SPECIAL REPORT: INSPIRATION POINT

A look at where we've been in 2025, and where we can go in 2026 if people, not parties, continue to lead the way ...

As I type this from the battleground of Madison, Wisconsin, America and our allies are under steady attack by a 79-year-old, deranged felon with mommy issues, a nuclear arsenal at his disposal, and a gutless Republican Party which is leading from the vicinity of his fat behind …

It’s all about Trump all the time, because the foul-mouthed lout has beaten most of our legacy media, universities, corporations, military, and his subservient weaklings in his pathetic party into submission.

A racist, un-evolved moron, who lies as he breathes, has done all that.

Who says America isn’t the land of opportunity?

It’s even worse of course, because fully 60 percent of America positively hates his guts, and spend hours each day seething as the old man-child snorts, sneers, and destroys for profit as much of our 249-year-old history as he can get his fat, little, purple hands on.

He’s dead on the inside, but reflexively knows just where to go on the outside to drive us all crazy, and America into the swamp he’s always whining about.

Right now the dead-inside man is in Davos, Switzerland, insulting as many of our allies as possible, before he gets his weekly report card from Putin, and the billionaire oil slicks, who are making all this mayhem possible.

We’re just citizens trying to save our country. He’s using the power of our government to destroy it.

It’s a wonder we all haven't died of our rage, which I am quite certain is a part of his diabolical plan. He thrives among the chaos, the lies, the murders, the hate, the vindictiveness, the rapes, and the carnage. He can never get enough. So he presses ahead each day always going lower — always searching out our pain points to exploit them, and really rub it in.

Most human beings aren’t programmed that way. His unlimited capacity to inflict hurt disorients us, and feeds his blood-thirsty party. Murdering a mother in cold blood in the middle of the street, and watching as it is celebrated by millions of our fellow citizens isn’t something decent people can properly process.

Lynchings like these were supposed to be a thing of the past in America. Now an entire political party holds them up as a return to “greatness.”

Don’t you dare tell me both sides are the same …

Then there are your friends and families who support all this. Turns out they are broken in ways we never imagined. “Was he always a racist?” “Does she really believe Trump is acting in anybody’s interests but his own?” “Does he really believe Jan. 6 was OK …?”

With the insidious help of state-run, right-wing propaganda they are living in a reality that might as well be two galaxies removed from your own. Try as you might, you can’t reach them.

It’s terrible it really is, because we know now, they are never coming back. Everybody makes a mistake once, but three times is criminal intent.

And speaking about intention … How about the selfish people who don’t bother to pay any attention at all …?

They defiantly say things like, “I got enough going on without paying attention to politics.” Or the dreaded, “They’re all the same.” Or, “I just can’t deal with this. You are ruining my happy place by talking about it.”

They busy themselves in their bubbles, leaving the rest of us in the cold to deal with this catastrophic free-fall back toward the 1850s.

I would like to strangle these people, I really would. Many of them know better, because they understand what happened in Europe in the 1930s, which makes their gross inaction that much more intolerable, and inexcusable.

So that’s where we are right now, good people, but it’s not exactly where we’ve been the past year ...

Yes, we have seen a few things, but our actions spoke louder than our words in 2025.

In fact, the opposition to Trump and his sheer madness had one helluva year striking back against the evil empire. The truly good and decent people in America poured their hearts out, took to our streets and our ballot boxes, and did what they could to fight past their mental anguish. They crawled over those do-nothings who litter our lives, and exacted many beatings on the regime that means to end us.

Democrats flipped 21 percent of all the GOP-held legislative seats that were on the ballot throughout 2025.

The Republicans, on the other hand, flipped exactly zero Democratically held seats.

Let me type that again: The Republicans flipped ZERO seats.

This rebuttal to pure evil is even stronger than the one we experienced in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s first win, when Democrats flipped 20 percent of all GOP-held legislative seats up for election. The following year’s epic Blue Wave saw Democrats gain 40 seats in Congress, flip seven governorships, and significantly eroded Republicans’ huge advantage in the Senate, all but putting the ghastly Trump in check.

The opposition has never been stronger, but this time is being led by the boots on the ground, instead of the empty suits in Congress. That’s a key distinction, but more on that in just a few.

On Tuesday, New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill was inaugurated to be that state’s 57th governor. Sherrill absolutely battered the Trump-endorsed candidate last November. Like Abigail Spanberger’s smashing victory in the governor’s race in Virginia, it signals a Blue Tsunami that is most assuredly coming the Republicans’ way this November.

And while I am rallying here, let me duck in a quick, Go Navy! Sherrill was a Navy helicopter pilot, who bravely served her country, unlike the burnt-orange draft-dodger who attacked it.

It might not feel like it, but there are millions of veterans like myself, who know the difference between people who truly love and care about their country like Sherrill, and people who use and abuse our country like Trump.

We all need to make ourselves heard, because we understand good and damn well the oath we took, even if too many in today’s military leadership don’t.

Now let me quickly address what you are no doubt thinking: Trump and his Orcs are going to try to interfere with this year’s elections, or shut them down altogether to prevent that Blue Tsunami from coming ashore.

It’s a legitimate worry, and why we need to talk openly and honestly about it, instead of kicking it aside as folly. There’s been too much denialism on a host of fronts from the Democratic Party for my liking.

Trump and his party are evil, and will do every single thing they can to destroy us. Unless we are operating under that assumption, and are prepared to do everything we can to stop it, we can never prevail.

On Tuesday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was asked by NPR if she thought pro-Trump forces would attempt to interfere with November’s elections.

Here’s what she said:

"It would be a mistake to assume that they're not going to. So I don't know precisely what it is that they might come up with. But we've got smart, sophisticated, savvy people around the table that we will continue to get prepared."

Asked about fears that Trump’s immigration crackdown — deploying thousands of masked thugs into American cities — would become a tool for controlling elections, Whitmer said this:

“I don’t think it’s paranoia to have that concern.”

She said Democratic governors are discussing how to respond, and performing “table top” exercises, though she gave few specifics. “There are important reasons that I’m not going to go into a whole lot more detail.”

That’s chilling, yes, but it is also an opposition party that is slowly starting to understand the stakes. There can be no more warming our hands in front of the fire and welcoming fascists back to our White House. No more pretending that all this will just fade away by employing politics as usual.

Because THAT’S what we were getting from most Democrats in the wake of that terrible November, 2024 election.

This is the most dangerous time in America since the Civil War, and anybody who won’t acknowledge at least that much isn’t worth our time or treasure.

We need fighters, not fawners.

We need people like Sherrill, and Spanberger who know the stakes, and will do everything with the power we have given them to fight for us, and help protect America from itself. These impressive women won because they listened to us.

We the people have more power than we know, and it’s time we made good and damn sure everybody remembers that.

So far, our resurgence has been a people-led revolt, which the Democratic Party Machine has had very little to do with. We have done all this despite the party, not because of it.

We have demanded change, and are leading from the front.

When the calendar turned in 2025, our Democratic “leadership” did nothing but re-elect basically the same people to power who were walloped in 2024.

This is absolute madness.

Chuck Schumer in the Senate, and Hakeem Jeffries in the House survived the massacre, and shortly after Ken Martin took the helm at the hapless DNC.

This very well might be the most uninspiring leadership team ever assembled anywhere for anything. Schumer with his strongly worded letters; Jeffries with his monotone, calculated robotics; Martin so transparent you can see right through him ...

Inspiring leaders like Zoran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race were left out in the cold by fellow New Yorkers Schumer and Jeffries, the latter of which only endorsed him when it no longer mattered. The worthless Schumer couldn’t even be bothered to do that much.

Tell me you’re completely bought off without telling me you are completely bought off.

Through it all, Mamdani prevailed, because it turns out people are craving bold, brave leadership, not more of the same old bullshit from the stale leadership in the Democratic Party.

Mamdani is a generational political talent, and won because he has vision, is not afraid to speak truth to power, and stands for what is most certainly good and right. You can do that when you don’t come off as scripted, boring phonies, who are worried about offending donors, Hakeem and Chuck.

The top of the party feels old, tired and out of touch. You know it, and I know it. So what’s taken so damn long for THEM to know it?

Voters are mad and they aren’t taking it anymore. Out with the old and in with the new. These damn parties and all their money have gotten too big in America. Citizens United saw to that. Now its time for the citizens to truly be united and take it to the man, and never stop taking it to him.

The next 10 months will be the most important time in American history. If we don’t charge past whatever might be standing in our way and vote in obscene numbers, it is is very fair to say we will never get another chance.

But if we do this right, and WE lead as I know we can, there will be an epic wipeout of the Republican Party in November that will be too big for even them to ignore. The 80-year-old, quickly diminishing Trump will be weaker than he’s ever been, and his party will be a fractured mess scurrying to find the nearest hole.

They will be the past.

The future will be ours.

So we make it so.

Power to the people.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

(That’s a photo of one of 2025’s No Kings marches. More than 12 million Americans hit the streets last year to participate in these protests against fascism.)