Two stories dominated the national news in 2025: The most serious attack on American democracy since the Civil War, and the American people’s dramatic response to beat it back, which drew comparisons to other people-powered pro-democracy movements across the globe. There were frequent local impacts, and echoes of past history we reported on as well.
The attack came in the form of President Donald Trump’s multi-front power grab, enabled by GOP legislators and the Supreme Court, as well as America’s billionaire class.
Unlike Trump’s first term, political elites hastened to normalize his actions, even as they proved far more dangerous. Trump issued illegal and even unconstitutional executive orders starting with a flurry on day one, and he appointed cabinet members and other top officials who were not just unqualified, but anti-qualified, with clear records of being dangerous and hostile to the missions of the departments and agencies they were appointed to lead. Only one was rejected by the Senate, and his replacement was similarly anti-qualified.
But even as politicians, media conglomerates, large law firms and universities initially bowed down to Trump, a powerful grassroots democratic counter-movement arose to do what they did not: protect and defend America. It started with small local protests, coalesced into a wave of Tesla Takedown demonstrations, and went nationwide with early 50501 demonstrations, which evolved into “Hands Off” and “No Kings” demonstrations that put millions on the street — roughly 7 million in the most recent on Oct. 10.
This helped produce a blue tsunami election in November, where Democrats swept all major races — all 13 statewide races, as well as the New York City mayor race, and countless down-ballot races. By mid-December, Trump’s approval rating had sunk to 36% and Democrats had won 21% of contested state legislative races, more than the 20% they won in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. These were clear signs that Republicans are headed to a massive loss of power in the 2026 midterms.
While these were the two dominant stories of the year, they were multifaceted, and interacted with state and local stories in multiple ways. Trump’s tariffs and ICE raids had profound local impacts here in LA and the Harbor Area in particular, while his anti-climate actions, begun in his first term, contributed to the unprecedented midwinter wildfires that ravaged LA just before Trump took office.
In Trump’s first two weeks in office, we reported:
He pardoned all the Jan. 6 rioters, illegally fired 18 inspector generals, began a purge of the FBI that could affect thousands of agents, illegally withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, illegally sought to halt a wide range of government spending authorized by Congress, and tried to undo virtually all Joe Biden-era climate policies designed to protect against growing disasters like the recent LA wildfires.
But even before that, the prospect of Trump’s victory led LA Times’ owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong to begin shifting the paper back to its pre-1960s rightwing roots. Trump’s initial effort to install his anti-qualified staff of lieutenants hinged on having the Senate confirm them all, without holding any hearings or any other form of inquiry into their fitness. After firing his entire editorial board after Trump’s election, Soon-Shiong personally intervened to spike an editorial calling for the Senate to hold fast to its constitutional duty to scrutinize and vote on Trump’s cabinet appointees. As we reported then, “It could only run alongside an editorial arguing the opposite, he decreed — in effect, that Trump should have absolute power. The pro-democracy side has to be balanced with the anti-democracy side.”
And, we noted, “Pro-truth with anti-truth, too, it would seem.” He also proposed using AI to write alternative stories, to ensure “balance,” which users could activate with a button. As long-time press critic Dan Froomkin put it, “Leave aside that there aren’t two and only two sides to a lot of topics, how do you create ‘both sides’ versions of a story based on reported facts? What’s the ‘other side’ of a fact?”
Prescription for Death
As opposed to Soon-Shiong, Random Lengths News not only believed that the Senate should do its job assigned by the Constitution, but that this clearly meant rejecting RFK Jr.’s appointment to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which we called a “Prescription For Death.” We began our story with a quote from his July 6, 2023 podcast appearance, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” and paired it with the facts as presented in The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal: “Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year.”
But it wasn’t just RFK Jr. “I’m just worried that we are not working the way we need to work against a nominee slate that is just absolutely bonkers and out of the American mainstream by a million miles,” Sen. Chris Murphy said. He was right. But it was much worse than that, as Trump illegally gave far more power to his billionaire backer Elon Musk, and his ludicrously misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), whose main purpose was destroying, damaging or subverting the purpose of agencies that regulated or otherwise threatened him.
“There is an ongoing coup against the Constitution of the United States happening as we speak,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes warned on Feb. 10, Trump’s third week in office. “This nation is at an incredibly dangerous moment and it is all the more dangerous if people don’t understand what is happening,” she said. “Trump has grabbed the power of Congress and handed it to an unelected billionaire and a group of teenage hackers. The richest man in the world is now running roughshod over the authority of federal agencies in violation of the rule of law and the Constitution.”
This didn’t come out of nowhere, independent journalist Gil Duran explained. “We are witnessing the methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step.” That playbook was written by rightwing blogger Curtis Yarvin (who’s influenced Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and JD Vance) all the way back in 2012. Its main steps were:
- Install a CEO dictator
- Purge the bureaucracy
- Build a loyalist army
- Dismantle democratic institutions
- Seize media and information control to maintain power
Yarvin was more blunt and honest than Musk. He called his tool to carry out #2 “RAGE” instead of “DOGE”: “Replace All Government Employees.”
A prime target for Musk’s illegal destruction of government was USAID, which we noted, “has prevented millions of deaths worldwide: 4.6 million children and 200,000 women in 25 priority countries since 2008, 25.3 million children vaccinated against deadly preventable diseases since 2012, and an estimated 48 million lives saved from TB from 2000-2015, just to cite a few major accomplishments.”
The People Respond: No Kings!
While Congress was uninterested, and the courts were slow, at best, in stopping Musk’s lawlessness destruction of government — threatening everything from National Parks to the Post Office to the National Weather Service to Social Security — people quickly began taking to the streets, with a wave of hundreds of Tesla Takedown demonstrations.
At the same time, a new group, 50501 (50 states, 50 demonstrations, one day) began organizing nationwide protests in February. The second wave of 50501 protests — dubbed “No Kings Day” on President’s Day — surpassed its original goal, turning out thousands of protesters in capital cities across the country, with hundreds and thousands more in other cities and towns. With the added fuel of the Tesla Takedowns, and a growing coalition of other groups, most notably, Indivisible, there were “Hands Off” demonstrations at more than 1,400 locations on April 5, including Torrance and Lakewood as well as Downtown LA, and Random Lengths spoke with leaders involved in all of them.
“The Trump administration and Elon and DOGE are putting their hands into everything … everything from Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, and trans and LGBTQ rights, and it runs the gamut. So the hands-off theme, I think appeals to a lot of people,” said Kenny Johnson, lead organizer in Torrance, with Indivisible South Bay.
“Hands-off our democracy, hands-off healthcare, hands-off women’s rights, hands-off our future … hands-off — there’s a whole list,” said Hunter Dunn, 50501’s Southern California spokesman, a lead organizer of the Downtown LA march and protest.
The “Hands Off” protests marked a turning point, leading to the even larger “No Kings” protests on June 14 and Oct. 18, which also marked crucial turning points as well. The same week saw Trump unveil his global tariffs, prompting instant backlash that only deepened over time, while Wisconsin elected Democrat Susan Crawford to the state supreme court with a dramatic 10-point victory, despite Musk’s intervention with a $25+ million in campaign spending, the first big setback that eventually led to him leaving the Trump administration, attacking Trump’s centerpiece budget bill, and revealing that Trump was in the Epstein files — two further major developments.
Trump’s Tariff Folly
While the Trump-Musk feud fallout took time to unfold, the folly of Trump’s tariffs was immediately apparent, not least in the fact that four species of penguins on two uninhabited Antarctic Islands were subject to 10% tariffs, along with a slew of other territories and countries. While Trump quickly backtracked after the stock market dropped over 1,000 points in one day, he persisted with narrower focus on China — raising tariffs on it twice, up to 145% — eventually causing a complete halt of Chinese imports, devastating activity at our local ports and associated businesses.
When a reporter asked Trump about the situation and “thousands of dockworkers and truck drivers [who] are worried about their jobs,” Trump responded callously: “That means we lose less money … when you say it slowed down, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
“It shows how out of touch the president is with the working class of America,” Teamsters Local 848 President Eric Tate told Random Lengths. “This is a person that has never worked for a company a day in his life, never had to earn a living (everything has been given to him since birth), and has never known what it is like to be in need of a paycheck to pay bills.” Similarly, a policy statement from the ILWU bluntly stated: “These tariffs don’t put ‘America First’ — they put American working people last.”
While Trump backed down again, and China trade resumed, higher tariffs remained in place, contributing to a weakening economy.
Trump’s Murder Budget
The first “No Kings” protests, on June 14, came just after ICE raids began in Los Angeles, and helped intensify community resistance — see the story on page 4 for more details on this crucial ongoing story. At the same time, Republicans were battling to pass Trump’s murder budget — which included massive cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare marketplace subsidies, and SNAP, directly affecting more than 10 million people, with ripple effects harming tens of millions more, all to provide tax cuts for the wealthy and for large corporations.
“The combination of closed rural hospitals and reduced agricultural income from SNAP will hurt Trump-supporting rural communities especially hard,” we noted, while “The murder budget’s rollback of Joe Biden’s green energy tax incentives would be economically disastrous.”
“Do I like this bill? No.” GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said, after casting the deciding vote for it to pass. She expressed hope that the House would fix the bill, but had to know it wouldn’t. Her bad faith support typified how conflicted and weak GOP lawmakers had become, but that was arguably the peak of Trump’s power. The bill was massively unpopular, as pollster G Elliott Morris noted on Bluesky. “I haven’t seen a single credible poll with support above 40% of adults” and “If you poll them about the individual components, it’s 30+ points underwater.”
Musk turned against the bill, but what really hurt was his social media post claiming that Trump was in the Epstein files. It took time to gain traction, but Trump’s continued refusal to release the files opened up the first significant schism in his base of support.
In early August, we reported, “83% of Republicans Nationwide want Epstein files released,” while “Local Republicans stay mum.” Only one of more than a dozen local Republican leaders we reached out to would say anything about Epstein, and he lied, saying, “Clinton was his best friend,” when it was actually Trump, whose close friendship lasted roughly 15 years.
As it became increasingly obvious that ICE wasn’t going after the “worst of the worst,” but rather the easiest to catch — sometimes even U.S. citizens — Trump’s support outside MAGA began crumbling, and he reacted with power-grab attempts to rig the 2026 midterm elections, most prominently by pushing Texas and other states to redraw their congressional maps.
Pushing Back Against Trump’s Power-Grab
When California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded somewhat in kind, Republicans suddenly discovered it was terribly unfair. But a trio of California labor leaders took center stage in explaining why it was necessary to put a check on Trump’s deadly, destructive dictatorial ambitions, with a focus on the immediate stakes involved.
David Huerta, the president of SEIU California State Council, made the key point, that it was Republicans who were trying to disenfranchise voters: “Republicans have one goal and that goal is to silence the voices of working people. Divide brown and Black communities in particular, unleash terror in immigrant communities, and establish a government that will serve corporations and the wealthy, not the working people.”
While the vote seemed uncertain at the time, less than three months later, on Nov. 4, Californians approved the redistricting by almost 2-1: 64.4-35.6%. It was just one of the 13 statewide elections Democrats swept that night, along with electing democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as the first Muslim mayor of New York City. This came two weeks after the second “No Kings” demonstration brought out 7 million protesters in some 2,700 locations nationwide.
In addition to the “No Kings” demonstration — which Trump reacted to by destroying the White House’s East Wing two days later — two other significant things happened between August and November. First, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and the right tried to turn him into a saint, with hundreds, if not thousands of people being fired for failing to mourn him properly, most notably, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who was “only” suspended. After that, we reported, “A combination of street protests, mass Disney+ subscription cancellations, and dropping stock prices reinforcing a chorus of celebrity condemnations of the action, helped to produce a quick reversal.” Ultimately, the effort to sanctify Kirk and whitewash his bigotry failed spectacularly, and the demonstrations and boycotts supporting Kimmel gave added impetus to the anti-authoritarian movement.
Second, there was a prolonged government shutdown fight, which intertwined with GOP efforts to suppress the Epstein files by refusing to seat Rep. Adelita Grijalva, who would have provided the last signature needed to force a vote on releasing them. As the shutdown wore on, Trump cut off funding for SNAP (food stamps), threatening tens of millions nationwide with starvation.
Democrats trimmed their initial demands down to just one: an extension of Obamacare marketplace subsidies. While most outside DC expected the Blue Tsunami election results to stiffen Democrats’ spines, instead they capitulated just days later, getting virtually nothing in return and prompting a new wave of activist responses aimed at electing new candidates who fight.
As the year ends, Trump’s power appears to be cracking up, as even Fox News has begun noting his mis-steps. Meanwhile, the oligarchs behind and around him are doing better than ever. The year ahead promises to be a struggle to define what a post-Trump America will look like. Will it be a tech billionaire fantasyland? Or a republic, if we can keep it?
