Readers always tell me I'm wrong, but I was right about Trump | Opinion – USA Today
There is one thing we can all agree on: This year has been filled with news and happenings that just never gave us room to breathe.
Regardless of what side of the political debate you’re on, you’ve had plenty to talk about and react to.
Thankfully, so have the USA TODAY columnists and editors. We’ve spent 2025 doing our best to stay on top of a never-ending news roller coaster. As we careen toward 2026, we wanted to take one last look back at the year that was. Specifically, we asked our columnists to write about what they got wrong or right.
Early on in President Donald Trump’s second term, I reserved some naive hope that Congress would have enough dignity to block his most egregious actions. Whatever low expectations I had were obviously far too optimistic.
The story of Trump’s second term has been one of Congress abdicating its duty as a body to legislate. Amid lawless tariffs, military strikes without congressional approval and attempts to slash wasteful federal spending, Congress has been completely silent and ineffectual.
As much as Trump’s abuses of the role of the executive speak to how unfit for the office he is, there is something worse about Congress standing by idle to let it happen. Trump is a known quantity, and his self-serving nature was priced in when Americans voted for him. What wasn’t part of that calculus, however, was that Congress has abandoned its duty to defend the Constitution.
— Dace Potas
Since I hear all the time about how wrong I am from you, dear readers, I thought I would focus on something I got right this year.
In January, while former President Joe Biden was still in office, I wrote about how I thought it was likely that Biden’s awful rewrite of Title IX would be overturned in court. Shortly thereafter, it was.
Biden spent his four years in office prioritizing gender identity over biological sex, and he sought to remake Title IX, the law that prevents sex discrimination in schools that take federal money, to give his misguided goals the force of law.
Luckily, more than half the states challenged the new rules, and the courts found them to be unconstitutional.
I also believed that Trump – who campaigned on protecting women’s and girls’ sports and spaces – would follow through on those promises. And he did.
In February, Trump signed an executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” that prevents transgender athletes from playing on female teams and using private spaces like locker rooms.
Even better, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed this summer to take up two cases that could bring much-needed certainty to this issue. The cases out of Idaho and West Virginia challenge whether it’s legal and constitutional for states to make laws that ban transgender athletes from playing on women’s teams. More than half the states have done just that, so the impact of the court’s decisions in these cases will be far-reaching.
The court hears arguments on Jan. 13.
I applaud the courts and the Trump administration for standing for women and girls. This is something I really wanted to be right about.
— Ingrid Jacques
I’m proud to report it has been another year of me, America’s most-beloved and humble columnist, being absolutely, 100% correct about everything.
In January, I re-upped my license from the Mar-a-Lago Institute of Infallibility and received my official Certification of Zero Self-Reflection, signed by none other than President Donald J. Trump. There have since been zero moments of wrongness, and anyone who has claimed otherwise about any of the columns I’ve written is a fake, hoax-spreading loser who is likely guilty of sedition.
In February, I applauded our unifying commander in chief for saying America “has gotten bloated and fat and disgusting” and noted: “I’m just grateful we finally have a leader who is unafraid to tell us he can’t stand the sight of us and, by the way, those jeans do make us look fat.” I was spot-on in my gratitude, and Trump has continued to make most Americans feel embarrassed to be Americans.
In July, I wrote that the new “Superman” movie gave me the Woke Mind Virus because it contained virulently liberal concepts like kindness and decency. That was correct, and I was only able to cure myself by listening to 15 hours of Elon Musk’s social media posts read aloud by an AI voice programmed to sound like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I also drank several gallons of ivermectin and, at President Trump’s suggestion, ingested zero Tylenol.)
And in October, I castigated Taylor Swift for having the gall to release a new album, even though Trump had declared her “NO LONGER HOT.” I wrote: “Without Trump’s support, I’m sure Swift’s album will be a MASSIVE FLOP anyway, but just in case, make sure you stay engaged and outraged.” That was clearly accurate, and any claims that the album has been No. 1 on Billboard’s top 200 for 10 weeks are FAKE NEWS!
Bottom line: 2025 was the year of me being right all the time, again. You’re welcome, America.
— Rex Huppke
Remember the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, the destructive plaything Trump briefly handed to the richest man in the world, who then used it to eliminate American aid to some of the poorest people on the planet?
Early on, I had a very low opinion of DOGE, with its slapdash destruction of our federal government, the stutter-step firings and layoffs, followed by attempts to rehire workers because their work actually matters.
Turns out, my opinion about DOGE was on target. Don’t take my word for it.
Just listen to the regret in Musk’s voice as he recounted his DOGE efforts during a Dec. 9 podcast interview with MAGA sycophant Katie Miller.
Musk called his DOGE efforts “somewhat successful” or “a little bit successful” while acknowledging that he wished he hadn’t done it at all and would not do it again.
Guys like Musk live to tell the world about their brilliance. “Somewhat successful” is their way of saying they made a mess and then walked away.
And Musk isn’t even the harshest critic of DOGE in Trump’s inner circle.
The president’s chief of staff, in a jaw-dropping series of interviews with Vanity Fair that landed on Dec. 16, described herself as “initially aghast” that Musk slashed humanitarian aid dispensed by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
That agency, known as USAID, did “very good work,” Wiles told Vanity Fair.
But DOGE? Not so much, according to Wiles, who declared that “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one.”
— Chris Brennan
I didn’t write an official prediction last year, but I still got some things right – and wrong – especially as it related to politics.
I was right about how badly we needed to bid farewell to Biden’s disastrous term. He wasn’t fit to be president, and his team lied and deceived their way through, especially in the second half of his term. Good riddance.
I was right that Trump would accomplish a lot this year for Americans, at least to a degree, and at a frenetic pace. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with tax cuts for Americans – especially business owners – is a great example. He banned federal funding for the harmful treatment of minors, protecting vulnerable kids. He tried to reduce extraneous federal spending through DOGE. Trump did more on the international front than I thought he would: He was firm with Iran, bombing three of their nuclear sites, and he brokered a peace deal between Hamas and Israel.
However, I was wrong that 2025 would be entirely a success. I worried about Trump’s tariffs, and I’m not convinced they’ve helped the U.S. economy – at least yet. Affordability hasn’t shifted much, and just recently, Trump mocked the idea at a rally. He also, quite predictably, can’t just focus on leading the country – improving our economy – and gets bogged down in his own maddening vices, like smearing dead foes on social media.
—Nicole Russell