The Trump Show, season 2, episode 1: a year in review | Opinion
Do you remember when Donald Trump started making noises about the U.S. taking over Greenland or maybe making Canada the 51st Sstate, that snowy region as populous as California to our North? Me neither or, at least, it is such a distant memory that it seems a lot longer ago than just a year.
The first year of Trump has been exhausting, like binge-watching “Game of Thrones” or any director’s cut with a Hobbit in it. But remember to Trump, the savant of reality TV, this is all just a show. He doesn’t care when or how you watch, but he does care about getting your attention.
The show had a beginning when we got introduced to the characters. Remember Matt Gaetz? He got voted off the island or at least bowed out when it seemed like the Senate might reprise its starring role in presidencies past. But boy, the guys who stayed around the whole season, what a crowd.
There’s Attorney General Pam Bondi, straight from a previous role as Trump’s impeachment defense attorney. And former Democrat turned intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, previously with the Kremlin talking points. And nlation czar and Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick. Secretary of Wwa, the tattooed Captain Pete Hegseth. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services, who looks and sounds like the opposite of human health. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who jumped at the chance to leave a show, er, state, nobody watched. Oh, yeah and Secretary of State Marco Rubio with lapdog-in-chief JD Vance.
You have to give Trump props because half the battle for a new show is building a cast the viewers want to watch. Trump can safely use the day bed so recently abandoned by Joe Biden to take daily naps secure in the knowledge that the show will go on, and the viewers will remain entertained.
Don-roe Doctrine in Venezuela
There are a host of compelling, twisty plot threads each moving at its own pace with one always ready to move into the foreground when the last one has had enough screen time.
How much of a rubber stamp is Congress? Can Trump push them too far on Cabinet picks? Will the Senate satraps lift a finger to reclaim their power over tariffs? Can Trump spend at will without anything even vaguely related in the budget? Will Congress let Trump kill a Cabinet agency it created?
In foreign affairs, Trump stops wars as quickly as he considers starting or spreading others. If you can remember the eight wars he stopped according to his FIFA World Peace Prize speech, you are a better man than I.
I keep thinking about his efforts to cut arms supplies to Ukraine, a war that weakness could spread deeper into Europe, and a prospect that Trump’s NATO hatred has made more likely. The Don-roe Doctrine is on display in Venezuela where Trump seems eager to start a war, or at least can’t get enough acts of war with boat bombing, blockades and boarding parties providing fresh visuals.
Meanwhile over at center stage, I mean the White House, they are rebuilding the set with more gold, room for a dancing number and insulting subtitles under the pictures of presidents past. The demolition dust provides a subtle shadiness to the corruption as Trump sells sponsorships for the ballroom (what’s TV without sponsorships?), promotes payola for the acts of independent agencies and sells pardons for crypto-billions. No reality show is complete without the spokesman who moves along the story line with artfully- and not-so-artfully disguised untruths.
If the audience threatens to change the channel, Trump can keep raising the stakes. Will tariffs and out-of-control government spending spike inflation? Will manufacturing jobs continue their precipitous fall, despite promises of the opposite? And finally, what will happen with the ONE TRILLION DOLLAR trade deficit with China next season?
And just like a good TV show, there’s a climax, or in this case a government shutdown, where the reality show came awfully close to reality for the millions of travelers its chaos derailed or deplaned, if you will.
Good God, I am exhausted just writing about it and I didn’t even mention the cameos by trillionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE horde, dozens of undocumented migrants given an all-expenses-paid trip to a Salvadoran concentration camp and National Guardsmen brought to Washington, D.C., (and elsewhere) to fight crime and alternatively, do a little light gardening.
I’d give you some hints about next season, but I am not sure I am going to watch. This show has jumped the shark.
This story was originally published December 29, 2025 at 5:08 AM.
