2025 in Review: Trump II, War Abroad, Pressure at Home

 2025 never really gave anyone time to catch their breath. It opened with Donald Trump reentering the White House and closed with the world still stuck between permanent crisis and an exhausted kind of normal. The year felt like a stress test: for institutions, for small states, and for ordinary people just trying to keep the lights on.

A second Trump term with fewer guardrails

Donald Trump's return to the White House in January 2025 reshaped global politics faster and more aggressively than many expected. This time, he came back with a tighter inner circle, fewer institutional guardrails, and a Congress already locked in trench warfare. Executive power—not negotiation—became the primary instrument of government in matters ranging from immigration to foreign aid.

Over the course of months, the administration pursued mass deportations, sweeping tariffs, DEI rollbacks, and a restructuring of federal agencies and oversight mechanisms. The message to both allies and opponents was simple: Trump II would be less about spectacle and more about consolidation, less about improvisation and more about systematically reshaping the machinery of the state.

War abroad, deals on Trump's terms

If Washington was busy rewriting its own script, war zones across the world reminded everyone that history doesn't pause just because a new president is sworn in. 2025 was not a year of peace; it was a year of precarious pauses and redirected violence. The uneasy cease‑fire in Gaza—something Trump eagerly branded as his deal—coexisted with ongoing instability in the West Bank, continued low‑level confrontation between Israel and Iran, and a grinding Russian campaign against Ukraine's infrastructure and morale.

Beyond the headlines, a dense map of conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, the Sahel, Mozambique, the DRC, and elsewhere continued to disrupt civilian life, often far from Western news cycles. In many of these places, the new U.S. posture treated wars less as moral emergencies and more as variables in a larger equation: border security, migration routes, energy prices and the optics of strength.

The politics of the grocery bill

Meanwhile, the crisis most people experienced was not articulated in the language of geopolitics but in the language of grocery receipts and rent notices. Across a wide range of countries—rich and poor alike—2025 deepened an already‑long stretch of cost‑of‑living pressure. Wages struggled to keep up with prices, housing remained out of reach for many, and basic goods—from food to fuel—kept people in a state of constant anxiety.

That economic anger did not stay quiet. Protests and consumer actions emerged everywhere, from "economic blackout" campaigns in the United States to demonstrations against fuel price hikes and austerity in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Polling and analysis indicated a similar pattern: economic frustration was coupled with more profound distrust of political elites and institutions, turning what appeared to be a pocketbook issue into a legitimacy crisis.

Civil society squeezed from both sides

In this environment, civil society organizations—the NGOs, movements, and community groups that typically step in when states fail—found themselves carrying greater weight with fewer resources. One global assessment described 2025 as part of an "era of precarity and inequality," and the characterization is apt. Many groups faced shrinking civic space: new restrictive laws, smear campaigns, police violence against protesters, and bureaucratic tactics designed to exhaust or silence them.

At the same time, communities expected these same organizations to absorb the fallout: supporting people priced out of housing, defending migrants and refugees, responding to climate‑driven disasters and filling gaps in mental‑health and social supports. The Trump administration's moves to slash or redirect foreign aid, politicize grants, and reshape key agencies added another layer of uncertainty for organizations directly or indirectly tied to U.S. funding streams.

Protest, exhaustion, and what comes next

Taken together, 2025 appeared to be a year that normalized crisis. Mass deportations and hardline border policies were folded into everyday governance; rolling conflicts and fragile cease‑fires blurred into the background; and the cost‑of‑living crisis stopped feeling like a temporary shock and more like a permanent condition. People cycled between mobilization and fatigue—between the street, the ballot box and the private strategies of survival that don't trend on social media.

The open question going into 2026 is whether this becomes our baseline or our breaking point. Trump II has shown how quickly one government can bend institutions toward a more unilateral, transactional world. The wars and protests of 2025 have shown how fragile that world actually is. What remains to be seen is whether the next wave of resistance will come from the usual places—capitals and big parties—or from small states, cities and communities quietly deciding that they are done living inside someone else's crisis script.