2025 Thoughts and Recap

Hello dear subscribers,

What a fucked up year it’s been. I hope you all have found effective means of coping with the downfall of the Republic happening before our very eyes–mine, somehow, was writing about it. But my blog posts are only as good as the audience reading them. If you know me personally and I made you subscribe in the early days, thanks for sticking around. If you somehow found me in my little corner of the internet and subscribed too, thanks for hearing me out.

For those of you newer to Patriots Against Trump, here are my personal favorites since I started the blog back in June. As with all my posts, I promise that these are relatively short reads:

1. I Think I Just Became a Progressive

My analysis of Zohran Mamdani’s popularity as a blueprint for the Democratic Party

2. J.D. Vance vs. the Founding Fathers

My take on the Vice President’s uniquely horrible misreading of the Founders’ vision for America

3. Democrats Need Their Own Brand of Patriotism

My reflections following a road trip through small-town America

4. The Real-Life Sith Lords of American Politics

My comparison of the Trump administration to literally the Sith from Star Wars (just hear me out)

5. The Future of Elections - 2026: Local Government

My guest feature on the University of Arizona Discourse Series podcast in Tuscon, Arizona

I really appreciate the traffic these posts and others have generated in just six short months. All of you have made writing fun for me again, and more importantly, given me a community on Substack that shares my concern and love for our country as well as a passion for intellectual engagement. As we move into 2026, I ask of you two things:

If you’ve enjoyed my writing, please share the blog with your friends (or, if you have your own blog, DM me and we’ll trade recommendations). I make no claim to true originality nor exceptional insight, but in growing my readership I see the benefit of continuing to build online communities that exchange ideas about American life and politics and debate their merits (so if any of your friends are Trump supporters, all the better).

A hundred years ago, the Lost Generation of writers fled to Paris following the First World War to try to make sense of the senseless and tragic world they had inherited; they confronted the essential facts of life, challenged their milieu and produced artistic and intellectual works of lasting consequence. Let’s be the Substack version of that. To that end, I invite you to make more noise in the comments section of future posts, whether in agreement or disagreement. Civil discourse is sorely and increasingly lacking in today’s America. Change won’t happen until we change that first.

Secondly, I’d love to hear your ideas on what else you want to see included in Patriots Against Trump in 2026. Any new topics of focus? More guest features? If you have a Substack blog too, is there anything you want to collaborate on? What’s something in politics or history that interests you that you don’t hear enough about? I may never be the first person to have a brand new opinion on something, but we can at least refine ideas and spread them further.

We are living in a unique time in our country, to say the least. The type of decade that could one day be the subject of a Ken Burns documentary. Yes, it sucks. It sucks a lot. But if you’re here reading my blog and others, then you’re already among friends who are paying attention and debating what should be done to see America through the challenges currently facing it.

So thanks for being here, guys. We’re just at the beginning of something awful, historic, and possibly epic, all at the same time. And with that, I’m going to leave you with one of my favorite scenes in literature, one that I hope leaves you with motivation heading into the new year, as it has for me:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring