Keen On America

The 2025 Trump was supposed to be a more refined version of the 2017 original. But according to National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn, Trump 2.0 has fizzled into Trump 0.2. 2025 will be remembered, Heilbrunn argues, as the beginning of the end of Trump’s authoritarian aspirations. MAGA has fractured, the administration is incompetent, and Trump himself is running what Heilbrunn calls an "absentee landlord" presidency. And things, Heilbrunn predicts, are only going to get worse. In 2026, he suspects, there will be a serious economic downturn—even an AI-triggered 1929-style crash—that will only formalize the dismal failure of Trump's second regime. Perhaps. Although Trump always seems most resilient after being written off by DC pundits like Heilbrunn. The old pugilist, albeit only a “quasi-Caesar”, still has a few more rounds in him. Three more years, to be exact. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Whither America? For the Canadian writer Stephen Marche, that’s no longer the question. America in 2025, for Marche, has already withered. The Toronto-based author of The Next Civil War argues that the future has already arrived in the United States. And it’s a violent, regressive future - which is only going to get more dismal in 2026. That’s the view from Toronto where Marche is enjoying a front seat on the arrival of the American future. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The best fiction seems real, the best non-fiction books read like fiction. That, at least, is Bethanne Patrick’s take on the best books of 2025. Selecting her favorite four fiction and four non-fiction books, the LA Times book critic suggests that all eight of these books brilliantly blur the line between fact and fiction. Take, for example, Murderland, Caroline Fraser’s new non-fiction linking 1970s serial killers to environmental toxins from mining. “People love true crime as if there’s something called untrue crime”, Patrick notes. “Fraser shows that what really happened and the way it blows up in our minds—that’s where fact and fiction blur.”Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Might 2025 turn out to be the new 1925? In other words, are we currently in the Roaring Twenties and on the brink of another Great Depression? This historical analogy, according to the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, isn’t entirely fanciful. Economic history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, Wolf acknowledges, but it has a rhythmic quality. We are living, he suggests, in a “slow-motion” interwar moment. And while FDR is Donald Trump’s mirror image, perhaps the most similar President to Trump was Warren Harding whose administration was deeply tarnished by the Teapot Dome scandal. Crypto, Wolf suggests, might turn out to be Trump’s Teapot Dome. And 2026, Martin Wolf warns, might turn out to be significantly more turbulent for both the US and global economies than 2025.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

“If they want to put on my tombstone ‘The Last Idealist’, that’s fine,” the iconic (and I don’t use that word lightly) American journalist Ray Suarez tells me. But even Suarez’s idealism was tested by Trump’s America in 2025. It was a “jaw-dropping” year, he tells me, astonishing for a veteran journalist like Suarez. In some senses, he says, America has reverted to being a 19th century colonial power. So what happens when you “repeal” the 20th century? For all his idealism, Suarez is a realist, particularly in economics. So it's worth noting his warnings about the “devils of inflation” in 2026 which he sees as a likely consequence of Trump’s economic populism. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe