To understand where my head was at in 2025, it’s best to start with one of the first books I read in January. During the previous year, I discovered the work of Philip Roth, who, understandably, I recognize as a dicey author. Even still, the prose found in “The Human Stain” and “American Pastoral” painted a very unique portrait of the 20th century that I felt obliged to dig deeper, eventually settling on what sounded like the sexiest premise for that time and place. Having also watched its HBO adaptation, I was curious to know what made “The Plot Against America” such a renowned book centering on speculative non-fiction. To put it simply, it was a chance to ponder what would have happened if fascism had won during World War II.
The long and short is that the book posits a very engaging talking point, but it slowly lost my interest the more specific its fictional elements became. While the rise of Anti-Semitism presented something haunting and real, I realized that this wasn’t necessarily an urgent read. This wasn’t the blow to the chest that “American Pastoral” had given me months prior. At most, I was entertained, which is not nothing.
This was not a happenstance decision, but one stemming back to the prior November, which, as an American citizen who participated in the presidential election, ended less in any mutual acceptance than the doomsday prepper talk that has since become trendy. In one of my final nights on Twitter, I witnessed the despair of online friends, worried beyond belief that Project 2025 was going to destroy the country. My LGBTQIA+ friends were especially fraught with some suggestive of suicidal ideation. For some, election night was a victory. From my vantage point, it was a time to seek refuge in community and garner resources while they were still legal.
As the final days of Joe Biden’s administration emerged, I found myself perplexed by the question of what it meant to be American. It would be easy to get caught up in any disillusionment from the Democratic party’s collapse, but I knew that if I was to survive the next four years, I would need as much to trust the community as find traces of hope. I’m not talking about the feel-good human interest pieces that finished off the nightly news. No. For as much as charity always strikes the right chord, I was going to need to believe that the America we were entering wouldn’t erase my relationship to its past.
But how could it not? I already believed the incoming president to be a known terrorist thanks to inspiring supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The institutions that I grew up believing in would always protect from abuses of power were falling apart. A South African immigrant dismantled the infrastructure in a matter of days after sporting a Nazi salute that was written off as being some cute neurodivergent quirk (fuck you, by the way) with the help of an unqualified teenager who went by the name of Big Balls. Not to be outdone, scientific research was defunded in favor of leadership by a man who cut down access to vaccines and suggested the scientifically disproven idea that pregnant women taking Tylenol was responsible for autistic children. Mind you, all of this was under the leadership of a man who would sanction the modern equivalent of internment camps for people he deemed Unamerican (despite some being proven to the contrary) called “Alligator Alcatraz” and once poorly Photoshopped “MS13” onto a man’s knuckles to suggest gang affiliation in front of ABC News’ Terry Moran, a man he berated on camera for being a bad reporter, whose later critical remarks lead to an indefinite suspension.
It’s difficult to fully encapsulate everything that happened throughout this year that I would deem “concerning.” Even so, it has continually left me disillusioned and questioning what this country stands for. I have felt that in some way since the Republican National Convention in 2016, when I watched a major party elect a man expressing poor conduct as a major platform promise. However, over and over, I wanted to believe that something about this country would fall into place as it should’ve. There would be accountability. Certain offensive comments would be met with some reprimand or, at very least, an infraction penalty. At the time of writing this, nothing has happened. People have complained, but the people I believed to control some level of order have been unable to course correct, leaving a terrible stain on the trajectory of contemporary politics and, I’ll assume, less reason for younger generations to take pride in this country that no longer is looking out for them.
Deep down, I love America. As a part-time history nerd, I take pride in picking up random factoids throughout the timeline about how eclectic and strange this country has been. It’s never been the beacon of perfection, but the promise of supporting a “living, breathing document” has long made me the naïve optimist, the type that probably is going out of favor with the shortcomings of Biden. In recent months, I was reminded of how much this country means to me when my concerns went beyond any thoughts of the current administration and became about the literal symbols.
Already, laws are being disproven as nothing more than malleable ideas that are apparently easy to manipulate. I wasn’t ready for the sight of The East Wing being destroyed. I have never been there, and yet, as I looked at pictures of tractors tearing apart the infrastructure, I began to cry in ways I don’t normally do during any demolition. This was beyond the pale, gross. Not only was it a flagrant act of selfishness, but it was erasing a side of history that I wanted to believe even the most disagreeable citizen found sacred. Even as PragerU remodeled government websites with a biased reimagining of the founding fathers, I knew that was something we could work around. A building, less so. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
The most glaring disagreement I had with The White House in 2025 came this past October. Following a very public assassination of a figure known for debating politics, there were the familiar outcries of support and criticism. However, my hope was that something deemed this tragic would lead to the overdue conversation around gun control. With several pundits admitting insecurity of becoming vulnerable targets, it made sense to finally enact change due to very selfish reasons. It may have gone against the murder victim’s public platform, but it would’ve been a net positive for the greater good.
Instead, the rhetoric by the end of the weekend translated to the familiar smear campaigns against trans women and division among parties, believing that the other side was murdering their enemies. Going beyond any opinions on the overzealous memorial, I was dismayed that gun control was never brought up once, yet Jimmy Kimmel became a martyr because of a joke that was vaguely critical of the response. Many have rightly noted the late-night show’s immediate departure as an affront to free speech, but the fact that the lesson for one man’s death was to censor the least bit of disagreement while building statues and holidays is the most damning example of how America had lost the plot. This isn’t about my thoughts on one man’s platform. This is about a government not looking out for its constituents in a larger, more meaningful way.
This may be why my mind has been perpetually stuck in the conversation of looking for America in every facet of life. The most evident place was in the media I consumed, which, unfortunately, meant that I associated way too much with a greater commentary on a moment that was, at best, crafted during a time before 2021, when things were, bizarrely, much more innocent. Even the autobiographical film The Apprentice (2024) seems designed more as a warning shot than any greater commentary on what was to come. Though, to be completely honest, I knew I was doomed when I could no longer watch Citizen Kane (1942) without thinking of what our current president saw in its quest for complete control over his own narrative and the country.
My prompt is not easy to address, nor one I feel makes for an interesting checklist of titles that brought out deeper emotion inside me. I could go on about how The Brutalist (2024) is my favorite movie I saw this year because of how it conveys the immigrant experience and the struggles to add their contributions to this great American tapestry. Few performances have moved me as much as Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning role that finds him pushing against the odds to make his art resonate. It’s not the flattery mold, but something more symbolic of survival even when the outside world is ugly. When I listen to his monologue about immigration, I remember why The American Dream matters to millions. It’s more than a story we tell ourselves. It’s the hope that everyone can make a difference if they try hard enough. As Lin-Manuel Miranda would say in Hamilton, it’s a beautiful, unfinished symphony. Amen.
Of course, it should be noted that The Brutalist is ultimately fiction down to its reference points. While Brody’s character fled war-torn Europe, he’s from a fictional country, while also serving as the biographical subject for an architect who never existed. Credit must be given to director Brady Corbet for undertaking such a daunting feat on such a low budget and turnaround time. Even so, the efforts aren’t without criticism due to a controversial use of A.I. to alter the accents to be more consistent. Why is this important? I’ll tell you in a bit.
Most of the films that reminded me of America in 2025 fall closer to the cynical side, possibly even to an unhelpful degree. Friendship (2025) and Bugonia (2025) commented on the social divides that keep deeper empathy from taking root. Even if these films weren’t designed to hold urgency, they spoke to the discomfort I felt, only offset by less defined family films like Dog Man (2025), where the idea was to celebrate differences and that bad men could be redeemed. Ideally, it’s a message we should be teaching, even if I worry that applying it right now feels a bit too harmful. In a time when people are being ripped from their homes for simply not being the right skin color, it’s not exactly a time to play nice.
And yet, the one message that has overwhelmingly annoyed me is the suggestion that a product was “Made in America.” On the surface, this is ideal and something that this nation should be moving towards. Even so, commercials starting in January were becoming more transparent about how much their product was being sold on that promise. They would go out of their way to state that they weren’t made overseas, suggesting some superiority that would inspire hope if the job reports reflected ANY industry booms. Even as the president has argued that the economy has never looked better, I watch those commercials and feel a misleading message taking shape. It doesn’t help that America currently has a president who threatened to raise import prices when Canada created a commercial criticizing his tariff actions using a Ronald Reagan speech that aired during The MLB World Series. There is no diplomacy, no acceptance of alternate opinion, just that “Made in America” equates to the best in ways that have always been objectively untrue. Even so, the backlash to Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny doing the Super Bowl halftime show reflects what areas (and languages) of America they want things made in.
Which is all to say that I shouldn’t have emotional conflict watching a commercial for Duracell batteries. In this particular exchange, an actor with a short-sleeved lab coat to show off his toned muscles details the reasons the batteries are better than those imported from overseas countries like China and Indonesia. As he gives this speech to a woman in front of a rack of batteries at an undefined store, he creates this warped perception of winking 80s machismo. Out of context, it could be humorous, but the explicit tone suggesting that Duracell’s best feature is that it’s “Assembled in America” quickly makes this less a quirky ad and more a cross-pollination of consumerism and patriotism. Frankly, I haven’t thought this much about batteries since The Energizer Bunny became a fixture of my childhood. This lab coat hunk only exists in my mind because it’s the most accessible/ridiculous version of how the narrative is now sold. Even the way he jokes about paying for batteries before telling the young woman that he was kidding feels less ironic and more bleak transparency. Again, I am not opposed to creating jobs “at home,” but in a global age, there has to be recognition of how collaborative the market remains.
In a tragic case of irony, I finished reading George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (an allegorical British novel, I know, but the themes still resonate) for the first time an hour before The State of the Union. I was specifically heartbroken by the final chapter, in which Orwell shifts focus to the next generation and notes how they weren’t aware of a world before the violence and animosity. They never got to experience the peace that their predecessors had, and, quite frankly, I recognize the feeling now. 2025 also marked the 10th anniversary of that presidential campaign announcement. A whole decade, lost to the reimagined world of one man who, up until then, wasn’t more than a Razzie-winning huckster whose first presidential run in 2000 remains ignored by almost everyone fearful of his hats lining The Oval Office walls alluding to a 2028 run.
That’s getting too far ahead of the narrative. The State of the Union was a victory lap of a speech that is filled with familiar, if somehow toned-down, rhetoric that attacked the typical targets while announcing that aspects of America were about to change. It was The Gulf of AMERICA. Mount Denali would be Mount McKinley. Greenland and Canada would soon be ours! Those migrant farmers being ambushed in Central California will not have a negative impact on the produce industry. More generally, California deserves whatever fate wildfires hand them for voting against him. If you talked up, like Senator Al Green, you would be escorted off the premises and made a victim of the internet’s version of throwing tomatoes at the blockade.
The legal system would now only recognize “two genders,” leading to the alarming fact that this State of the Union remains historically the one that most openly discussed trans rights… and not in a great manner. In distress, I watched National Anthem (2023) that evening and found some relief in a Midwest community where queer people lived freely and, more shockingly, a trans woman was allowed to have a complex relationship that wasn’t as exploitative or condescending as current events would encourage. Pride Month may have happened with the familiar pageantry, but there were the jealous types running counter Hetero Awesomeness festivals. With stores like Target turning the rainbow into beige, there was no greater life. Hell, even Disney came under fire for removing queer elements of Elio (2025) only years after Strange World (2022) promised more dimensional representation. Then again, a teacher in Florida was fired in 2023 for showing the film, a novel fate in the “Don’t Say Gay” state, where queer children weren’t legally allowed to confide in teachers without transparency to their guardians. Self-expression was quickly approaching the act of criminalization, and with that, history has never felt more bass-ackwards.
Conflict has never ceased in my distractible nature of seeing how most things relate to the modern state of America. Reading books like Emily M. Danforth’s “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” was inspired by hints of conversion therapy being reconsidered. When reading Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” I felt relieved to see a side of America that was founded on immigrants and the lower class while depicting a country that always had its problems. The opening section includes a subplot related to abortion, and I’ll tell you that it surprised me to see a story so celebrated by soldiers during WWII feel so honest and raw with how it saw the world. In a time when history is being whitewashed, I read Smith’s words and grow somber, realizing what removing the complexities of this country will do. By the time I saw Nickel Boys (2024), I realized how even contemporary views of the past are still exploring revolutionary perspectives.
Returning to The East Wing, I realize that a lot of my emotions are because of how much I bought into The American Dream, this sense of reverence for the origin story that is worthy of criticism but also paints a country that was more willing to collaborate and overcome a lot of egotistical differences. As I watch the most acclaimed criticism of 20th-century American innovation, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” be turned to an unironic celebration of excess, I realize that nuance and media literacy have been lost, that the recognition of compromise and sacrifice are currently concepts of the past. Even as I sat in a theater enjoying a sing-along of Hamilton (2020) this summer, I noticed how its aspirational reimagining of history reflected outdated ambitions of the masses.
I say this as I prepare to release a list of my favorite books I read in 2025. Near the top of that list is David McCullough’s iconic “John Adams” biography, which more than lives up to its reputation as an essential portrait of American history. It humanizes this man largely disconnected from a modern lens, whose noteworthy contributions to modern theater are songs that tell him to sit down and that he doesn’t have a real job. Also, upon completion of McCullough’s text, I noticed that the flawed progressivism he presented as an educated man was still enough to instigate ideas that would be improved upon later. I’m also now convinced that Alexander Hamilton was an annoying brat. It also got me to revisit 1776 (1972) which… is very much of its time. I recommend not watching with commercial breaks.
But watching these historical reenactments brought new joy. As someone who believes in film as our modern mythology, titles like 1776 and even The Apprentice are crucial to shaping our understanding of the past. It may be inaccurate, even altered, but they create the messages that we take for granted. We don’t research and instead see the themes as being crucial to this country. Maybe it’s why 1776 lands for me because of how it paints the process of compromising and noticing that the founding fathers are far from sanctimonious.
That feels true of modern politics as well, where a reality TV star currently tries to manipulate the headlines with tactics not dissimilar from petty feuds. He uses A.I. to alter the work of Francis Ford Coppola and Hayao Miyazaki to sell himself as a master of propaganda. There are constant attacks that transcend honest journalism, and sometimes I’m left bothered by what it’ll look like in the future, when our memories have faded, and all that’s left is out-of-context footage of material that used to look insane. What happens when reality becomes surreality and is accepted as normal? There’s been a lot of harmful narratives, but what’s to stop the future history books from listening to a figure often considered trustworthy by default of protecting his public? I pray we’re better than that, but this is also not the first thing I’ve said that about in the past decade.
That is why I end by saying that for every effort to embrace media that paints a version of America that’s more ideal, it’s important to recognize that fiction is fiction. Even the movies I watch and find my heart being restored by may hold inaccuracies. Do research. Recognize that the past was flawed, but this country’s beauty is in how it changed and welcomed new ideas. This time is so ugly because of how much that fact is being denied. It’s important to never stop learning.
It’s a reason I encourage everyone to support funding public broadcasting and sharing information where possible. The more curiosity that’s out there, the more exciting the world becomes. I fear how boring the president wishes to make a world that can’t even afford propaganda artists to create a more interesting house style. As I spend the final weeks of this year catching up on Ken Burns’ new series on The American Revolution and Netflix’s excellent Death By Lightning, I remain driven to find other areas of history that have escaped me. It’s by noticing the patterns that we can seek to break them and build a greater future. I want to read more biographies, reflect more on why this country is pretty damn weird. Don’t take away its weirdness. Without it, we’re nothing.
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