Year's End 2025

A year of resistance

To mark the final day of 2025, I wanted to share some of my favorite columns from the last year, in hopes that you’ll have time to peruse them here and there over the holiday and the weekend. They are favorites in the sense that they remind me of where we’ve been this past year, the ups and the downs. They are favorites because many of them represent events I’d forgotten in the utter deluge that we endured in 2025, and those reminders are important. They are also favorites because they help me understand how incredibly strong and capable of action we—people who believe in democracy—are. We made it through the devastation of the early days following Trump’s election and inauguration. Early on, there was dawning awareness that it was, in fact, a coup. And now, we’re seriously into the fight to save democracy.

One of my favorite protest photos this year

Last year, at this point in time, I wrote to you, “I can’t offer the message of hope and accomplishment I would have liked to be sharing today. The simple truth is that we lost the election, and Donald Trump’s reelection says some devastating things about our country. But I remain hopeful that we can all stick together and get important work done. I still think that civil discourse is the path forward, even though our progress as a nation is not linear.” As it turned out, I wrote a book that used our legal and political history to demonstrate the strength of our institutions and our path forward if we were willing to commit to it. And, we have. Those words ring truer today than ever.

At the end of this year, we can look back and see that, as difficult as it was, we are rising to the challenge. We are already in the fight for free and fair elections in 2026, when so much will be on the line. Democracy demands citizen participation, and that means, as painful as it can be at times, we have to stay well-informed and well-educated. We must, to borrow a sports metaphor, keep our heads in the game.

That said, here are some columns that stand out for me as I think about the past year:

• January

  • Trump’s Day One Executive Orders

  • How to Push Back

  • Where is this leading?

  February

  • A Big Fire Hose

  • Is It Really A Coup?

  • Welcome to the Fight

  March

  • Let’s Be Honest About The State Of The Union

  • Deportations: It’s not where it starts, it’s where it ends

  • Wisconsin And, Strangely, Alabama

  April

  • Why We Have Due Process

  • Rule of Law?

  May

  • Stand Up to the Bully

  • Hamburger Mary’s Goes to the 11th Circuit

  June

  • “We are a democracy. But we can lose that democracy.”

  • How We Keep Our Democracy

  July

  • Why We Don’t Politicize the Military

  August

  • Living in 1984

  • Trump’s “Truth” About Voting

  • Moving the Window

  September

  • Paper Clip Protest

  • On Political Violence

  October

  • When they Bukele the Courts

  • Are We the Nazis Now?

  November

  • What the Frogs Know

  • Quiet Piggy

  December

  • Trump on Women

  • The Absence of Decency

As I was reading through old columns and thinking about what the future has in store for us, the House Judiciary Committee had other plans for the last day of the year. They chose this low point in the news cycle, when few people are paying attention, to dump the transcript and video of Jack Smith’s behind-closed-doors testimony on Capitol Hill earlier this month. The transcript runs to 255 pages, and I’ll be taking time over the next few days to digest it so we can discuss. But if you’d like to get a head start on your own, the transcript can be found here. Smith testified that he believed he had proof beyond a reasonable doubt of Trump’s guilt in both the January 6 case and the classified documents prosecution. He told members of the Committee, “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

2026 is going to be the year that democracy strikes back. And we’re all going to be a part of that! Thanks for your support of Civil Discourse. If you aren’t already a member of our community, I hope you’ll join us. I appreciate your comments, your emails, and the conversations I was lucky enough to have with so many of you during my book tour. I’m confident that no matter the man in the White House, we will bring meaning and renewal to our country’s 250th anniversary in the new year.

We’re in this together,

Joyce