This past year was not easy, but it certainly was eventful. In 2024, Joe Biden dropped out of the race at the eleventh hour, and Kamala Harris’s swift anointment brought us the joy of Brat summer. There was not one, but two assassination attempts against Donald Trump; the continued wars in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon; the sudden and surprising fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria; the murder of a CEO (and Luigi-mania); mystery drones over New Jersey; and finally, Trump’s decisive reelection to the White House.
On a cheerier note, 2024 was also the year of breakdancing at the Paris Olympics; Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard; SpaceX’s first commercial space walk; and Israel’s epic, spy-thriller pager-explosion attack on Hezbollah—not to mention they also took out Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar as well.
So, what will 2025 bring?
We are starting the year, as we did last year, with a special 2025 predictions episode of Honestly. We called up some friends of the pod—people we trust in their fields—to get a better sense of what’s in store for the year ahead.
Sarah Isgur tells us what we can expect in the Trump 2.0 White House. Linguist John McWhorter looks at new words and how language will evolve in the coming year. Our very own Suzy Weiss talks us through the cultural year ahead. Leandra Medine Cohen clues us in on fashion trends in 2025, and last but not least: Niall Ferguson tells us, as he did last year as well, whether or not we’re right to have nightmares about World War III—but for real this time.
Some guests cheered us up, whereas others freaked us out. All of them were a pleasure to talk to. We hope you enjoy these conversations with some of our favorite people.
Below is a small taste of each of those chats, but click here to listen to the full episode:
Sarah Isgur on immigration, DOGE, and abortion in Donald Trump’s first year in office:
Bari Weiss: What will Trump do on the southern border?
Sarah Isgur: He said he’s going to do mass deportation. But I do not think this will be “mass deportation” as we generally understand it. The administration will make life so painful that it encourages self-deportations. They’ll add resources into border security stuff and speed up asylum claims. And, my prediction is a lot of litigation, because a president isn’t in charge of our immigration system, it’s Congress. So unless he can move something through Congress, which I don’t predict happening, this will be met with endless lawsuits.
BW: What about birthright citizenship?
SI: We will see litigation challenging birthright citizenship, and I think it will fail.
Nellie Bowles: What about tariffs and trade?
SI: Trump will do everything he said he’s going to do.
NB: Will Trump be able to make the government more efficient and cut spending?
SI: Among the biggest expenditures for the government are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those are the things they can’t touch. So even if they find some stuff, it will not change the underlying reality of what is driving this country into debt and borrowing money from China.
I’m more interested in how the Office of Personnel Management works. So huge changes in the federal workforce—making it smaller, making federal employees come to work every day, making them more fireable—all of that will happen and DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] is going to be out there looking for fraud.
BW: Is anything going to change on abortion?