Person or Thing of the Year

There’s no question Trump has had the biggest impact in 2025. Good or bad? We report – you decide.

AQL’s choice for Person — or Thing — of the Year reminds me a little of 1979, when Time Magazine named Iran’s revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as Man of the Year. That decision was widely misunderstood and condemned as a crazy reward for a criminal who had just encouraged the taking hostage of dozens of Americans at the US Embassy in Tehran. Time argued in vain that the title was not necessarily an honor and that bad guys can be Man of the Year (the times were patriarchal). The public wasn’t buying it but soon faced bigger problems, like the collapse of civilization. As did Time.

Last year, AQL chose Elon Musk, a similarly polarizing figure whose technological and political reach had become impossible to ignore. “This title isn’t a prize, but about influence,” we argued then as well, to the same effect as Time. Readers may still not love the paradigm, but we choose to be consistent — and this year there’s no contest. It can only be the bizarre and impactful Trump, true to the definition discussed, to an astonishing degree at that.

GIFT A SUBSCRIPTION!

I want to be clear upfront: though I’m in no way a supporter I’ve agreed with Trump on some things. Migration across the southern US border was out of control, and you don’t have to be racist to want borders enforced. I don’t believe the 2020 election was stolen (just that Putin did not interfere then) — but I do think the US electoral system is absurd, and I support measures like voter ID which Trump called for in an executive order (as well as eliminating electronic voting). I’ve even admired some of his tactics abroad, especially his willingness to bash heads in the Middle East (though not his self-dealing), and I think Europe should pay much more for its own defense (but not be berated and abandoned). And the progressives overreached — there was a needed coursse correction there.

I say all this to avoid being dismissed as a “Trump derangement” case. That said, none of it changes my view that he constitutes a clear and present danger to American as well as global stability and prosperity, that he is a corrupt authoritarian, and that his repeat election was a stain on the republic.

In his first year back in office, Trump inflicted unusually deep damage on the American order and the norms that once protected it. He did this by somehow figuring out that you can carry out illegal actions – like, say, his global tariff nonsense – and this will work for quite a while because of four things.

• First, the Republicans who currently control congress (and will always have the advantage in the upper house, the Senate, due to the absurdity whereby every tiny rural state has the same two representatives as California and New York and Illinois) are lemmings with infinite capacity for hypocrisy and toadyism. These invertebrates will not stop him before the MAGA base has scattered.
• Second, the captured Supreme Court is no check on his power (it ruled Biden cannot forgive student loans but that Trump can do close to anything, for example). This disgraceful assemblage if Exhibit A in the argument that the way America chooses its judges needs to be blown up to smithereens.
• Third, the rest of the legal system is slow, such that you can overstep wildly for months and years before being checked effectively. At which point you move on to the next illegality.
• Fourth, you will be cheered on by an angry base, much and probably most of which basically hates the system for giving them inadequate lives.

The result is that norms that survived wars, depressions, and social upheavals have proven irrelevant. Deploy the National Guard, mess with global trade, fire anyone you want, trash the First Amendment, kill masses of people by pulling the plug on USAID, encourage people to not vaccinate against polio — anything goes.

This amazing innovation has complemented the First Trump Paradigm, which was the discovery that lying all the time, without the slightest compunction, and doubling down in the face of expertise and evidence to hte contrary, can net positive with certain audiences and even get you elected to office. Tarrifs bring in trillions (when they are a tax on Americans); the Israeli-Palestinian wars have killed millions and lasted thousands of years (not even close); I ended eight wars (laughable); the economy has never been greater (totally unfounded); and on and on. Trump is not the first to observe the power of outrageous lies (there is at least one prominent predecessor), but he boasts the highest bullshit factor in US history to be sure.

This sounds like an extreme position, but it is not — rather it is vehement, and the two can often be confused. So it’s only fair that we explain the reasons, and here are the top ten ones.

• Attacking the Constitution and normalizing illegality. Trump’s circle openly derides the constitutional limits that define the presidency. Steve Bannon’s repeated suggestions of a third term and his sneering dismissal of the Twenty-Second Amendment are trial balloons meant to acclimate the public to the idea that constitutional boundaries are optional. Trump actually demanded Mike Pence refuse to certify the 2020 election, leading to a mob rampaging through the Capitol on January 6, 2021, trying to hang him and causing multiple deaths. He tries to cancel birthright citizenship, speaks of deporting US citizens and ignores the rulings of courts — all without precedent. Trump also signed an executive order seeking to preempt state and local AI regulation in ways that critics argue exceed presidential authority and to challenge the separation of powers between federal and state governments. Courts have repeatedly struck down or blocked parts of his executive actions — including attempts to pause federal spending or other federal actions — citing constitutional violations. It is a shitshow.
• Normalizing corruption. In his first term Trump at least pretended he was no longer running the family business, because it was understand that the president should not profit from his job. Those were quiainter times. At this point the issue seems moot. Channeling Nixon, a Mother Theresa by comparison, Trump’s motto might as well be “I Am A Crook.” Access to Trump family members and senior officials flows through business arrangements, PAC donations, and informal networks tied to Trump-branded entities. Foreign governments and domestic oligarchs understand that policy outcomes can be purchased, and the administration hardly bothers pretending otherwise. Taxpayers were billed hundreds of thousands of dollars for Secret Service lodging at Trump properties; Republican committees funneled donor money into Trump hotels and clubs; foreign delegations steered events and room blocks to his venues while seeking policy outcomes; he tried to award the G7 summit to his own resort; and his family simultaneously solicited billions from Gulf sovereign funds while shaping US policy in the region. The brazenness includes licensing deals across the Gulf, lucrative development tie-ups with state-linked firms, and political favors that seemed to trace suspiciously clean lines to mega-donors, crypto players, and pardon recipients. Drain the swamp? They turned it into an ocean.
• Empowering billionaire patrons to reshape government. Few benefactors have gained more from Trump’s second term than Elon Musk, whose companies were poised to benefit directly from Trump’s dismantling of regulatory agencies responsible for financial oversight, telecommunications rules, autonomous vehicle safety, and more. The decapitation of agencies like the SEC and FCC serves no national purpose; it serves the narrow interests of those who stand to profit from the absence of rules. The government now behaves less like a public institution and more like a service provider for the ultra-rich.
• Preferring Russia over US allies. Trump’s foreign policy increasingly mirrors the worldview of the Kremlin. The new National Security Strategy, praised effusively in Moscow, downplays Russia as an adversary and reframes key NATO commitments as optional. Public polling shows that Americans themselves perceive Trump as favoring Russia over Ukraine. European leaders have reacted with alarm as support for Kyiv wavers and as the administration rewrites decades of bipartisan security doctrine to suit Trump’s personal sympathies. Does Putin have something on Trump? Maybe, but I think he just admires the man linked to mysterious defenestrations.

• Engaging in dangerous public-health recklessness. COVID misinformation that once lived at the fringes now enjoys presidential amplification. Trump’s partnership with RFK Jr. and the resulting mainstreaming of anti-vaccine pseudoscience have weakened public trust in medical institutions. At a time when new variants and other health threats periodically emerge, this is truly demonic, and the public pays the cost.
• The war against the media. Trump’s war against the media comes from a worldview whereby criticism is quasi-criminal and anything goes in the effort to silence it. He sues networks for unfavorable interviews, threatens licenses over monologues, dangles access as a reward for praise, and uses the machinery of the state — from merger review to credentialing to DOJ investigations — to project that tough reporting will be costly and dangerous. In Trump’s universe, negative coverage is not part of democratic life but evidence of conspiracy, “treason,” or “enemy of the people” behavior. The goal is to intimidate journalists into self-censorship. It is the stuff of dictatorships, and it is devastating to the health of American society. It is meant to enable him to lie constantly with impunity. “When I took over, inflation was the worse … some would say in the history of our country,” he said (see video below); 2024 inflation was about 2.9 percent com[ared to, say, the 5 percent average throughout the 1980s. This is part of an even wider problem — the war on expertise and knowledge, a truly suicidal enterprise which has the potential, if successful, to end America’s great power era.
• Expressing unprecedented disdain for predecessors and institutional memory. Other presidents distinguish themselves from prior administrations, but Trump treats predecessors as enemies, dismantling commissions, impeding access to past records, and attacking the legitimacy of presidential traditions that long predate him. His hatred for Obamacare and decision to bin the Iran nuclear deal seem to be merely a matter of this principle. Institutions rely on continuity to maintain stability; Trump injects chaos, seeking to erase anything in which he’s not the central figure. In a new historical low (a bar that is high), he added plaques mocking his predecessors to their portraits at the White House; at this point it is fair to wonder whether there is a limit to the uncivilized, undignified behavior, and whether this will actually have an influence on society by projecting to young people that assholery is rather cool and will get you far in life.
• A massive illiberal personality cult. The Republican Party has transformed into a personality cult and has infected the government with an authoritarian worldview. Even symbolic gestures echo illiberal politics: replacing national park free-entry days tied to Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth with a celebratory day for Trump’s birthday is a disgrace that would have once been unfathomable. But no sooner do we get used to that than Trump is trying to rename cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself (an example that seems calculated to be especially absurd).
• Inflicting economic damage through pointless tariff wars. Trump’s tariff war harms American consumers and businesses more than foreign competitors. Economists across the political spectrum warn that these blunt instruments raise prices, destabilize supply chains, and encourage retaliatory measures from allies and adversaries alike. They risk dragging the global economy into contraction. Tariffs have a role — to protect specific industries at specific times. But Trump’s blanket tariffs are incoherent and illegal — Congress imposes tariffs, not the White House. They are misrepresented — US importers and consumers pay the cost, not foreign countries. They oppose decades of bipatrisan consensus. None of it matters, and Trump’s goons line up to lie through their teeth in justifying this nonsense. Below, on NewsNation, I try to set the record straight.
• Abandoning US alliances and degrading American leadership. Trump’s first-year foreign policy has left allies scrambling. European governments, shaken by Washington’s unpredictability, have passed their own defense spending bills specifically to reduce reliance on the United States, which is actually a good thing. But the administration’s transactional vision — alliances as pay-to-play arrangements — undermines decades of steady US leadership and leaves openings for authoritarian powers eager to divide the West.

• These ten disasters are far from comprehensive and yet form a coherent pattern: Trump and his “GOP” enablers are building a system in which personal loyalty and enrichment of the ruling class supersedes the good of the country and the world, and in which America’s institutions, economy, alliances, and public culture are instruments of personal power rather than guardians of the republic.People call it authoritarianism, but frankly I believe that what we have here is a colossal betrayal. Betrayal of the Constitution, which they treat as a set of obstacles to be gamed. Betrayal of allies who relied on American constancy. Betrayal of civic memory and civil rights. Betrayal of economic stability. Betrayal of the principle that the presidency exists to serve the nation, not the person who occupies it. Betrayal of the American ideal. Betrayal of the American people.No foreign adversary has done as much damage to American democracy as Trump and those who enable him. And shame belongs not only to the man driving this project, but to every official, donor, propagandist, and voter who looks away as the country’s foundational commitments are being trashed.In this landscape, it cannot be denied that Trump has had not only the most impact of anyone in the world, but probably more impact than any global leader in memory, at least since some unmentionables many decades back.For these astonishing accomplishments, which no one comes close to matching, Trump has earned the title of AQL’s Person or Thing of the Year.