Good morning!

How wildly the world can change in a year.

You can gain some excellent prophetic perspective by watching this week’s two “Year in Review” Trumpet Daily episodes reflecting on the tumultuous political, social and geopolitical developments of 2025.

Receive a free news briefing in your inbox each weekday—the Trumpet Brief.

The first shows the roller coaster and the whiplash of the early months of President Trump’s consequential, controversial second term: his executive actions, reversal of Biden policies, immigration crackdown, tariffs and trade wars, doge, the Big Beautiful Bill, crime clampdown, the bombing of Iran, legal wins and losses, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, religious revival, government shutdown, and more. To hear President Trump tell it, America is starting a golden age. Bible prophecy forecasted a resurgence, but warns that it will be precariously temporary. In fact, the president is hastening several prophecies, many of them extremely dangerous.

The second episode covers the broader global picture, looking at last year’s natural disasters, rising anti-Semitism and anti-Jew terrorism, the Israel-Iran war, the warming German-Israel alliance, remilitarization in Germany and Europe, Russian provocations, EU nuclear sharing, the rise of Europe’s far-right, the fracturing and restructuring of nato, a new pope, a flurry of peace negotiations and deals, and the illusion of world peace. It truly is stunning list. All from the past 12 months.

You have to wonder: Where will we be this time next year?

Given the pace of events, and how rapidly even revolutionary change is unfolding, the haunting words of the Apostle Paul resound: “For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:2-3, English Standard Version).

Nazi scandal shocks Germany: The German military is investigating incidents in its elite paratrooper regiment involving excessive drinking, cocaine abuse, salutes to Adolf Hitler and an alleged Nazi party.

The findings, first published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on December 29, have rocked Germany. But considering Germany’s rapid militarization, they should shock the entire world.

• More than 200 criminal and disciplinary charges are under investigation involving 63 individuals.
• At least 30 of those are accused of right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic acts.
• Approximately 20 personnel have already been dismissed from the Bundeswehr, and others have been prohibited from wearing a uniform.

Given that the German Armed Forces has only 4,400 paratroopers, these revelations are astonishing. These are only the incidents that have been exposed: How many more are hidden? And how many more soldiers knew what was going on but remained silent or even sympathized?

“When we found out what was happening in Zweibrücken, we were practically speechless,” Commander of the Field Army Harald Gante told FAZ. “By the events themselves, but also by the way they were handled.”

Euronews wrote: “The elite Bundeswehr unit allegedly allowed a culture of misconduct to persist for years, such as anti-Semitism, sexual assault and violent rituals.”

The story echoes similar cases:

• In 2020, a company of Germany’s elite Special Forces Command engaged in enough far-right behavior to be completely dismantled.
• In 2021, members of a platoon stationed in Lithuania sang a birthday serenade for Hitler amid wider allegations of sexual assault and insults with racist slogans.

In each case, the reports reveal unbelievable tolerance by superior officers.

Germany is seeking to increase its military by tens of thousands. This will make it more difficult to avoid introducing more Nazi sympathizers into its ranks, and to prevent radicalization among the troops. If war breaks out, will Germany ban its radical soldiers from fighting, or will it allow them back into its ranks?

The Nazis who committed the horrible crimes of World War ii were human beings, but a radical mindset and the frequent use of drugs turned them into monsters.

After the war, the Allies assessed the horrors of the concentration camps and the cruelty of Nazis warfare. They vowed to never let it happen again. Their pledge has failed. Germany is militarizing, and its Nazi past is reviving—just as the Bible prophesied.

Jack Smith’s dystopian deposition against Trump: What is the greatest threat to the United States’ national security? Many people cite Russian strategy, Chinese espionage, Iranian ambition and other dangers. Yet one could argue that a graver, more immediate threat to the nation is that posed by federal intelligence officials.

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee released former special counsel Jack Smith’s 255-page deposition transcript, shedding new light on Smith’s indictments against President Donald Trump.

• Of course, Smith stepped down as special council 10 days before President Trump took the oath of office, but House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan subpoenaed Smith to testify at a closed-door deposition on December 17 so Congress could see whether he had been targeting Trump unlawfully.

What Jim Jordan discovered was shocking.

Released video footage shows that Smith appeared before the House Judiciary Committee with three personal lawyers to support him and argued that Donald Trump was guilty of fraud for simply challenging the outcome of the 2020 election. He claimed that Mr. Trump knew Joe Biden had won the election but rejected the “truthful information” presented to him, instead launching a psychological operation against the American people.

• In other words, Smith was not prosecuting Trump simply for instructing his Justice Department to examine the evidence of election fraud—he was prosecuting Trump for doing so when he knew in his heart that Biden was the legitimate winner.
• It is not illegal for the president of the United States to order an investigation into election fraud, so the whole case against Trump boils down to prosecuting him for something he thought, not something he did.

Mark Bradman at Conservative Treehouse wrote:

I don’t care if you support Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or the Easter Bunny, any American who doesn’t realize the tenuous future of our union after reviewing the information within this testimony is going to forever live in a collapsed dystopian nightmare, if they vote for any political representative who supports it. … The only way Jack Smith could prove fraud would be to prove that President Trump believed the information about Joe Biden winning the election.

In “Saving America From the Radical Left—Temporarily,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote that a Hillary Clinton victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election likely would have meant “an end to our constitutional republic!” Jack Smith’s dystopian deposition against Trump shows that he was right. If the radical lawfare against Trump had been allowed to continue, the nation would have descended into a dark period where people could be punished for things the government accused them of thinking.

IN OTHER NEWS

Trump threatens Iran: As anti-government protests spread in Iran, United States President Donald Trump announced on social media that if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime “kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” It is confirmed that Iranian security forces have fired live ammunition into crowds. President Trump campaigned on ending America’s involvement in foreign wars, yet he has shown willingness to conduct limited foreign military operations, including his direct bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June. The U.S. is cursed with a lack of will to use its power, so the president’s threats will likely prove hollow and will not weaken Iran’s radical regime. In fact, the Bible prophesies Iran will grow more powerful and belligerent.

CIA: Putin lied about the drone attack: Following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit with U.S. President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, optimism was in the air. Zelenskyy agreed to give in on several points of a peace deal; Trump agreed to visit Ukraine to petition parliament to part with some territories; even Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on board after a phone call with Trump before the meeting. The war’s end is “closer than ever,” President Trump announced. But then Ukraine launched 91 drones at Putin’s residence in Novgorod in an assassination attempt. As a result, Russia said it needed to be “more rigid” in negotiations, and the hopes for peace were dashed. On Wednesday, however, the CIA confirmed what Russia-watchers had suspected from the start: The drone attack never occurred. Ukraine vehemently denied carrying it out, and Russia could not produce a shred of evidence proving it (unless you count comically bad AI fabrications). Clearly this was yet another instance of Putin feigning engagement with peace efforts while manufacturing a pretext to reject them and keep killing. To understand why the efforts continue to fail, read “The Roadblock to Peace.”

Germany already at war? German military planners view recent Russian cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns as the start of war, a confidential government document seen by Politico says. The 24-page Operational Plan for Germany covers Germany’s plan to defend its land against Russia and logistic plans for moving allied forces. It lists five escalation phases “ranging from early threat detection and deterrence to national defense, nato collective defense and post-conflict recovery,” Politico reports. Germany sees itself in the first phase of escalation now. According to Bible prophecy, Berlin will eventually fight Russia, but not before destroying its English-speaking allies.

WSJ: China opposing U.S. in South America: As U.S. forces remain in position to strike the regime of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, the Wall Street Journal and others are recognizing that the conflict actually involves China. In December, the U.S. Navy enacted a quarantine of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers, but China called the action a blockade that violates international law. In an article posted yesterday, the Journal pointed out that “Beijing recently sent a provocative message when state media showed a war game simulation in the Western Hemisphere.” Why is China intervening in a seemingly unrelated struggle 10,000 miles away? In the last eight years, 24 South American nations have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and many of them conduct more trade with China than with any other nation. China has invested tens of billions to replace American influence, and its intervention in the Western Hemisphere is prophesied to culminate in a siege of America.

The National Guard is leaving Chicago, L.A. and Portland: President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he is withdrawing guardsmen from the three cities. This comes after the Supreme Court declined to overrule lower court injunctions against the deployments and “despite the fact that crime has been greatly reduced by having these great patriots in those cities,” the president wrote. His social media post said it’s only a question of time before crime spikes again and he redeploys the National Guard. Despite this legal setback, expect the president’s sway over the Supreme Court to grow.

Drug use pushing British and Welsh medical centers toward breaking point: Since 2015, the number of Britons and Welsh who admitted to using ketamine in the past month increased 252 percent, the Guardian reported Tuesday, the largest increase in the usage of any drug during that time, and a burden on hospitals. Ketamine, created to relieve pain and sedate, is increasingly being used recreationally. Alison Downey, a consultant urologist in South Yorkshire, said, “We’re already stretched really thin as it is, and it’s been a massive increase that we’re just not equipped for.” The rise of recreational drug use will have devastating consequences.