We are one year into the second Trump administration. Three to go. To mark the occasion, I took a look back at what I was thinking and writing about a year ago. The most surprising takeaway is how predictable this last year we have lived through was from the outset. By February, the pearl-clutching “But I didn’t know Trump would do XX” folks were already out in full force. They somehow hadn’t known he would fire them, let DOGE have access to their personal information, compromise their health care, deport their household help, and so on. They didn’t know, of course, because they hadn’t paid attention. “As a voter, the only reason you would let Donald Trump control the levers of power is because you don’t understand what it means and that it’s deadly serious,” I wrote, as he returned to the White House in January. “I’m not talking about politicians or business people here, people who want to ride Trump’s coattails to power and or hope to remain there because of him—there’s a special circle of hell reserved for people like Mitch McConnell, who saw Trump’s behavior on January 6 for what it was and then got right back in bed with him. I’m talking about Trump’s base, our fellow citizens, and, regrettably, sometimes our friends and family.” The good news, a year later, is that more people are finally paying attention. We don’t need all of them—just enough. Trump won in a very close election, with 49.8% of the popular vote. He received the nod from 77,303,568 voters to Kamala Harris’ 75,019,230 people. That means that there were almost as many people who didn’t want to reject democracy in favor of Trumpism as there were people who voted for him. The election was not a romp for Trump. We need a better-informed, more motivated electorate as we head into the midterms. One way to do that is by focusing on how much of Project 2025—a road map for America that was so widely rejected during the campaign that Trump was forced to disavow it—he has gone on to impose on the country. He lied about his intentions. That has had profound consequences for many Americans. It’s powerful to remind people that they voted based on a lie the candidate told them that turned out to have serious consequences for them personally. Like Cynthia Olivera, the Canadian who supported Trump and his plans for mass deportations, until she found herself detained and sent to an El Paso facility after spending 25 years in the U.S., marrying, and having three American citizen children. On the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, I wrote, “Already, we see signs that Trump, who tried to walk away from Project 2025 during the campaign, is taking steps to implement it. Despite the campaign’s claim that people who worked on Project 2025 would be banned from the new administration, Trump has brought them on in droves. That includes Russell Vought for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Vought, who authored the chapter on the Executive Office of the President was, ‘also deeply involved in drafting Project 2025’s playbook for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.’” Vought wrote in Project 2025, “Properly understood, [OMB] is a President’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.” Sending him to run it was a clear sign we were headed into full-on implementation. My piece continued, “‘President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025,’” Trump’s incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. ‘All of President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and appointments are whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups.’ But Leavitt herself appeared in training videos for Project 2025.” Then we got into the essence of Project 2025 and what the first months of Trump 2.0 were going to look like. “The fourth pillar of Project 2025 is a ‘first 180 days’ strategy. The authors wrote, ‘The time is short, and conservatives need a plan. The project will create a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.’ And right on target, Trump has promised a barrage of executive orders on day one of his new administration. Some of the items he has mentioned include mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, blocking rights and care for transgender people, pardoning January 6 defendants, imposing his tariffs which would function in reality as a tax on American consumers, canceling the current mandate to move to electric vehicles, and open up preserved lands to drilling…It’s increasingly clear that the executive orders will be a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s first day in office.” It has all proven unrelentingly true. Now, we have moved on from the preposterous to the ridiculous. Three illustrative examples, just from today’s developments: A federal judge finally put an end to Lindsey Halligan’s tenure as U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. Completely unqualified, she made too many mistakes to count when she fell all over herself to indict former FBI Director Jim Comey and NY AG Letitia James to please Donald Trump. Judge David Novak wrote, “In short, this charade of Ms. Halligan masquerading as the United States attorney for this district in direct defiance of binding court orders must come to an end,” a harsh critique of Trump’s efforts to implement his revenge agenda in the courts, a project that has been a massive failure. The court has issued an announcement soliciting lawyers to apply to be her successor.
DOGE, which dominated headlines after Elon Musk and his band of twenty-somethings inserted themselves into the most sensitive government operation in early 2025, has dropped off the front pages, but the abuses are having long lasting impact. There are echoes of how Trump backed away from his public embrace of Project 2025 when opposition arose in the abrupt termination of DOGE and Musk’s disappearance from favored status in the Oval Office. Today, the Justice Department revealed in a court filing, made to ensure “candor” to the court, that the Social Security Administration discovered in December and conveyed to DOJ counsel that there were violations of the court's injunction regarding DOGE’s activities that they had just become privy to. Among them was this: “SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States. In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a ‘Voter Data Agreement,’ in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.” The pleading indicates that no one at the Social Security Administration was aware of what the DOGE employees were doing and that “In late December 2025, SSA made two Hatch Act referrals to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel related to the activities described.” Senator Chuck Schumer tweeted, “It was never about curtailing waste, fraud, and abuse. The DOJ just admitted DOGE was ‘secretly’ in touch with advocacy groups ‘seeking to overturn election results.”’The idea being: use a trove of personal information to disenfranchise voters and change election results. No one should be holding their breath for the Trump administration to suddenly begin taking the Hatch Act seriously. But Judge Ellen Hollander could and should be extremely unhappy about what she learned from the government today. Then came the ultimate absurdity. Trump, acting in his “individual capacity” filed a motion with Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, asking her to issue “an order prohibiting the release of Volume II of the Final Report prepared by so-called ‘Special Counsel’ Jack Smith and his office.” That sounds like Trump’s voice, the attempted dig at “so-called ‘Special Counsel’ Jack Smith,” and something no attorney should permit the client to direct. But apparently, Trump’s lawyer thinks she can get away with that, given who the judge is.
The bottom line is that Trump sounds pretty desperate to keep the special counsel’s report on the Mar-a-Lago indictment out of the hands of the public. “Release would also lead to the public dissemination of sensitive grand jury materials, attorney-client privileged information, and other information derived from protected discovery materials, raising significant statutory, due process, and privacy concerns for President Trump and his former co-defendants.” It’s a consistent theme with this President. There is so much to hide, so much to keep out of the public domain. Like the Epstein Files. Like the Mar-a-Lago case. Trump is suggesting the direction we should move in by virtue of what he’s trying to conceal from us. Congress needs to push full throttle to enforce the Transparency Act it passed. There should be calls every day for release of Epstein-related materials with reminders that DOJ is ignoring the law and that there is too much information pointing to the connection between Epstein and Trump to ignore. The fact that Trump is hoping to Venezuela and Greenland his way out of that quagmire suggests how important it is for us to continue to pursue the truth. When it comes to Mar-a-Lago, the government is almost certain to go belly up on making the special counsel report public out of deference to Trump. But it should be possible for other parties to pursue the matter in court. While any request is likely to fall on deaf ears before Judge Cannon, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has been a less friendly venue for the President. Special Counsel reports are routinely released at the end of the investigation, and particularly here, where an indictment was dismissed, not because it was found wanting, but because Trump was elected a second time, the public has a right to know. One year in. This is where we are. Reminding people of where this administration has taken the country, in just one year, is key. Especially today, as we watch Trump’s attempts to destroy the post-WWII alliances that have sustained us unfold, making sure the people around you are aware of all of the above, of where this first year of the second Trump administration started and where it ended, is essential to working to restore pro-democracy majorities in Congress come the midterms. As I told you last year at this time, we have work to do. Trump has had some success. But we have come a long way as a force of resistance. Eight million of us marched to support “No Kings.” Lawyers stopped the administration’s attempt to disappear Venezuelans without legal immigration status in the U.S. to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. We forced Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. We still have a long way to go, but we can do this, as long as we don’t give up. We’re in this together, Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Tuesday, January 20, 2026
One Very Long Year
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January 20, 2026
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