Cynicism Redeemed: My 2025 Epigrams

2025 was another great year for scoffing at politicians and Washington. Here are some of the zestiest lines from articles I wrote last year.

Trump Returns

“Trump’s economic victory proclamations are akin to a bad magician whose tricks are so lame that his audience starts to heckle him.”

“Trump’s biggest handicap now is that he’s no longer running against ‘Sleepy Joe Biden.’ Instead, Trump is going up against reality.”

“Did Thomas Jefferson roll over in his grave when President Trump asserted that the 1776 Declaration of Independence was ‘a declaration of unity and love and respect’?”

“Trump fired 17 Inspector Generals in his first days back in the Oval Office. Does the Trump version of ‘Rule of Law’ go beyond hiding all government crimes?”

“If the Trump administration can establish a prerogative to preemptively kill anyone suspected of transporting illicit narcotics, millions of American potheads are in grave peril tonight.”

“Trump promised that his Department of Government Efficiency would be like the ‘Manhattan Project’ which created the atomic bomb. But DOGE became the equivalent of a Pakistani nuclear-bomb test — a few loud clicks and then nothing.”

“Trump demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ from Iran, as if he were Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in 1862 waiting outside a fort commanded by a dimwitted Confederate general.”

“In March 2025, op-eds officially became a weapon of mass destruction. Does the Trump administration feel entitled to kidnap anyone who espouses an idea it disapproves – or only foreigners? Is the White House seeking to frighten everybody into submission and silence?”

“Trusting a Trump appointee to be a fair judge of Harvard University’s ideology is like appointing Bill Clinton to be chaperone of a girls basketball team.”

“‘He who saves his country violates no law,’ tweeted President Trump in February, echoing a line from Napoleon. Trump’s lawyers are toying with the same legal nitroglycerine that helped destroy George W. Bush’s presidency.”

“President Trump uses a catch-all definition of treason, presuming that anything that denigrates the supreme leader betrays the nation.”

“Some of Trump’s greatest victories do not yet exist beyond his imagination.”

Biden Still Damned

“Biden helped turn Washington into an Impunity Democracy in which government officials pay no price for their crimes. Thanks in part to Biden, Americans today are more likely to believe in witches, ghosts, and astrology than to trust the federal government.”

“‘No Deadbeats Left Behind’ was the mindless maxim for Biden’s mortgage policies.”

“Biden’s apologists vindicated the president by defining down ‘dictator.’ Henceforth, ‘dictatorship’ refers only to presidents who publicly proclaim their plans to do bad things to good people.”

“Only in Washington would a T.S.A. edict to banish all dissidents be labeled Operation Freedom to Breathe.”

“The COVID vaccine’s rushed approval was the pharmaceutical version of a riverboat gamble—except that Biden was betting the lives and health of all Americans.”

“Biden had no liability for the injections he mandated or the freedoms he destroyed. Despite pervasive abuses, not a single government official spent a day in jail for the most politically exploited pandemic in American history.”

Waco Redux

“Nothing vanishes from the official memory faster than federal atrocities.”

“Trusting congressional hearings to discover the truth is like trusting a roomful of monkeys with typewriters to write great novels—it might happen, but only in an eternity.”

“The gaudy grandeur of the House Judiciary Committee hearing room could not disguise a vast moral and mental wasteland.”

“Waco exemplified the Capitol Hill version of ‘Attention Deficit Democracy’—congressmen clueless and careless about the atrocities they bankrolled. That default foreshadowed similar congressional pratfalls on the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the bombing of Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, Yemen, et. al.”

Foreign Aid Still a Swindle

“Foreign aid has been incorrigible since long before most people reading this sentence were born.”

“Foreign aid bureaucrats take a sacred vow to never learn from mistakes.”

“Foreign aid has long been the incarnation of American benevolence—at least according to the Washington elite.”

Miscellaneous Caterwauling

“Call me a relic, but I prefer how the Bill of Rights defines liberty.”

“The louder politicians holler about treason, the more crimes they are probably hiding.”

“Self-government cannot survive people idealizing their rulers. Telling citizens to glorify contemporary politicians is like urging battered wives to idealize their husbands.”

“Paternalism requires degrading assumptions about citizens and deluded assumptions about rulers.”

“Government routinely blindfolds both itself and its victims.”

“Edward Snowden’s courage exposed the prevailing DC standard: We have nothing to hide and we’ll kill you if you prove otherwise.”

“Passing out millions of psychiatric Purple Hearts to young Americans will do nothing to help them surmount the challenges of life beyond the classroom.”

“In East Berlin grocery stores, Communist shoppers could purchase any fruit or vegetable they wanted as long as they only wanted apples, cabbage, or potatoes.”

“TSA checkpoints are still on par with blindfolded drunks swinging at a piñata.”

“After Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams departs this vale of tears, his glorious BS radar deserves to be prominently displayed in the Smithsonian Institution. No one has a sharper ear than Adams for contemporary American bloviating.”

Revolution, Then and Now

“Americans should never forget that their nation was forged in resistance to political slavery and claims by distant masters to unlimited power.”

“In 1775, colonists revolted because they were being bayoneted down the road to serfdom. Studying the Revolutionary era can vaccinate Americans against contemporary political frauds.”

“During the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, can President Trump avoid committing ‘a long train of abuses and usurpations’ that make Americans fear ‘absolute Despotism’?”