos — his and Trump’s — in 2025.

Then there are the sidelined Democrats.

Biden will be gone from the scene, but he’s already seemed to be for much of 2024. After delivering a rousing State of the Union address in March, Biden showed up for his June debate with Trump so addled that the party backlash forced him from the ticket. Post-election, the apparently embittered president has been “quiet quitting” — a sad end to what’s been, in its first years, a consequential presidency.

Yes, Democrats will be the minority in Congress. But as 2024 showed, Republicans will need their support to pass essential government-funding bills, giving Democrats leverage over the final products. Meanwhile, Democrats will spend 2025 doing what many of them hankered to do in 2024: Look for new leadership, new direction and new ideas.

By the time of the 2026 midterm elections for Congress, Democrats can count on one thing: They’ll look better to many voters compared to the Republicans after the mayhem of all-Republican governance that’s ahead.

@jackiekcalmes