Volume 6, Issue 2: Modern Times

"In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain, you'll never see me frown."

It has been a long, long year. The question is just how long the next few will be.

“What will America look like after three more years of Trump?” wrote my New York colleague Ed Kilgore (a UGA law grad, by the way) this week. “What will America look like after three more years of this barrage?” When the election was going on last year, those of us who were horrified by the prospect of Trump returning to office kept insisting that if he won, it would not going to be like the first term at all, that everyone who kept him from blowing everything up last time are gone, that it was going to be madness. This turned out to be a vast underestimation. It has been much worse.

To live in the year 2025, the first real year of Trump Unleashed, is to live in a constant state of exhaustion, fear and surreality: Sometimes the venal stupidity is so overwhelming it can feel like the end of the world. You do your best not to think about it all the time. But, to paraphrase Grierson, it starts to feel irresponsible not to think about it all the time. And around and around we go.

Kilgore’s column asks the right question: How in the world are we going to make it through three more years of this? So much has changed already, and it is beginning to feel too late to fix much of it; I don’t know how you reverse so much of the damage that has already been done, not just in a governmental sense but a social one. It’s in our bloodstreams at this point.

I think you see the effects of having a madman in office, surrounded by the worst people in public life, throughout every aspect of our days, whether we want to think about it or not. I think it touches everything, and the aftereffects will echo for decades. I think when our children are in their 70s, their children will ask them what it was like to live through Trump being President. They’ll have to wonder.

It’s in the air, always. At the end of the first year of Trump 2.0, it’s worth looking at how we’ve changed already. As wrap up 2025, here are some of my personal observations and takeaways from Year One.

Everyone is exhausted. One must account for the fact that I hang out with a lot of middle-aged parents—people who tend to be definitionally exhausted—here, but there is an undeniable sense of at-the-end-of-their-rope everywhere you look in the culture. Everything is either treated with intense anger or a weary, defeated shrug. You see this in people having far shorter fuses, as well as more mental health episodes, particularly among the most vulnerable. But I also believe you see this in just everyday life, largely through a quiet but unmissable lowering of standards and the basic expectations one has for the world. Everything’s a little bit worse—enshittification is now standard operating procedure for every industry, by design—and we seem to have collectively decided that we do not have the energy to do anything other than slump our shoulders and accept it. One obvious symptom of this is what AI has done to creative industries like graphic design and illustration. AI “art” is ugly and sloppy and soulless and full of mistakes, but people don’t seem to care because it doesn’t matter, it’s fine, everything is shitty, at least this was shitty quickly. People are too busy just trying to keep their heads above water to have the time or inclination to worry about the quality of pretty much anything.

In a world with no rules, people are acting accordingly. The story I always tell is one I first wrote here back in July 2018; I won’t go through it again (you should read it though) but I’ll repeat the takeaway: Shamelessness is a superpower. If people believe they can get away with anything, they will attempt to do so. If you think you can do something you know is wrong but will face no consequence for, you are far more likely to do it. In a world where Trump has committed multiple felonies, assaulted women, attempted an actual coup, along of course with an endless number of other atrocities (as regularly and helpfully updated by this McSweeney’s catalog), and he has not only not been punished for any of them but was, in fact, returned to the highest office on the planet … what incentive is there for any regular person to ever worry about doing the right thing at all? I think this is becoming so common that we’ve stopped even pointing it out as unusual. People refusing to pay bills, treating people who work for them like shit, being cutthroat and cruel in financial dealings, blithly ignoring any ethical concerns, doing solely what is best for themselves at all times. At a certain level, you almost can’t blame them. Why should they care about any of this stuff if the country has clearly made it clear it doesn’t? People are treating doing the right thing as a sucker’s bet. I’m not sure they’re wrong. Get what you can, while you can, everybody else is.

People are a lot more unplugged. One might even stay … stoned? I don’t mean to be flippant about this, but what was once a way for some to unwind or disconnect at the end of a difficult day increasingly feels like a prescriptive way simply to make it through one. The world is so much more stressful and scary and uncertain that the need for disconnection is becoming total. Honestly, I’ve found this to be a helpful explanation for why drivers are so much more terrible now than they used to be: They’re all stoned.

Escaping into diversion is an illusion, not that it stops us from lying to ourselves anyway. I have had an absolute blast of a time writing about college football for The Athletic this year, partly because I love the sport, partly because it’s fun to be writing for a sports-obsessive audience (as opposed to the writing-about-sports-for-non-sports-publications like I’ve been doing for the last 20 years) and partly because I’m working with terrific editors who have given me the freedom to explore a wide variety of topics in the way I want to explore them. (I basically treat the column like I’m a Jane Goodall anthropologically observing a fascinating and complex subculture of species.) But the real fun of the pieces comes from all the parallels between the world of college football (and all sports, but especially college football) and the real world. Almost every one of those columns has the subtext of “this is what it’s like to live in 2025.” The lack of personal responsibility and the need to find some “other” to blame for your problems. Tribalism above all else. The forever nagging sense of dissatisfaction and the relentless need for More. The sense that the world is collapsing around all of us and that it’s making us all lose our minds. The inherent distrust of expertise and institutional wisdom. The emotional cul-de-sac of nostalgia. The inability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. All of it. That’s what they’re all secretly about.

I have never watched more sports, probably in my life, than I have in 2025. I have attempted to escape into basketball, into baseball, in college football, into youth sports, into movies, into music, into binging TV shows, into art, into anything that will take my mind off what is currently happening in the world. But Trump is still in all of of it. Pretending otherwise is kidding myself. There is no escape, no matter how much we might want it, no matter how much we might need it. It’s in every molecule. How could it not be?

Kids are now brewing in this stew. My son Wynn was about to turn one year old when Trump came down the escalator in June 2015. This world is all that he, and all of his friends, and basically everyone too young to remember what it was like before, could possibly know. Back in March 2018, I wrote a cover story for New York about Raising Boys In The Age of Trump, and implicit in it was the hope that this would all be over quickly, that my kids would look back at the Trump era as some weird blip that stressed their parents out a lot but provided them, as adults, no tangible memories that stuck with them. (In a not-entirely-dissimilar way from the way I remember the Reagan years, which spanned my ages four-to-12. I am not saying the Reagan years were worse, or even all that comparable to, what we’re currently living through; I’m just saying that I don’t remember ever fretting about, or even thinking about, who the President was.)

That is obviously not what has happened. The Trump years span these kids’ entire world. Our kids can’t escape him and the people around him and the things he is doing any more than any of the rest of us can. He’s at the World Cup Draw. There are ICE ads on Spotify. The entire online culture these kids immerse themselves in is one that is run by tech companies who specifically cater to, and profit from, Trump. The time that they could get out of this unscathed is over. This is what they have grown up in. It is, in many ways, all they know.

There’s no button to push to end this. One of my favorite SNL sketches from the last decade was from May 2017, when Trump (played, broadly as ever, by Alec Baldwin) is being interviewed by Lester Holt (Michael Che). They’re discussing Trump’s firing of James Comey, and Holt asks him if Comey was fired because of his Russia investigation. Trump—as he did in the actual interview—just goes out and says, “Yep, that’s why I fired him.” Holt, astonished, notes that is an obstruction of justice. Trump just nods. “Yep.”

Holt flashes a quick, confused grin: “Wait … so did I get him? Is this all over?” He then touches his earpiece and frowns. “Oh. No. I didn’t. Nothing matters? Absolutely nothing matters anymore? OK, got it.”

It seems almost quaint now that we thought there would be any accountability, any ramifications, any sort of basic structure for justice at all. There is not a single day that passes that doesn’t feature a scandal, usually multiple scandals, that would have brought down every single administration before this one, likely in a matter of hours. They happen so quickly and so often that we don’t even bother nodding at them anymore. We all know the score now. No one pretends otherwise.

The stakes have been raised if we ever do get out of this. Much has been made about the (undeniable) fact that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has explicitly—almost cheerfully—committed war crimes with the bombing of fishing boats outside Venezuela, in what seems like a buildup to a war that no one wants and few even understand what the objective would be anyway. But the atrocities have been so relentless that, if power is ever wrenched out of Trump’s hands (however that would happen) and actual defenders of democracy return to power, it is foundationally understood that there will have to be criminal charges for those who committed them. This is a decided difference from Trump’s first term, both in scale (there are many more crimes happening in Trump 2.0 than Trump 1.0) and in temperment. It is going to be a baseline level minimum for whoever succeeds this administration that all of these evils—the boat strikes, the ICE raids, the prison abuses, you name it, all of it—are going to have to be addressed and investigated, and those responsible will have to face trial and, if convicted, punishment. The time when we could tell ourselves we could just turn down the national temperature and things would get back to normal is over. If we don’t someday hold people responsible for what is happening, there isn’t going to be much left to defend.

There are signs of hope. One of the most discouraging aspects of the first half of this year was that you felt so helpless. Not only were you powerless to stop what was happening, it didn’t seem like anybody seemed to care or notice. Trump was still (reasonably) popular, the corporate and tech world was bending to him, much of the professional media apparatus appeared resigned to “well, the people voted for him, so I guess we have to just let him cook.” This is no longer happening. There have been two national protests featuring nearly 3 percent of the population taking to the streets to stand against this. (These protests are so mainstream now that my parents go to them.) Courts are increasingly striking down most of Trump’s most draconian and unconstitutional edicts. Trump’s approval ratings are lower than they have been since January 6, and continuing to fall.

And we have seen it, consistently, at the election booth too. (We actually had our own victory here in Athens just this week, a district gerrymandered for Republicans for years now flipping Democratic.) There is every reason to be optimistic about next year’s midterms. People do not want this. They are now making that abundantly clear.

There are many more hard times to come. There is every reason to think 2026, alas, may be worse. Insurance premiums are about to explode. The cost of living continues to rise. The economy is being propped up by an expensive technology that not only is soulless and destructive, and not only doesn’t actually work, but has the perhaps even larger problem of not actually being profitable; as someone who lived through the 2000 dot-com bust, much of this looks familiar, but also much more corrupt and perilous this time. And I see no reason to think Trump and his sycophants are going to somehow be more humble and prone to moderation as they become less and less popular and as opposition to them continues to rise: They’re going to keep doubling down. They are never going to relent. I am hopeful for the future. But we have to make it to the future first.

People are still good. Even with all this: I still believe. You see it every day. You don’t have to look very hard. I know it’s exhausting. I know it’s scary. I know it can lead to despair. But just because the current culture incentivizes self-aggrandizement and cruelty does not mean that people actually are cruel. There is so much good, and I find myself even more encouraged by the good than I once did, because it is swimming against the tide: It is goodness simply for goodness. It is simply because, deep down, I still believe, even after the last 10 years, even after this one, that people are, indeed, good. They want to be. They can be. They are. I don’t know how all this turns out. I don’t know how this ends. But I know we’ve still got that going for us. I will take it. I think it means we’re gonna make it. I think it means we’re gonna make it through. Eventually.

Every year, I take the final two weeks of this newsletter “off,” which is to say, next week’s newsletter will be my annual ranking of the best movies of the year (here is last year’s; you can listen to Grierson & Leitch’s annual Dorkfest show, taping Wednesday and posting later that night, to get this year’s), and the week after will be a year-end recap of all the pieces I wrote in the past year. Consider this 2025’s closing message. Thank you for hanging out with me this year.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. College Football Is Run By Whiners, The Athletic. It’s always someone else’s fault.

2. The USMNT Is Set Up Well. Too Well, New York. I absolutely cannot wait for the World Cup next summer. I think I’m even comfortably rooting for the US again!

3. In Praise of Old Athletes, The Washington Post. Go get ‘em, Philip Rivers.

4. Illini Power Rankings: They Grow Up So Fast, Illini Board. Every six weeks or so, I have to scratch the itch.

5. Takeaways from the Pete Alonso Deal, MLB.com. I remain optimistic about the Orioles.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, discussing “Marty Supreme,” “Jay Kelly” and “Is This Thing On?”

Morning Lineup, I did Friday’s show.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the game against Alabama and previewed the playoff.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Donald Trump Is Losing,” Garrett Graff, Doomsday Scenario. A smarter, maybe more rosy (slightly) version of what I wrote above.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Last Night on Earth,” U2. The new Knives Out movie is on Netflix now, and you should watch it, it’s good. It also reminded me I hadn’t heard U2’s Pop (which has the song Wake Up Dead Man) in a long time. It’s a better album than you might remember?

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

In two weeks, you can sleep until New Years. You’re gonna make it.

Have a great weekend.

Best,
Will