It’s been over a month since I’ve blogged, and with my busy season at work about to start in the next couple of days, I don’t imagine I will have much to say over the next several weeks either.

Things continue to progress in what I view as a deeply negatively direction for this country, albeit not at a particularly rapid pace. We are not yet at war with Venezuela, although events still seem to be trending in that direction. Notwithstanding Trump’s apparent belief that drug smuggling is a major national security concern, he recently continued his war against the war on corruption by pardoning the former president of Honduras, who had recently started serving a 45-year federal sentence for cocaine trafficking. Trump has been trying harder in recent weeks to broker peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, but the endgame remains unclear. Trump continues to express his interest in annexing Greenland against the will of a NATO ally, having recently named Louisiana’s Republican governor as a “special envoy to Greenland,” a post the governor described as “a volunteer position to [help] make Greenland part of the U.S.” And the administration recently announced its intention to start de-naturalizing U.S. citizens (due to purported misrepresentations made during the naturalization process) at approximately a 100-fold increase over historical rates.

With SCOTUS yet to rule in the IEEPA tariffs cases, there have been no significant developments in trade policy as of late, nor have the impacts of Trump’s tariffs yet had much influence on the general economy. After official inflation figures were not published for October 2025 thanks to the government shutdown, the November 2025 figure was only 2.7%, down from September’s 3.0% and at the same level as in November 2024, albeit still higher than the Fed’s target of 2.0%. Unemployment ticked up to 4.6% in November 2025, up from 4.2% in November 2024. The S&P 500 is up 16.5% for calendar year 2025, thanks in some part to the OBBBA’s extension of the TCJA’s tax regime and in other part to a potential bubble in AI-related stocks. Trump recently rated the economy “A+++++” under his watch, although a recent poll has Trump significantly underwater on his handling of the economy, 36 – 57.

Last week we finally had a 6-3 SCOTUS shadow docket ruling that was against the administration instead of for it, in Trump v. Illinois. Recall that in this case the 7th Circuit ruled that Trump’s attempt to federalize the National Guard for deployment in Chicago was unlawful. As foreshadowed by the Court’s November request for supplemental briefing of the issue addressed in Marty Lederman’s amicus brief, a majority of the court believes that a stay of the ruling is not warranted on the grounds that the reference in the Milita Act to “regular forces” does indeed refer to the military and not to civilian law enforcement. So, that’s one. The ruling was extremely textual in nature, allowing the Court to weigh in without needing to get into thornier issues, which may not be a great sign of the Court’s willingness to address those issues in a situation where there wasn’t a clear alternative offramp.

Looking back on the year holistically, I feel pretty down about it. My major concern is that many of the changes that Trump has wrought to the country this year are things that in practice will be nearly impossible to reverse in the absence of constitutional reform, which in turn is nearly impossible to imagine.