The Year Everything Collapsed, and I Found My Voice

Notes From The Wreckage

I started 2025 with 3,000 followers. I end it with almost 55,000. My writing, once a wine offer, became a verdict. A dispatch. A kind of documentary record from inside the collapse.

This was the worst year I’ve had in two decades of running my own business. I’ve been importing wine since 2011. Through debt ceilings, shutdowns, pandemics, I’ve made it work. But 2025 broke me in ways I’ve never seen. Trump’s return didn’t just poison the air; it poisoned the ledger. First it was a threat of 200% tariffs, floated like a joke, announced like a punishment. Then a fake retreat 20% then to 10%, which the press praised as “restraint,” as if setting fire to half your house deserves applause because you didn’t torch the entire block. Then it settled at 15%, which gutted my middle-class customer base. Rich people can’t carry a company built on taste and trust. And even if they could, the euro strengthened. It always does in chaos. But this time it it was clarity. No one trusts the dollar when it’s held hostage by a man with a grudge.

That was the story of my year: a fragile business, finally roaring after COVID, slammed by policy written like a vendetta. And the media just watched. They call it economic nationalism. I call it economic homicide.

But this was also the year I found my voice. The same voice I’ve used for twenty years in wine writing: metaphor-laced, emotionally direct, allergic to bullshit. I started using it for everything. Threads became the platform where I wrote like no one was watching. And then they watched. And kept watching. From 3,000 to 55,000+ in ten months. Because I said what so many were afraid to say. Because I didn’t argue. I indicted.

While the country slid further into darkness, I sharpened my language. While ICE raided homes for misdemeanor immigration status, I wrote plainly about white supremacy. While DHS filled its feeds with Rockwell cosplay and millimeter-precise branding, while they laundered racism through nostalgia and called it law, I named the sickness. While Pete Hegseth, a drunk Christian nationalist with a death drive, held encrypted chats, and unknowingly having press on it, about bombing Yemen and called it strategy, the press dubbed it SignalGate. I called it what it was: incompetence disguised as command.

They changed the name of the Department of Defense to Department of War. You can’t parody a government that already writes its press releases like it’s staging a reboot of Rome.

This was the year Trump figured it out. Don’t hire people who might challenge you. Don’t elevate competence. Loyalty is the only qualification, and loyalty requires one thing: shared stupidity. If you’re dumb, they have to be dumber. Or smart enough to pretend they’re not.

This was the year the Supreme Court vanished into its shadow docket. Sixteen straight rulings for Trump. Then a flicker of resistance with the National Guard Chicago case, a little judicial theater to pretend they’re still a court. But we see it. We know. The real test will be the tariff case. Two lower courts rejected them. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments. The government’s defense was hollow. A president cannot unilaterally impose trade punishments on a whim, especially not on his own citizens. The deficit is not a war. One man cannot set prices. That’s dictatorship by spreadsheet.

The list of horrors stretches endlessly. We deported immigrants to the wrong countries, including CECOT in El Salvador, a brutal mega-prison where people vanish. CBS spiked that story. Of course they did. CBS is gone. Bari Weiss runs it now, on strings pulled by David Ellison, who inherited his father’s billions and believes fascism is a fashion trend. They spiked the CECOT story, ran fluff on Christian influencers, and buried the dead. You don’t get authoritarianism without a compliant press. You certainly don’t get Trump.

This was the year of white supremacist PR. This was the year of imperial murder. Bombings in Iran. Strikes in Venezuela. No declarations, no justifications, no proof. Ships hit. People dead. No war. Just homicide. He killed over 90 people in countries waters we’re not at war with. That’s murder with government branding.

And it was the year of Gaza. A tragedy repackaged as development. A Dubai-style dream city pitched atop the rubble of annihilation. We knew it was coming. We saw the maps. We heard the language. But knowing doesn’t dull the horror when the sky turns black and the buildings fall.

And then there was Rob Reiner. One of the last lights. Murdered, allegedly, by his own child. Trump’s response? That he died of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and that his son killed him for not supporting Trump. Said it in the third person. Like a demon narrating its own sins.

This was the year the Epstein files came out. Not all of them, of course, just the first poisoned drop from a reservoir hundreds of gigabytes deep. But even that drop was radioactive. Trump had campaigned on releasing “everything.” Early in his presidency, he brought a flock of clout-chasing right-wing influencers to the White House. They posed with fake binders labeled “Epstein Files Part 1,” like interns at a conspiracy-themed escape room. The contents were junk. A few blurry documents. Names redacted with the force of a blackout. It was never about disclosure. It was about delay.

Then came Pam Bondi, his former Florida crony turned PR necromancer. She promised transparency. Said the Epstein files were “on her desk.” Weeks later, she declared with dead eyes that “there is no client list,” and “the case is closed.” That sentence will one day be remembered as one of the most disgraceful acts of public betrayal in American legal history.

It took a bipartisan discharge petition, yes, a discharge petition, the last resort of a broken Congress, to force the issue. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna led the effort. The Speaker of the House, a barely sentient cleric named Mike Johnson, had failed to do anything. Arizona elected a new rep, and that tipped the count to 218. The vote passed, something like 420 to 1. I think Chip Roy refused to sign. Maybe one or two of the other diehard Trump loyalists who think sunlight is a deep state plot. The Senate followed. Unanimous. Trump, boxed in, signed the bill.

And now the documents are dripping out. Not in full. Just a few curated gigabytes. But even that is horrifying. Redactions protect billionaires. Redactions protect princes and presidents and executives who fund both parties. But the rot still leaks. The language is unspeakable. Children trafficked. Surveillance tapes. International transport. Code names. Lawyers with blood on their hands and blackmail in their inboxes. The story is infrastructural. It was a system.

And now the DOJ is openly shitposting. Someone, probably Stephen Cheung, or one of the other Trump propagandists embedded inside the building, is using government channels to troll citizens on social media. To call critics “fakes” and “conspiracy theorists.” To cast doubt on verified documents. It’s branding. They’re using the Department of Justice like it’s a campaign war room. Because it is.

Pam Bondi is the worst Attorney General this country has ever seen. She doesn’t work for the public. She works for Trump. The DOJ doesn’t serve the law. It serves the man. It is now his personal firm. And as the files come out, their only concern is message control. Some of the details are unbearable. Some can’t be unread. This was a crime scene dressed as diplomacy.

And the worst part is that we let it happen. We always do. America doesn’t battle its demons. We market them. We rename them. We bury them under flag-draped narratives and bipartisan shrugs. We never faced the genocide. We never faced slavery. We never faced the original sins, so they just keep evolving. Same DNA. Different wardrobe. And every time we look away, they return stronger. This is America revealed.

And through all of this, I kept writing. I kept recording. And people kept finding me. Because I don’t flinch. I don’t hedge. I don’t weigh both sides when one of them is holding a match over the country.

And yes, if Biden or Harris were in office, the press would be calling for their heads daily. There would be editorials, panels, outrage marathons. But Trump breaks their backs just by existing. He humiliates them into silence. Because the press is part of it. The spectacle needs a stage. This year broke my business. It nearly broke my heart. But it did not break my voice.

I found something this year. A way to tell the truth without begging for agreement. A way to carry the weight and say it plainly. A way to survive, mythically, angrily, honestly, while everything else goes dark.

And in 2026, I’m bringing it all with me.