As early as January, last year, we deemed 2024 to be the historic year of broken records. It never let us down. For instance, consider the Democrats’ side of the electoral campaign. Starting in the summer, Joe Biden flamed out in a record-breakingly poor debate, he was pushed aside in a historically public intra-party coup, and then the Democrats introduced a lowest-polling-ever replacement candidate and did it later in the campaign season than had any previous post-convention switcheroo. (Curiously, Democrats have pulled this trading-places trick at least three times, but Republicans have never switched candidates after their convention.)
Then in the vote, Democrats set their worst records with men, latinos, blacks, and hispanics, shattering their fantasies about permanent majorities and casting a terrifying pall of prospective permanent minority.
We are now in March of 2025. The Chinese Year of the Dragon is over. We are now in the Year of the Snake. This year’s new motif is not just about setting new records. Breaking a previous record implies some kind of incremental improvement (or failure) along an existing track, like a runner who completes the quarter mile faster (or slower) than any runner has ever raced before.
But this year’s historic events aren’t merely extensions, exaggerations, or new records. We’re living through historical alchemy that’s cooking up a novel element. A unique combination of disparate material factors are melding together in an accelerating spontaneous reaction. These prediction-defying factors include absolutely unique human personalities (e.g., Trump, Musk), novel technologies (e.g., A.I., worldwide wireless internet, ubiquitous handheld devices), and a nascent global world empire pooling into something completely new like drops of mercury assembling from scattered bits of Pax Americana.
It’s creating a whole new type of surreal substance, an entire, novel reality knitted from a Twenty-First century high-tech fabric. That word, “surreal,” has two parts. First, a French prefix, sur, which means above, beyond, or over. Second, the latin root realis, which means actual, existing, or true. So, surreal literally means something beyond reality or above the real. It’s different from “unreal”—which suggests something made up or imaginary.
Rather, surreal implies a distortion or exaggeration of reality itself, to the point where things acquire a dreamlike quality.
Just a few quick weeks ago, President Trump casually renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He didn’t appoint a two-year, blue-ribbon committee to study the name change and give him advice. He just did it. Boom. Who cares what anyone thinks or says about it? Next.
I dare you to argue that Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and Canada isn’t surreal. He’s not even hinting around—he’s said it outright, repeatedly, with signature bluntness. He’s been entirely consistent in his explanations: America needs Greenland for Arctic security against Russia and China. Canada, he’s argued, cannot exist economically without the U.S.—so why pretend it’s independent? Just make it the 51st state and move on.
And, crucially, President Trump doesn’t seem to be joking. And we’re now actually discussing annexing all of North America.
The media (and many other folks) struggle to comprehend that it is really happening. They are almost stunned, in shocked (and often outraged) disbelief. The media and much of the public, conditioned by a lifetime of politicians saying one thing but meaning something completely different, still struggle cognitively to accept current events. They keep retreating into mental safe spaces, assuming Trump must be bluffing, posturing, or trolling.
But they also assumed that about his border wall in 2016. They assumed that about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. They assumed that about the original tariffs on China.
And yet, here we are—watching the impossible become inevitable.
Frankly, I doubt they are even sure what’s exactly is going on. Like the rest of us, media is struggling to keep up with the frenetic rush of events. Media isn’t even sure what to disbelieve. And I hardly blame them. The timeline itself is flying at hypersonic speeds, defying the laws of physics, far beyond anything we’ve previously considered to be possible in the real world.
Christopher Nolan’s 2010 movie Inception might be the most appropriate metaphor. In its iconic scene, a dramatic scene unfolds (and refolds) inside a bizarre lucid dream, with the cityscape of Paris bending, folding, and reshaping itself in impossible ways, its classical architecture warping beyond all physical limits while somehow preserving an indescribable sense of coherent reality.
That dreamlike sequence is a perfect visual metaphor for 2025’s Year of Surreality. The world isn’t dissolving into chaos. It’s reorganizing itself into something structurally sound but completely beyond traditional expectations. The laws of political physics aren’t breaking, but they’re bending in ways nobody thought was even possible.
Except President Trump. He saw possibilities that no one else saw.
One of the most dependable axioms of life has always been that government is glacial. Fast government is altogether new. Hypersonic government is literally unthinkable. The fact it’s happening is not just an extension of the world before, or some kind of incremental improvement.
Trump isn’t reinventing government— he’s reimagining government. Not just government. He’s reimagining a new, new world order.
2025 seems so surreal because history isn’t acting like we expect. Things are happening too marvelously fast, and too magnificently openly. The old world order is breaking apart in real time, but instead of dissolving into chaos, something altogether new and uniquely American is taking shape. But what?
We don’t know yet. Trump’s called it a “Golden Age,” but in classic fashion, he has not yet precisely described the endpoint. (Nor should he, given who his enemies are and what they are capable of.)
So, for better or worse, we’re all passengers on an unidentified flying vessel moving at impossible speeds, bending the rules of history like a UFO warping space-time. The old world isn’t just ending—it’s folding in on itself, Inception-style, with new shapes emerging in real time from a molten forge of historical alchemy. What was once thought immovable is liquefying, reacting, and speeding up. The gravitic laws of past assumptions are failing.
The world expects politics to obey obsolete laws, but Trump is rewriting the rules in mid-flight —building a new UFO while flying it— untethered, accelerating, and unconcerned with the politically “impossible.”
But it isn’t a dream. It’s not an illusion. It’s more than real— it’s surreality. Will the stubborn creatures of history collapse back into the swamp? Or are we looking at a different new world order that Davos never, in its wildest fantasies, could have possibly foreseen?
America won’t be “reshaped” until there is Justice. None of the criminals in our government or federal law enforcement have been arrested or indicted. Is Bondi even showing up? I mean, beside on Fox News?