(The Daily Signal)—To call 2025 a tumultuous year would be an understatement. It already feels like January was about five years ago, and I expect the rest of President Donald Trump’s second term will move at a similarly breakneck pace.
That said, it helps to take a breather and reflect on what actually happened and what it means for American politics today and in the future.
Without further ado, here are the biggest winners and losers of 2025.
Loser: The Left’s Nonprofit Industrial Complex
The federal government has long contracted with leftist nonprofits in the name of justice or helping other countries, but the funding ballooned in the Biden administration, and the Department of Government Efficiency represented a historic attempt to expose and shatter this ideological piggy bank.
Before DOGE, I investigated the woke groups that infiltrated and advised the Biden administration, and my research uncovered not only that these groups received federal grants but that many of them sued the Trump administration to block his policies—particularly to keep the gravy train flowing. I testified in Congress about this research twice, and the Dao Prize honored me for it by designating me a finalist.
The Trump administration cut off the funding streams for immigration groups that moved illegal aliens across the country. The Environmental Protection Agency clawed back extravagant grants to climate alarmist groups. The State Department shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development. Congress finally cut off funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
After Scott Walter and I highlighted the leftist nonprofits that worked with Arabella Advisors, Microsoft founder Bill Gates withdrew his foundation’s entanglement with them, and Arabella Advisors purportedly dissolved, leading to the emergence of new entities.
Contrary to leftist fearmongering, civil society remains strong. Americans remain free to contribute to causes they believe in, we just aren’t being forced to do so with our tax dollars anymore.
Loser: Transgender Ideology
Candidate Trump campaigned on protecting children and bringing back sanity on gender. He has delivered on this promise in spades.
Trump’s executive order declaring the basic truth that human beings are male and female corrected major abuses of the Biden administration.
In May, the Department of Health and Human Services published a review of the science, finding extremely weak evidence for the claim that “sex-rejecting procedures”—grotesque medical interventions that trans activists refer to as “gender-affirming care”—have any positive effects. A peer-review process confirmed this finding and also highlighted why transgender activists seek to silence their opponents, rather than engaging with them.
HHS ended the year by announcing six major policy moves against “sex-rejecting procedures,” which will prevent your tax dollars from funding “treatments” that leave kids stunted, scarred, and infertile.
In June, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s right to protect kids from these procedures.
Loser: The Fourth Branch of Government
The president hasn’t just been cutting back government spending—he’s also paring back the unaccountable bureaucracy.
Trump has cleaned house at federal agencies, and he is now forcing the Supreme Court to consider, once and for all, whether there are parts of the executive branch that fall outside of the president’s control.
While the Constitution clearly vests all executive power in the president, Congress has established so-called independent agencies. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Trade Commission as an agency not subject to the president’s Article II authority because it engaged in “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” functions. Now, the court seems on the verge of rightly reversing that ruling and returning executive power to the people’s elected president.
Winner: Border Security
Former President Joe Biden repeatedly insisted that he needed new laws to address the border crisis, but Trump effectively solved the issue on Day One with executive orders, finally directing the feds to actually enforce the laws on the books.
An estimated 10 million illegal aliens entered the country on Biden’s watch, but border crossings hit record lows this year and remain a tiny fraction of what they were under the former president.
Winner: Trump Peace Deals
Trump has taken credit for ending eight wars.
While his celebration on this might seem premature, Trump has indeed brokered agreements to stop fighting and taken decisive action that ended conflicts.
For example, the brief war between Israel and Iran ended after the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear sites in a show of force and after Trump urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to immediately secure peace with Iran following the strikes.
Although India downplayed Trump’s role in securing peace between New Delhi and its long-time rival Pakistan, the Pakistani prime minister nominated the American president for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump achieved a historic ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas this fall, securing the release of the final living Israeli hostages from Hamas.
While the war between Russia and Ukraine rages on, and Trump’s strikes on drug boats off the coast of Venezuela may lead to a conflict, the president can rightly take credit for securing many peace deals.
When the Nobel Committee refused to award Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, the FIFA World Cup awarded him its inaugural peace prize.
Winner: Political Violence
This year saw an alarming increase in political violence, particularly from the Left.
Many on the Left raised money to help the alleged murderer of a health care CEO.
In May, a gunman yelling, “Free Palestine,” shot and killed a Jewish couple outside the National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
In June, a man allegedly murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband, and shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, both of whom survived. A few days after the assassination, a Democratic Party lobbyist reportedly sent text messages to a former friend of an opposing political viewpoint. The lobbyist wrote, “Excited to have my gun at the capitol and blow somebody’s f—— face off.”
On Aug. 27, a man who legally changed his name to affirm a transgender identity shot and killed two children and injured thirty others at a school mass at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis.
On Sept. 10, a man in a relationship with another man who identifies as transgender allegedly murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Many on the Left celebrated Kirk’s death. A church celebrating Kirk faced an arson attempt, and many Kirk memorials faced vandalism.
Winner: Affordability Messaging
The president has rightly called Democrats’ attempt to blame him for cost-of-living struggles a “con job,” because the root of most recent inflation is the excessive government spending during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That said, “affordability” clearly resonates with voters, and that helps explain the Democrats’ victories in November. Americans want to see lower prices and higher wages, and Vice President JD Vance addressed the issue earlier this month.
Trump’s policies have addressed some drivers of the affordability crisis—such as an all-of-the-above energy strategy that drives down energy prices—and many Americans may look forward to tax cuts in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”
Expect affordability to remain a political issue, at least in the near term.
Winner: Conservative Media
Trump opened the White House briefing room to alternative media, including new conservative outlets. While The Daily Signal has long had a presence in the White House, Biden briefly excluded The Daily Signal and other journalists. Trump, by contrast, has opened the briefing room to new outlets, allowing increased transparency.
The Trump administration has also bucked the trend for Washington Republicans. For too long, Republicans in D.C. would go to left-leaning outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post with exclusive stories, hoping to curry favor. Now, the Trump administration has worked with outlets like The Daily Signal.
My colleague, White House Correspondent Elizabeth Mitchell, has become a scoop machine, and FBI Director Kash Patel gave me the scoop on the bureau swearing off the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
