On being ... 2025 Alpha list

By Ingrid Sapona

This year’s list is a bit different than the last few years. For some letters there are more than one entry and there’s an unmistakable underlying theme.

A is for ambush – what Trump and Vance did to Zelenskyy on Feb. 28 in the Oval Office and to Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in May. 

A is for appeasement – that’s what world leaders (well, maybe not China or Russia) have been trying to do all year.

B is for blackmail – China’s description of Trump’s tariff threats. 

C is for cruelty – perhaps the most shocking thing to me about the people Trump has empowered is the cruelty they insist on inflicting on others. It’s not enough that they arrest folks, they have to subject them to humiliation and put them in danger.

D is for deranged – how Trump describes anyone who criticizes him even after they’ve been murdered.

E is for extortion – no other word for Trump’s MO. 

F is for forum shopping – the U.S. spent the better part of the year moving ICE detainees from one jurisdiction to another in hopes of skirting courts’ jurisdictions. It’s called forum shopping – choosing to bring a suit – or defend one in this case – in places where the courts are more lenient or amenable.

G is for genuflecting – the press secretary calls it “bending at the knee” – whatever. Riffing off a comment in an opinion piece by Frank Bruni in the NY Times in April, it’s part of the cabinet’s cardio routine.

 

H is for hegemony – until this year, many around the world described the U.S as the global hegemonic power. From day one Trump has done everything he can to create .a new international order that swings authoritarian. (For those like me who really weren’t sure of what that term means, here’s how Britannica explains it: “hegemony, the dominance of one group over another, often supported by legitimating norms and ideas. The term hegemony is today often used as shorthand to describe the relatively dominant position of a particular set of ideas and their associated tendency to become commonsensical and intuitive, thereby inhibiting the dissemination or even the articulation of alternative ideas”.)

I is for inconvenience – one of the arguments made for NOT shutting down TikTok is that it would be “inconvenient” for millions of Americans. Gosh, we wouldn’t want to inconvenience people, even if that means information about users gets into the hands of a Chinese tech giant. That was all a smoke screen, of course, to buy time until the right US investors (including Oracle, which is owned ~40% by Larry Ellison, a friend of Trump) could be lined up to buy into ByteDance. Speaking of inconvenient, I’ll bet people in the boats the US has blown out of the water found that pretty inconvenient.

J is for Jesus – freedom of religion now means freedom to assume everyone sees Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

K is for Kafkaesque – that is the only way to describe what’s happened to Kilmar Ábrego Garcia and all the other people wrongfully detained and deported.

L is for law – law used to be something taken seriously. Now it’s something that is made a mockery of on a near-daily basis by the “justice department”.

M is for mafia state – a system by which the don distributes money and power. Turns out it doesn’t take all that long for a mafia state to take root.

N is for nihilist – David Brooks wrote a great opinion piece back in February (!) explaining that Trump isn’t a populist because he doesn’t really give a rip about the working class. Brooks sees their tearing down of whatever institutions the (perceived) left occupies as nihilism I can’t disagree.

O is for oligarchy – what the U.S. is becoming.

P is for profit and power – two things Trump can’t get enough of.

P is for peace prize – something Trump covets so much, people are creating fake ones to bestow upon him. (I’m talking about you Gianni Infantino.)

Q is for Qatar, gift givers extraordinaire – gotta say, pretty hard for others to top Qatar’s May gift of a luxury jet to be used as Air Force One. Mind you, South Korea deserves honourable mention for its October gift of a golden crown.

R is for retribution and revenge – Trump’s main motivator. 

S is for state capitalism – as companies like Intel have come to realize, state capitalism isn’t just for communist countries any more.

S is for shakedown – what Trump has done to law firms, universities, and companies.

T is for transactional – Trump is often described as transactional. What many probably don’t realize is that in all the transactions he’s involved in, it’s his interests – not the country’s – that he’s looking out for. 

U is for unreliable – that’s how many countries now view the U.S. 

U is for unchecked power – what’s so shocking is that the U.S. system was theoretically set up with checks and balances that were designed to prevent unchecked power. Turns out theory and fact don’t always coalesce.

V is for vituperative – defined by Merriam-Webster as: “uttering or given to censure : containing or characterized by verbal abuse”. How appropriate that the vice-president, who so embodies the definition, has a last name that also starts with a V.

W is for whiplash – what importers and exporters have suffered from as Trump plays around with tariff rates on a whim (another W word that represents Trump’s decision-making).

X is for Elon Musk – you can’t talk about the Trump Administrations 2025 actions without mentioning Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X. Being the world’s richest person means you can buy a lot of influence – and Musk made the most of that power in more spheres than just Doge.

Y is for yippy – on April 9^th Trump claimed he decided to pause the tariffs because people were getting “yippy”. So, next time you can’t afford groceries or prescriptions or something, your reaction isn’t shock or anger, it’s just a feeling of yippy. 

Z is for zero sum game – the idea that if I win, you lose. That’s the only type of game Trump plays.

So there you have it. A skewed perspective of 2025? Perhaps… Mind you, I didn’t start the list with the intention of it having a depressing, or distressing, focus. But, as anyone following mainstream news outlets realized early on – Trump and his cronies had an outsized impact on the world this year. 

My hope is that 2026 brings better things to all throughout the world. 

©️2025 Ingrid Sapona