Our Best Stuff From the First Week of 2025

Hello and happy Saturday. I hope you had a festive yet restful holiday break. We slowed things down a bit here at The Dispatch, and I had some quality family time here in the Ohio bureau. The highlight for me was the chance to indulge in a longtime family tradition: enjoying a New Year’s dinner of pork and sauerkraut while watching Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Back when I was a kid, the game featured the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions and was billed as the “Grandaddy of Them All,” but this year the game served as a quarterfinal in the new world of college football’s 12-team playoff. In a fun coincidence, though, my Buckeyes faced the undefeated and top-ranked Oregon Ducks, a team that spent decades in the Pac-10 until joining OSU in the Big Ten this year (long story). I call it a fun coincidence mostly because the Buckeyes won in impressive fashion.  

Typically the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day marks a lull  in the news business. There’s a reason your favorite publications are heavy on year-in-review analyses, top-10 listicles, and person-of-the-year accolades: Those pieces are prepped well in advance so staffers can enjoy the holidays. But it’s been a while since we’ve had a typical year, and 2025 is shaping up to be no different.

In the days since Christmas, former President Jimmy Carter passed away, an American-born radicalized ISIS sympathizer killed 14 people celebrating New Year’s Eve on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and Rep. Mike Johnson narrowly won the speaker’s gavel in the House of Representatives. Two days from now, we’ll mark the fourth anniversary of the January 6 riot at the Capitol as we watch Congress certify Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory. 

Carter’s passing Sunday at the age of 100 prompted a wide range of reflections on his legacy, unsurprising given his legacy. His presidency is remembered mostly for the poor state of the U.S. economy and the 1970s energy crisis—his most famous speech is widely billed as the “malaise” speech, even though he never uttered those words. But he’s also remembered fondly by many for the humanitarian works of his post-presidency, including building homes for Habitat for Humanity and his campaign to eradicate guinea worm disease. 

Here at The Dispatch, Thomas Kidd looked back at how Carter changed the way Americans viewed a president’s faith by speaking openly of his own Christian beliefs. Yet he “never captured the hearts of white evangelicals the way Republican presidents have since Ronald Reagan in 1980,” Kidd wrote. “That Carter failed to do so is one of his most perplexing legacies.” 

In his remembrance, Kevin D. Williamson lets Carter off the hook for some of the travails of his presidency, writing, “Presidents do not dictate world events, and they do not have a magical steering wheel attached to the economy,” but he also notes that Carter was inconsistent and shifted blame toward others for his own failures. And worst of all?

He was an admirer of the cruel and the power-hungry and the vicious: He praised and coddled Yasser Arafat, pronounced himself “fond” of the monstrous Fidel Castro, affirmed that he “never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” These were not simply bad politicians, but tyrants and murderers and torturers—and Carter loved them all.” 

We woke up on Wednesday to the news that a man had intentionally driven a truck through a crowd of people celebrating New Year’s Eve on Bourbon Street in New Orleans and then died in a firefight with police officers. After initially denying that the incident was an act of terrorism, the FBI said it was indeed terrorism and identified the assailant as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Texas native who’d been recently radicalized and who’d pledged allegiance to ISIS before carrying out his attack, which killed 14 and injured more than 30. As we noted in The Morning Dispatch:

ISIS-inspired attacks have been rare in the United States since the fall of the terrorist group’s caliphate in 2019. But a lone-wolf attack, while not suggesting the presence of a cell, is not reassuring. “It may be counterintuitive, but I’d argue that a lone wolf is far more worrisome and dangerous for US counterterrorism officials, as it is so much harder for both law enforcement and the intelligence community to penetrate the operation itself,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. “This is exacerbated further if the attacker self-radicalized, receiving inspiration and guidance virtually from ISIS propaganda, for example.”

In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio wrote that the terror attack highlights that President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees to key national security positions have little experience with—or even interest in—national security. Referring to Kash Patel (FBI director), Tulsi Gabbard (director of national  intelligence), Pam Bondi (attorney general), and Kristi Noem (homeland security secretary), Nick notes that Trump’s nominees are “terrible selections if your priority is protecting Americans from dangerous threats, but they’re exemplary if your priority is co-opting the federal bureaucracy to harass your political enemies and to carry out an authoritarian’s wishes, lawful or not. Nationalist security, not national security, is Trump’s utmost ambition for his second term and he’s staffing up accordingly.”

We’ll have more on this important story and coverage of Rep. Mike Johnson’s reelection as speaker next week. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

And here’s the best of the rest: