Here Are Some Of The Dumbest Moments Of 2025
Before We Step Into 2026, Here Are Some Of The Dumbest Moments Of 2025
As 2025 draws to a close, one thing needs to be acknowledged:
This has been one stupid year.
If there was ever a single year in modern history that should be dubbed The Year of the Yokel, The Days of Dumbassery, The Age of the Asinine, or 365 Shades of Duhhh — It’s this year.
So, here at NewsOne, we have compiled a list of the dumbest moments of 2025. Before we get started, though, a few disclaimers:
First, we’re not going to get to everything. We will probably barely scratch the surface in identifying all of the absurdity that has happened from January to now. There are dummies we forgot about. Idiots whose stories we missed. There are stories we remembered and probably even wanted to include, but because this needs to be an op-ed piece, not a novel series, we had to cut some of the fat.
Secondly, this list is going to be very Trump administration-heavy. President Donald Trump is, among other unflattering things, a moron, and he has surrounded himself with morons, whom he has given far too much power, making Idiocracy great again, one policy at a time. Still, we will try to include a few moments that had nothing to do with Trump and his band of brainless buffoons. It’ll be like what white conservatives think DEI is, but applied to abject stupidity.
Finally, this list won’t be compiled in any particular order. Organizing it by timeline would mean we have to go back and check the exact date on everything, and trying to create a hierarchy of headassery for this year is something we just don’t have the bandwidth for. For the most part, these are just the moments that came to mind most immediately.
All that being said, let’s start with the event that set the tone for it all: Trump’s inauguration, and the Nazi salute none of us should have been surprised by.
Elon Musk’s (alleged) Nazi salute
Now, when it comes to Musk using his time on stage to give America a preview of what Trump’s reelection would bring, it’s not necessarily the act itself that earned its spot on this list. It’s all about the way delusional MAGA cultists tried to defend it.
From our previous report:
Musk apologists have tried to explain that the tech bro was actually doing a Roman salute as if Musk was Roman or in Rome or at an event where such a gesture would have been deemed appropriate. They’ve also offered the speculative excuse that Musk is neurodivergent and we’re all mistaking an awkward, autistic way of waving as a Nazi salute. But for those of us who have eyes and an unwillingness to pretend those eyes didn’t see what they saw, what Musk did was leave the crowd, not once, but twice, with a very intentional salute that very much resembled that of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Elon wasn’t demonstrating a Roman salute. He wasn’t showing evidence of autism. He wasn’t karate-chopping flies. He wasn’t trying to show the people in the bleachers his fresh manicure. Elon Musk gave his audience a very purposeful gesture that he knew or should have known would be identified by the public as a Nazi salute.
When right-wingers (or Reich-wingers?) weren’t trying to Jedi mind trick the rest of the world into not recognizing one of the most recognizable hand and arm gestures in history, they were calling us hypocrites for not having the same smoke for Democrats who did the same thing — arguments they backed up by showing video footage of Democrats, well, not actually doing the same thing at all.
Also, other Republicans and MAGA supporters decided to support Musk by videotaping their own Nazi salutes, like when people shave their heads to support their loved one who is a cancer patient, only for white supremacists who don’t want to be white supremacists all by themselves. Some of them lost their jobs over the act, because stupid is what stupid does, especially when stupid just does what it watched stupid do.
Anyway, let’s move on.
Pete Hegseth’s Signal chat debacle
Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump’s reverse-DEI hire, shared military plans to attack Houthi rebel sites in Yemen with his wife and several work colleagues on separate Signal chats.
It’s the kind of thing that might happen when a president fills his Cabinet with Fox News hosts and loyalists whose only qualifications are their willingness to stuff their heads up Trump’s butt and thank him for keeping their skulls warm. Hegseth, of course, tried his best to lie and gaslight his way out of it, first claiming the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who broke the story after being included in the chat, is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called-journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Eventually, Hegseth pivoted to denying that the war plans he shared were actually classified and damned the media for making a big deal out of it, as if a top government official sharing any war-related plans on such a platform and tagging non-government officials into it is normal behavior, and not inconceivably stupid.
So, what’s next? Let’s go ahead and get off politics for a sec.
Drake lost a rap beef and started suing over — I don’t know — something
Now, we all know Sir Audrey Drake Graham of NotLikeUsVille, Canada, has had a rough go of it the last couple of years. In 2024, he made the grave mistake of getting into a rap feud with one Kendrick Lamar. Honestly, the diss track back and forth wasn’t exactly going Drake’s way, even before K-Dot dropped a full gauntlet of infinity stones on him via the diss song that became an anthem, “Not Like Us.”
This was the track that solidified Aubrey’s loss, and if Draaaaaaaaake had just taken the L with grace and dignity, the embarrassment would have eventually died down and faded into the archives of social media memory. Instead, he started doing goofy shit like wearing bullet hole-ridden hoodies on stage to illustrate the betrayal of friends like LeBron James, who also became the subject of one of Drake’s diss tracks, only it actually sounded more like a weird breakup letter, the kind you get from someone you didn’t even realize you were in a relationship with. But it’s when Drake started with the legal filings against Universal Music Group (UMG) — which he unsuccessfully tried to sue for defamation, accusing the label of spreading a “false and malicious narrative” by promoting a hit song from one of its most famous artists — that BBL Drizzy ensured that the beef he lost would never be forgotten, which led to Kendrick reopening a wound that was still fresh during the Super Bowl halftime show this year.
Moral of the story, Drake: losing a rap battle is part of hip hop; filing lawsuits because you lost is decidedly not. The smartest thing would have been not to get into it with Dot in the first place. The second smartest thing would have been to humble yourself and lose with dignity. The dumbest thing was basically everything you did.
Anyway, back to Trump and them.
Donald Trump doesn’t know which years he was president
Now, when it comes to objectively unintelligent things said by Donald J-is-for-Jesus-he’s-stupid Trump, it’s really hard to narrow things down to just one comment that demonstrates how little he knows about literally anything, even if we’re only pulling quotes from this year alone. We could have gone with his seemingly recent discovery of the word “groceries,” which he described as an “old-fashioned” word that “sort of says a bag with different things in it.” We could have talked about his belief that he can issue a federal pardon to an election denier convicted on state charges, or the AI-generated video he shared that suggested he thinks “medbeds” are real. Hell, the man thought his MRI exam was an IQ test. Again, the possibilities were endless for this entry.
But for the sake of time, let’s just go with Trump claiming “the Biden FBI” was sent to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, about three weeks before Joe Biden was inaugurated as president.
So, the president doesn’t know when the president officially becomes president. Someone should tell him it’s the day billionaires throw up Nazi salutes to support the incoming commander in chief. That might jog his memory.
For some reason, a MAGA-fied fitness influencer was on CNN discussing U.S. history and how it blames slavery on white people
Look, no one really knows how fitness instructor Jillian Michaels, who is best known for being really mean to overweight people on The Biggest Loser, even found herself on a CNN panel, where she argued that Trump was “not whitewashing slavery” by moving to force the Smithsonian to remove slavery exhibits from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but people who know things certainly knew how out of her depth she was.
“You cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does,” Michaels declared, ignorant of the well-documented fact that, in the West, imperialism, racism, and slavery absolutely can be tied to one race. (Jillian Michaels wants to be Florida so bad.)
She went on to note that relatively few white people owned slaves in the U.S., as if that negates the fact that virtually all white Americans benefited from the institution, as did America’s entire infrastructure.
But again, the issue isn’t Michaels giving us some white and eternally fragile rendition of American history; it’s that she was doing so on a major news network while being an expert on absolutely nothing.
You see, Michaels’ CNN appearance makes the dumbest moments list, not because she’s stupid, but because booking her was. To be fair, Scott Jennings is just a big, white, and fragile ball of anti-intellectualism, who contributes nothing but that dumb, smug facial expression of unearned confidence, and he’s on the show every day.
Anyway, moving along…
A top FBI official claimed Antifa is America’s greatest terrorist threat, while demonstrably knowing nothing about Antifa, including whether it exists
Back in September, during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Kash Patel revealed (or pretended) he had no idea who white supremacist mass shooter Dylann Roof is, which should have marked the dumbest interview of an FBI official during a Congressional hearing, and maybe it did.
But one top FBI official who has definitely given Patel a run for his dummy money is FBI National Security Operations Director Michael Glasheen, who was challenged by House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson to describe “organizations that pose, on the domestic side,” the number one threat to the U.S., which Glasheen claimed, based on “data,” was Antifa, an ideology that is not an organization.
Glasheen’s interview makes this list because his stupidity made the second-hand embarrassment almost unbearable.
Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan, well, honestly — everything about her is dumb
Professional Trump loyalist Lindsey Halligan, who also occasionally practices law, apparently, was tapped by the administration to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, despite said attorney having no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, and despite the fact that she couldn’t legally serve in the role, which is what led to Trump’s retaliatory cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James being dismissed. Well, before that happened, Halligan — who is also one of the fragile whites Trump consulted to determine how much Black history is too much Black history at the Smithsonian — sent a series of unsolicited tweets to a reporter regarding James’ case, and waited until after she sent all of those messages to text, “By the way, everything I ever sent you is off record,” which, obviously, is not how “off the record” works.
What’s worse, Halligan did all of this on a Signal chat, just like Hegseth, which presents the perfect opportunity to close this list out with his other moment of pure, unadulterated stupidity.
Pete Hegseth’s meeting with top military command
In September, Hegseth had the bright idea of ordering some 800 top U.S. military generals and admirals to gather at a Marine Corps base in Virginia, pulling them away from their jobs defending the nation at posts spread out across the U.S. and several other countries, and putting them all in one publicly disclosed room at the same publicly disclosed time, and he did all of this just so he could yell at them for being too fat and too woke.
Instead of boring you with footage of the actual meeting, we’re going to share the satirical SNL depiction of it, which, for the most part, is barely distinguishable from the actual meeting.
Again, y’all, this list only represents a small sample of the idiocy that has plagued the year 2025. Stay tuned for part 2 of this list.
For now, feel free to add some of your own in the comments.
SEE ALSO:
Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” Reclaimed the Narrative for Black Culture
Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Drew 125 FCC Complaints
Before We Step Into 2026, Here Are Some Of The Dumbest Moments Of 2025 was originally published on newsone.com