It has been a year dominated by Donald Trump. It has not yet even been 12 full months since his return to the White House in January but already the changes he has wrought – in the US and around the world – would have seemed scarcely conceivable in 2024.
Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, tells Annie Kelly what it has looked like from the editor’s chair: from the deployment of the National Guard on American streets, to the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, to the erosion of the rules that once governed peace and war.
In the UK, she describes a Labour government failing to tell its story and missing chance after chance to tackle the rise of Reform and the far right. ‘Politics is about timing,’ she says of the government’s notable silence over the summer, ‘and I think a lot of those opportunities were missed.’
Of course, it has not been a year without hope, from the unexpected success of leftwing figures such as Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski, to the Guardian’s decisive victories in court defending its reporting, in a case described as a landmark ruling for #MeToo journalism.
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- This is our last episode of 2025. Thank you to everyone who has listened this year. We will return with new episodes on 5 January 2026.
Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
