Archive kept the paywall, so here’s an uglier solution:

US politics, with its showbiz patina, its stadium gigs and pyrotechnics, always looks surreal from Australia, where our politicians largely have the charisma of particularly forgettable substitute teachers, and look utterly ridiculous when attempting the kind of performance that’s relatively commonplace in America.

But even by these standards, Turning Point USA’s 2025 AmericaFest conference, held in Arizona this week, was ridiculous. When Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, there were instant calls for revenge against the left, and even more baseless, against the trans community, from influential figures on the political right. It was hard to suppress a rising nausea in the moment, a sense that the increasingly fascistic logic of politics in the country under President Donald Trump could finally flare up into widespread vigilantism, open and unpunished.

What actually happened was bad enough, with around 600 people losing their jobs in the land of the free for an insufficiently deferential response to Kirk’s death, one of the mounting parallels with McCarthyism.

But that sense of imminent, violent crisis passed with surreal speed and ease. Kirk’s widow Erika seamlessly assumed her husband’s role as head of the organisation and took on his duties with remarkable pizzazz. Seeing this recently widowed mother of young children taking to the stage in gleaming sequins as sparklers blazed around her, and later tossing t-shirts to the crowd? To quote then president George W. Bush, approvingly responding to a woman who had to work three jobs to make ends meet: “Uniquely American, isn’t it?”

Erika Kirk never let that chipper energy flag, even when right-shifting rapper Nicki Minaj bizarrely referred to Vice President JD Vance as an “assassin” during an interview, or when she introduced Utah Valley University student Caleb Chilcutt by praising him for continuing with the “grift” of her late husband. (Sorry, “gift”… no, make that “grit.” Ha! “It has been a long day!” she said before turning to Chilcutt and telling him, “Trust me, you’re not a grifter, honey. It’s all good.”)

Vance closed the event by asking attendees to aid in his administration’s mass deportations program, and using white supremacist rhetoric so seamlessly that he could have been an Australian MP.

And there lies the challenge for anyone trying to write cohesively about American politics in 2025, this “We Didn’t Start the Fire” verse of a year (“Public Servants losing work/Bari Weiss and Charlie Kirk/Andrew Cuomo is a failure/march to war with Venezuela …” etc*). It’s so silly and so terrifying at once, like literally any clown.

Trump returned to office in January a very different prospect from the bored, distractible figure he cut between 2016 and 2020. His administration too, was different — it was still stuffed with unqualified sycophants, but this time, when the inevitable disasters followed such appointments, there were no firings, and notwithstanding this month’s Vanity Fair, nothing like the torrent of damaging leaks and loose talk that leavened the early Trump 1.0 years.

This administration moved with terrifying speed, ticking off the authoritarian to-do list one by one — clearing out departments of independent figures, appointing loyalists at the head of security agencies and other regulators, and launching retributive court cases against political enemies. The judiciary, the media, and the “opposition” all fell into line. A brutal and opaque mass deportation process was initiated — visiting Trump opponents were routinely detained, and the National Guard were sent into cities run by the administration’s opponents. Voting rights continued to be attacked.

This terrifying run has been slowed as the year wore on — there was the longest government shutdown in history, which voters primarily blamed on the Republicans, and during which the Democrats swept to victory in the mayoral election in New York and the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. Trump’s approval rating has plummeted and stagnated as voters fail to see any end to the affordability crisis he was elected to solve with his little chart of tariffs.

And then of course there’s the Epstein files, the ultimate expression of the paranoid style in American politics, where a grubby coterie of super-rich and powerful coalesce around a paedophile financier who conveniently offs himself before he can go public with what he knows. It would be the greatest vindication of Trump’s approach to politics, but he’s spent the year downplaying the contents and delaying their release — it’s been the first scandal he just can’t shake, and it’s undoubtedly cost him support.

That the Democrats found a way to turn all this into another opportunity to cave probably best sums up their year, although former vice president and failed 2024 candidate Kamala Harris’ book tour — a fantasy version of life where she gets the “yass queen” treatment from various interviewers for things she didn’t do and didn’t say — runs it close.

Meanwhile, America’s biggest media companies, increasingly in the hands of a few billionaires, have shown themselves to be extremely accommodating to the new reality, settling lawsuits and dumping unfavourable coverage.

So while there have been some reassuring (?) signs of the old Trump in recent months, anyone with hope that next year’s midterms might stymie his authoritarian program should be cautious, at the very least. Even stalled, Trump and his program are ticking along nicely, and the sense of impunity is as present as it ever was. There is no reason to expect, if the midterms go badly, the MAGA crowd will accept the results. And we’ve seen where that denial ends. If the Oscars-style take on politics is one way Americans burn off a residual revolutionary spirit that has fewer and fewer places to go, sudden episodes of wild political violence is surely the other.

*Mamdani wins by miles/Everyone’s in the Epstein files/AUKUS deals with Don Farrell/ Finding God at Cracker Barrel/Trump demolishes the East Wing/AI post dumps on “No Kings”/Trump’s birthday is a fizzer/Nuzzi, brainworm, Ryan Lizza …