Trump’s 2026 Agenda: What His 2025 Actions Reveal for the Year Ahead

We should expect stepped up election subversion, further weaponize the justice system to weaken their opposition, and the industrialization their ethnic cleansing policies.

Graphic by Susan J. Demas

Although it is hard to see it now, 2025 was a turning point, the year when America’s fascist consolidation reached its high-water mark and began to crumble.

That doesn’t mean things will get better right away. They won’t. In part because the Trump administration feels threatened, they will make increasingly brutal use of their powers. In 2026, we should expect stepped-up election subversion, further weaponization of the justice system to weaken their opposition, and the industrialization of their ethnic cleansing policies.

But, because a large pro-democracy coalition mobilized in every state this year, we should see the pro-democracy forces move from defense to offense in 2026.

2025 Was a High Watermark for Autocrats

Trump used his first year in office to secure control over the federal government, turning the executive branch into a tool for his political and personal aggrandizement. Leaning on Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion that presidents are immune from prosecution, Trump acted rapidly without the constraints of law. He sidelined the United States Congress.

He used the full power of the federal government to coerce important elements of civil society. Universities and law firms, as well as corporate news organizations ceded control of their functions to his will. He passed an all inclusive law that created an oligarchic class of wealthy courtiers and a giant domestic security force. Throughout the year, the Supreme Court used its emergency docket to overrule lower courts and to give the administration time to consolidate power.

The Results Are Deeply Disturbing

Like autocracies everywhere, America’s is deeply corrupt. The Trump family has used its power to amass a personal fortune. Estimates are that Trump’s net worth has increased by billions of dollars. His son joined businesses that subsequently won lucrative defense contracts. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, negotiated middle east deals while earning millions each year, courtesy of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. America’s foreign policy and military capabilities are now credibly said to be tied to the business interests of the President and his senior foreign policy negotiators.

Independent Journalism Eroded

Trump used his power to erode America’s tradition of independent journalism. He used his power to approve mergers among media companies to steer a large portion of the traditional news media into the hands of his allies. CBS news opted to employ a government monitor in its newsroom and hired a Trump ally with no news experience as head of news. He cut government funding to public media, most notably, PBS and NPR. He built alliances with the owners of large social media platforms like Meta, X and TikTok. Credible reports have shown that X now tweaks its algorithms in ways that further spread administration’s propaganda while suppressing stories they do not like.

Congress Sidelined Itself

The Supreme Court and the Republican Congress not only failed to exercise oversight that might have put some guardrails around the corrupt acts of the administration, but they also gave Trump powers no monarch in the west has had since the 1600s. They allowed President Trump to impound funds appropriated by Congress and to ignore the deficiency rules to spend money not appropriated. In effect, the American treasury became Donald Trump’s to use as he sees fit.

It wasn’t just the power of the purse. In 2025 the Court realized its decades-long effort to mainstream the idea of the unitary executive - a once fringe legal theory that all of America’s executive power resides in the president personally. As the year ends, the Supreme Court is widely expected to overturn longstanding precedent and allow the president to terminate employees of independent agencies. The Court’s notion of an all-encompassing executive power vested in the person of the president even threatens civil service.

White Christian Nationalists Rule the Federal Government

Trump used his power to hire and fire to fill the administration with self-described White Christian Nationalists. These men sought to use the power of government to turn their own particular religious and racial notions into national policy and more broadly to coerce American culture to conform. Many of these people were appointed to high level positions that required Senate confirmation. Senate Republicans went along.

Civil Society Was Attacked

Trump claimed, and the other branches of government ceded, additional powers he used to attack civil society. For example, he rescinded research contracts with American universities and made future research contracts dependent on political objectives. He used that power to force some universities to cede their independence on issues as diverse as curriculum, admissions, free speech, and campus safety. He frequently claimed national security powers, sometimes to bring law firms to heal, sometimes to expand his power to revoke visas, sometimes to refuse to company with legitimate freedom of information requests.

Trump tore down a portion of the White House, added his name to at least two buildings in the capital, hung banners with his image from federal buildings, and named several new federal programs after himself. Meanwhile, his Congressional allies introduced bills to put his face on our currency.

Illegal and Unprecedented Use of the U.S. Military

Finally, he took unprecedented control of the military. Without approval from Congress, he sent bombers around the world to attack Iran, he launched military attacks against boats in the Caribbean, and he sent National Guard troops onto the streets of American cities. At numerous events with our military forces, he broke tradition and attempted to turn those events into political rallies. He often raised the Insurrection Act, saying he was open to sending the military onto our streets. He joked about bombing Chicago, and his Secretary of Defense told the military they should be using city streets as training grounds.

By the end of 2025, Donald Trump had more power than any previous president in American history.

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The Beginning of the End

And yet … during the same year, voters handed the administration one loss after another. Even when Trump’s candidates prevailed, they hemorrhaged voters, turning 22-point districts into barely 10-point ones.

The administration continues to claim elections are rife with fraud - as they did in the run up to their January 6th insurrection four years ago. This coming year, midterm elections will be vigorously contested, not so much at the ballot box, where opposition to the administration will lead to large Republican losses, but rather over the legitimacy of elections themselves. That’s something the opposition must prepare for, but it is also a signal that the administration is deeply unpopular heading into the new year.

Given the groundwork laid in 2025, we should expect Americans to demand ballot access, a fair vote count, rapid certification of the results, and the seating of all the winners in Congress and state legislatures. On the other hand, 2025 ended, at least for now, any attempt to hold back partisan and race-based disenfranchisement through gerrymandering.

Trump’s effort to rig the midterms by deploying a mid-decade gerrymander cost him the patina of invincibility within the GOP. The president got Texas to redraw Congressional boundaries, but in December, the Republican state senate in Indiana had seen enough and refused to go along.

His anti-immigrant zeal went too far. During 2025, the attacks on immigrants became armed attacks. In Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Minneapolis-St Paul; Charlotte; and New Orleans, the Department of Homeland Security sent poorly trained and over-armed troops onto the streets. They used Black Hawk Helicopters and masked storm troopers to overwhelm an apartment building in Chicago. They deployed troupers to tear gas dozens of neighborhoods, separated parents from children, and threw American citizens into detention centers.

Americans reacted in horror. Mr. Trump’s increasingly wild claims that his administration was taking “the worst of the worst” off our streets clashed with the reality that they were, in fact, rounding up American citizens, tear-gassing whole streets, separating parents from children, and lying about all of it in court.

When Trump sent ICE and CBP troops to Chicago, residents quickly organized with whistle brigades, peaceful protests, and their ubiquitous cameras to protect their neighbors and to hold the government troops accountable. The model of resistance proved successful and was rapidly adopted in other jurisdictions as federal agents moved from city to city.

Americans became organized. While this was going on, groups like Indivisible saw membership explode. No Kings Day became the biggest public protest in American history. These groups are not organized like a national political party. They are ground-up volunteer membership organizations. In 2025, these groups grew in blue states and red ones, in big cities and in farm towns, and in every state.

The long administration effort to hide the Jeffry Epstein files upended Trump’s carefully managed persona. Trump’s entire political persona - his battle against the “politically correct,” his cultivated crassness, his rule breaking - was intended to send a message that he is on the side of ordinary Americans. In 2025 that persona was shattered. This proved a devastating blow.

As the pain from Trump’s tariffs hit, Americans began to focus more on the corruption and wealth of the Trump family. When he bulldozed a wing of the White House to build a gilt ballroom that appeared to look as if it belonged in the Kremlin or Versailles, many Americans, even those sympathetic to Trump came to see a president who had abandoned their interests in favor of America’s billionaires.

Trump’s response was tin-eared. He mocked the economic anxieties of ordinary Americans saying, “affordability is a hoax.” When Americans weren’t convinced, he demanded and was given airtime for a nationally broadcast speech about the economy. It was widely mocked. He then returned to a theme that has worked previously - blaming economic anxieties on immigrants. But this time, when he told the nation that Somali immigrants were stealing jobs and living off public welfare. Americans knew better. This time, Americans would not let Trump shift the blame.

In 2025, lower courts mostly held the administration accountable. In different venues, federal authorities involved in the anti-immigration raids were found by judges - including some appointed by Donald Trump - to lack candor and credibility. In another court, after the administration won months of delays, a judge began the process of contempt hearings against administration officials for defying court orders not to fly immigrants to CECOT.

The courts overturned some of the most coercive acts of the administration. In two high profile cases, the administration sought to use prison as a political weapon. First, the administration arrested and detained a student for pro-Palestinian speech. The government said Mahmoud Khalil violated his visa by engaging in activities that were “detrimental to American foreign policy interests.” A judge ordered him released. The second case was resolved in December when the courts freed Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Mr. Abrego Garcia had been illegally deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison camp in March. After the administration admitted he had been sent there in error, the administration nonetheless chose to make him an example of their power. They fought up to the Supreme Court to keep Abrego Garcia from ever returning to America. They attempted to deport him to Africa and told a judge that Liberia was the only state willing to accept him. In her ruling, the judge called out the administration for “their misrepresentation to the court.”

In a hint of things to come, at year’s end the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s effort to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, depriving the administration, at least for now, of one of its most coercive weapons.

In 2025 ordinary Americans began an extraordinary campaign of jury nullification. More than a dozen times, grand juries refused to go along with Trump appointed U.S. Attorneys who sought to indict people on Trump’s enemies list or people engaged in protesting the administration.

All year, opponents of the regime pointed to its racism. For a time, that charge was dismissed as simply a partisan talking point. By year’s end, overt racism and antisemitism became a feature of the GOP, and Americans didn’t like it. The administration published its National Security Strategy. That document said, among other things, that the NATO treaty was signed with Europe when Europe was overwhelmingly white, and that since immigration has changed the continent, the NATO treaty might no longer be valid. The strategy joined naked racism to a pro-Putin approach to Europe and appalled the entire foreign policy establishment. The publication of the strategy shined a bright new light on the ugly bigotry that had been in plain sight all along. A few weeks later, at a meeting of Turning Point USA, J.D. Vance gave a speech where he invited Nazis, Groypers, and other hate-groups into the administration’s political coalition.

Despite the vigor of administration actions, this was also the year that age caught up to Donald Trump. He repeatedly fell asleep at meetings. He often appeared confused. He moved slowly and looked unfit. After spending much of the previous year attacking Joe Biden for being old, Donald Trump reacted defensively and angrily to news that showed him visibly aging.

Having won the popular vote for president in 2024, Trump ended 2025 with barely a 35 percent approval rating and Americans overwhelmingly told pollsters they believed the country was heading in the wrong direction.

Turning points are hard to see, especially for those in power who are blinded by flattery.

Looking back at 1942, it was both the high watermark and the beginning of the end for the Axis powers. In Europe, Hitler ordered his military to cut Soviet transport on the Volga and protect the flank of a movement to capture the oil fields in the Caucasus. The result was the six-month battle of Stalingrad. The casualties were enormous. In the end the German 6^th Army collapsed. From that moment, Soviet troops began their westward march towards Berlin.

In the Pacific, the American victory at the Battle of Midway halted Japanese expansion, destroyed four of the Empire’s aircraft carriers and began the allied push toward Japan.

In North Africa, a major allied victory over Field Marshal Rommel at El Alamein turned the tide on that continent.

In Germany, far from the borders where the war was turning against the Nazis, the regime’s evil leaders were beginning the systematic, industrial scale genocide of Europe’s Jews. The Final Solution was put in motion in a charming house on a lake in Wannsee, outside of Berlin. Reinhard Heydrich chaired the meeting.

For the rest of the war, the Nazis devoted scarce strategic resources towards the destruction of the Jews. Trains that could have moved troops instead were tasked with bringing human beings to death camps.

Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. Steven Miller is not Reinhard Heydrich. They have never proposed using death camps. Instead, they are satisfied throwing humans in foreign dungeons like CECOT in El Salvador. But, in an eerie symmetry, the administration is ramping up its cruelest race-based policies at the very moment when the forces of resistance are turning the tide.

No one doubts that in 2026 they will devote yet more resources to achieve their mass deportation goals rather than to focus their efforts on rebuilding trust with Americans. Their political losses will mount. So will the actual casualties among Americans. Citizens and immigrants alike will be detained in growing numbers. Some will be killed (at least one person was killed by ICE in 2025). Yet despite threatened and actual coercion, midterms will be held, and Democrats will take control of the U.S. House, and perhaps even the Senate. That will mark a transition from defense to offense, but it will not be the end of the authoritarian effort.

Of course, 1942 was not the end of the war. Millions were yet to die. Instead of focusing all their effort on the approaching allies, the Nazis believed that murdering every Jew would somehow deliver them the world they had wanted all along.

And 2025 is not the end of the Trump efforts to overturn American democracy and to greatly reduce its non-white population. Instead of focusing on governing to meet America’s needs, the White Christian Nationalists in the administration say that ending birthright citizenship and deporting more than 50 million people will make America great again. The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that will decide whether they can attempt to do this. But the tide has turned in favor of the resistance.

America in 2025 is a better place than Germany in 1942. The stories of children torn from their parents and disappeared are already being told. Ordinary citizens are standing up in defiance to protect their neighbors. Many judges are demonstrating continued fealty to the rule of law. Large and small demonstrations make it impossible for the regime to convince its opponents that they are alone. Americans remain committed to the idea of democracy and free speech.

The tide has turned. Much fighting remains ahead. But at the end of a terrible year, I am confident that victory for American democracy is far more likely than it was a year ago.

Edwin Eisendrath hosts "It’s the Democracy, Stupid" on Lincoln Square and on WCPT820 AM/ Heartland Signal. He's the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. You can follow him on BlueSky at eisendrath.net and Substack at “It’s the Democracy, Stupid.” Read the original column here.

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