2025: Year of the Trump-et and the Musk-et?
On January 20, 2025 Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. Eight years earlier on January 20, 2017, Trump was sworn in as the 45th president.
In the period from that date until he left office on January 20, 2021, President Trump blew his trumpet improvisationally and idiosyncratically. He did that because he had no specific musical score to play and was not prepared for the job.
That will not be the case this time around. Trump has a definite composition to play. It is called Project 2025, modified as appropriate by the America First Policy Institute. His proposed cabinet members are all proud to be a loyal part of the Trump marching band, and will move ahead in lockstep even if they don’t know how to play their instruments.
Trump with his trumpet, and his cabinet with their instruments, will be joined by Elon Musk, who will carry his musket to shoot down all of those dangerous federal civil and public servants who pose such grave threats to the future of this nation.
Trump and Musk demonstrated their ability to fire at things separately on December 18, when the 1500-plus page bipartisan congressional resolution to continue government funding until March 2025 was up for consideration.
Musk shot first over 100 times from X (formerly Twitter) saying it was a bad deal. Trump followed suit on Truth Social, saying don’t do it. Their shots were determinative, killing that agreement, which was replaced, and a version was eventually passed on December 20 to avoid a government shutdown.
Given this context, the question arises, will 2025 be the year of the Trump-et and the Musk-et? If it is, will 2025 be a new beginning? Or will this new year be the beginning of the end.
Those questions will be answered by what happens and does not happen throughout 2025. Our answers, based upon our assessment at this point in time, are: 2025 will definitely be the year of Trump and Musk. But the year itself will be neither a new beginning nor the beginning of the end. Following are the reasons for those opinions.
2025: The Year of Trump and Musk
There is no question that 2025 will be the year of Trump and Musk.
Donald Trump has dominated the media since he came down the golden escalator in Trump Tower on June 15, 2015. That coverage depending on the media source has varied considerably in its assessment of Trump over the past decade.
After the first 100 days of the Trump presidency in 2017, the Pew Research Center did a study comparing the coverage in major media outlets, and found those with “right-leaning” audiences such as Fox News were more positive in their assessments of performance than those with left-leaning audiences, such as MSNBC, and those with mixed audiences such as ABC, NBC, and CBS.
Based upon his research, Thomas Patterson, Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard Kennedy School, concluded that the substantial negative coverage and commentary during the early days of the Trump presidency in combination with his perception of its much more favorable treatment of Hillary Clinton during his presidential race caused Trump to sour on the traditional media and to work to make it less relevant in the political arena.
Trump did this by focusing on social media and building his personal brand there. He was tremendously successful reaching — and getting “alternative facts’’ — to those who got their information through non-traditional sources. His success did not get him elected in 2020 in the race against Joe Biden, but it contributed substantially to his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024. In a piece for CNN posted on the day after the election, Brian Stelter reported that some had written or felt that Trump’s win might spell the death of “mainstream” or “legacy’ media.
Two media events in December proved that Trump may not have killed the mainstream media but he has definitely captured it. One was Time Magazine naming him “Person of the Year.” The other was ABC News agreeing to pay $15M to settle a defamation suit relating to comments on Trump made by George Stephanopoulos on his show in March.
Then, in this new year, on January 7, Trump came front and center in a press conference in which he covered the waterfront with a wide variety of meandering messages, including renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, reclaiming the Panama Canal, and assuming ownership of Greenland.
To sum it up, for the past decade Donald Trump has been the news. He is and will be the news in 2025. He has tens of millions of followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Truth Social and YouTube. He will continue to use those outlets to promote his version of reality.
He will be joined in this endeavor — for as long as Trump can tolerate his companionship and sharing center stage — by Elon Musk. Musk, who is the richest person in the world, has already gained more public exposure and brand identification with the general public from his jumping around, speaking out for, and hanging out with Trump than he did for his substantial accomplishments as a technology wizard growing SpaceX, Tesla and acquiring Twitter to rename it X, among other changes.
Musk now has over 200 million followers on X. His followers have nearly tripled since his acquisition of the company in 2022. That number pales in comparison, however, to the billions of dollars that Musk and his fellow investors are reported to have lost to date on that social media platform.
Many pundits believe that Musk became an extravagantly outrageous Trump supporter — spending over a quarter of a billion dollars during this election campaign — in order to align Trump more closely with X and to drive up the value of his publicly and privately traded businesses.
Other pundits opine that Musk’s engagement with Trump is intended to help protect and grow the billions of dollars in federal contracts held by his businesses. Trump’s naming Musk to head the advisory committee improperly named The Department of Government Efficiency, which may influence decisions regarding federal government operations, gives some credibility to that perspective.
And a few observers have conjectured that Musk has become Trump’s ally to move himself out of the limelight, and into the spotlight, in order to add more fame to his already substantial fortune.
No matter the reasons, Musk will join Trump at the top of the media marquee in 2025. Some have already started referring to Musk as co-president or Trump as vice-president.
In spite of those assertions, Trump and Musk will not be joined at the hip. But they will both have “bully pulpits” for sending out salvos, making 2025 the year of the Trump-et and the Musk-et.
2025: Not a New Beginning
Those salvos, and the work of those in leadership positions in the Trump administration, will bring about some change. For the most part, though, that change will not be a new beginning.
Rather, it will be a retreat to the past — a step back to the future. A direction that many Trump supporters want the country to take.
David Ignatius highlights his concerns about this approach in an opinion piece he wrote for the Washington Post after the election, stating:
My big worry is that many Trump voters want to move the country backward rather than forward. Exit polls found that 67 percent of them thought America’s best days were “in the past,” whereas 58 percent of Harris voters thought they were “in the future.” Rather than Progressive politics, Trump’s movement represents what might be called Regressivism. Or, as his slogan puts it: “Make America Great Again.”
Ignatius continues to observe:
Trump’s campaign had a dark side. “Revenge and retribution” is the opposite of the hopeful qualities embodied by two previous Republican reformers, Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. If this payback agenda overwhelms Trump’s other goals, it could plunge the United States toward catastrophe.
We don’t expect the consequences will be catastrophic but we do believe that they will be problematic and chaotic. That belief is based upon our examination of the impact of the first Trump administration in two blogs written in 2020 titled “Preserving Our American Democracy in an Era of Repression and Regression.”
In the first blog, we detailed repression in the following areas: the coronavirus response, the three branches of government, federal government agencies, the Republican Party, the free press and media, voting, and civic life. In the second blog, we detailed regression in the following areas: American workers; women; minorities; big business; small business; urban areas; rural areas; civic learning and engagement; and political partisanship.
In those blogs we explained that the Trump administration was not responsible for initiating the repression and regression in those areas, but that its actions, in conjunction with other players, had accelerated and intensified the negative effects considerably in many of them.
Past need not be prologue. As noted at the outset of this blog, however, Trump will have a playbook this time around, and sycophantic cabinet members. That suggests that the second Trump administration will be even more repressive and regressive than the first.
During Trump’s first administration, many of the cabinet members refused to dance to his tune, acted independently, and countermanded his wishes. This ensured a modicum of stability and regular order during what would have been an otherwise extremely chaotic regime. That will not be the case this second go-round.
2025: Not the Beginning of the End
In spite of the difficult challenges that will be forthcoming in this new year, and the despair that set in for many Americans after Donald Trump emerged victorious in the presidential election, 2025 will not be the beginning of the end. We make the prediction because of what the United States is as a nation and who we are as its citizens.
When the United States of America was founded on July 4, 1776, no one could have foreseen how the “American experiment” would evolve or what a great nation this fledgling democratic republic would become. The nation and its people have made this progress because of what happened at pivot points — areas that can be leveraged and addressed effectively in order to effectuate change and achieve positive outcomes.
As we noted in our book, Working the Pivot Points: To Make America Work Again, pivot points define the character and shape the destiny of a nation and its people. Pivot points can be major, moderate, or minor in nature.
Over the short history of the United States, there have been scores of major pivot point moments that have shaped the political, economic, and social terrain of the nation and its citizens. To name just a few, they include: the Constitutional Convention; the Civil War; the passage of Social Security; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and Medicare legislation.
In 2025, the United States remains in a pivot point period. It has been locked in that period for some time. The critical pivot point areas now, among others, include the future of: the federal government, immigration, and the working and middle class. Those are some of the same areas we addressed in detail in our books, Working the Pivot Points and Renewing the American Dream: A Citizen’s Guide for Restoring Our Competitive Advantage.
It might seem like bad news that we are still grappling with those same issues. But, the truth is that pivot point issues are not resolved instantaneously. As we noted in Pivot Points:
Think about women getting the right to vote, civil rights, and equal educational opportunity. The hands of time moved very slowly on those pivot points. But the pivot persons for those issues stayed true to their course and cause. Sometimes they had to hand off the baton to the next generation, but they did not waver from their principles.
Pivot persons committed to bringing about positive change are a primary reason this will not be the beginning of the end for this democratic republic. Another reason is this great but imperfect nation.
America is a nation founded on hope. America is in the business of hope. America is dedicated to perfecting hope. America is committed to innovating hope. America is the world’s best hope.
In spite of these polarized times, we still believe that to be absolutely true, because we know that those imbued with hope, and a commitment to make the United States a fairer and better nation for all, will continue to work to move this nation forward rather than backward.
That is why in closing, we say that 2025 as the year of Trump and Musk will be a transitory year and not a determinative one. It will be neither a new beginning nor the beginning of the end.
The new beginning will be brought about by those who understand that meaningful change does not come about overnight. They recognize that working on the pivot points is a marathon and not a 100-yard dash. They know it requires patience, persistence and the ability to come back again and again in order to prevail.
Here’s to a productive and progressive 2025 for those concerned citizens and in the years and decades to come.
Originally published by the Frank Islam Institute for 21st Century Citizenship. For more information on what 21st century citizenship entails, and to see exemplars from around the world, please visit our website.
