The 5 most undersold political stories of 2025
- - The 5 most undersold political stories of 2025
Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNNDecember 31, 2025 at 5:01 AM
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President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on December 18, 2025. - Evan Vucci/AP
The year in politics has been a lot. We can say that about a lot of years in recent history, but that’s especially the case with 2025.
And that veritable onslaught of news meant we often didn’t get enough time to truly digest the significance of the events we were living through.
So at the end of the year, I like to look back on the stories that didn’t get their due — the things that might have escaped some people’s notice but could live on for years to come. It’s the things we didn’t appreciate or digest as fully as we should have.
Here is my list of the most undersold political stories of 2025.
1. The abdication of the legislative branch
It’s no secret that Congress doesn’t do nearly as much as it used to. Words like “gridlock” and phrases like “do nothing” have followed the body for years.
But this year was remarkable, even by those standards.
Congress not only accomplished less than it has at any point in recent recorded history, but it also effectively ceded its powers to President Donald Trump — willingly and repeatedly.
Some congressional Republicans started the year by arguing that their job was basically to do whatever Trump told them; then Trump proceeded to signal he pretty much just wanted to do things by himself, without Congress’ involvement or interference.
The final data is stunning.
Just 61 pieces of legislation have been enacted this year, according to data from the Congress-tracking website GovTrack. That puts this Congress on pace to be less than half as productive as any since at least the mid-1970s, and probably much longer than that (GovTrack’s data goes back only that far). The low for a two-year period is 274 enacted pieces of legislation, and Congress is likely to accomplish even less in 2026, given it’s a midterm election year.
But the gap left by the lack of legislation has been filled — by Trump’s pen. He’s signed more than 220 executive orders, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. That’s four times the pace he set in his first term and more than double the pace of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
So Congress is doing a lot less. And Trump is doing a lot more in its stead.
The situation has led to an increasing number of congressional Republicans asking why they don’t do more and wondering what the point of Congress even is.
2. An increasingly dicey clash between the courts and Trump
Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the presidency — including through those executive actions — have led to plenty of court cases, which have regularly been big news.
But one particular facet hasn’t gotten enough attention: the administration’s disdain for the judicial process.
It’s not just Trump attacking judges and decisions he disagrees with; it’s also his Justice Department flouting judges’ orders and lacking candor. A study published by the legal and national security news website Just Security and covered by “60 Minutes” in October found that, across more than 400 cases:
26 featured some kind of noncompliance with court orders by the administration.
More than 60 cases featured courts finding serious problems with the government’s claims.
68 cases featured judges finding the administration likely engaged in “arbitrary and capricious” conduct — that is, it undertook its action without due process and a sober review of the facts and the law.
There has been plenty of talk about a potential “constitutional crisis” if the administration opts to willfully disobey court orders. And the administration has certainly flirted with that, at the very least.
But even shy of that, the administration has treated the courts with a brand of contempt we rarely see in American politics.
How could that play out? It could certainly damage the authority of the judiciary if those courts don’t do enough to combat it. And/or it could damage the administration’s legal efforts if judges increasingly treat the administration as a bad-faith actor — depriving it of what’s known as the “presumption of regularity.”
3. The long tail of the DOGE fallout
The Department of Government Efficiency feels like old news now. Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s effort to rein in government spending was arguably the most chaotic part of Trump’s chaotic return to the presidency early this year.
But it’s unlikely history will forget it.
For one, it’s becoming clearer that the effort cut almost no spending. A New York Times study last week found that government spending continued to rise and that most of DOGE’s biggest claimed cuts were inaccurate. So even Musk, given immense power to take a meat cleaver to the government, couldn’t make a dent in the deficit. (Musk has acknowledged DOGE was only “somewhat successful.”)
But arguably even more significant is the long-term impact that DOGE could be remembered for.
A big part of that is the loss of expertise in government, thanks to the often seemingly indiscriminate firings — some of which later had to be reversed, as well as the medical research grants that were cut off.
But it goes well beyond that. A recent ProPublica investigation found that cuts to food aid in Kenya left thousands to starve. And a New Yorker documentary last month estimated that the broader shutting down of the US Agency for International Development — the primary engine behind US foreign aid — has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
To the extent these numbers are borne out, this is the kind of episode that could be remembered internationally long after Trump’s second term is over — just not for cutting spending.
4. The decline of GOP non-interventionism
2025 was the year the GOP got back in touch with its inner neoconservative.
Despite Trump having run his campaigns on non-interventionism and “America First,” his second term has been much more imperialist and militaristic.
Trump started it by suddenly talking about “manifest destiny” and taking over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. He’s proceeded to launch military strikes on Iran, as well as a series of other countries this year, including most recently Nigeria. And he’s even talking about going to war in Venezuela, despite an ever-shifting series of justifications.
And perhaps most remarkably, he’s taken most of his base along with him.
Despite early reservations within the GOP about the Iran strikes, a CNN poll afterward found that 8 in 10 Republicans supported them. And two recent polls show Republicans supported taking military action in Venezuela by double digits — even as one of them, from CBS News, showed just 25% of Republicans regarded Venezuela as a major threat to the United States.
5. A budding GOP reckoning over conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theories have long featured prominently in the Trump-era Republican Party — which makes a lot of sense given Trump effectively launched his political career on one.
But of late, the Republicans seem to be second-guessing just how much their party has been consumed by such claims and theories. As these theories have ensnared their own and jeopardized their political goals — on the Jeffrey Epstein files and on Charlie Kirk’s assassination — many in the party are suddenly calling for it to reckon with the cottage industry of conspiracism in its influencer base.
On Epstein and the January 6, 2021, pipe bomber, for instance, prominent Trump administration officials who once trafficked in these theories but went on to run the Justice Department have sought to assure there was nothing to them. But that’s proving a tough sell with prominent influencers and even with some members of Congress.
And on Kirk’s assassination, antisemitic conspiracy theories quickly hijacked Trump’s efforts to blame the event on the supposedly irredeemably violent political left. Of late, some prominent conservatives have argued it’s time to kick the likes of podcaster Candace Owens out of the movement.
But it’s not an easily fixable problem. These kinds of theories have become so ingrained in the party, in large part thanks to Trump, and some Republicans seem to fear that excommunicating the likes of Owens could jeopardize key parts of Trump’s base.
It’s one of the defining political questions as we head into 2026.
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Source: “AOL Breaking”
