37 Predictions From 2016
Donald Trump was elected President on November 8, 2016. Virtually nobody, including Trump, expected that he would win. I wished he hadn’t won then, and I still feel that way.
The next day I wrote a rather long post on Facebook, listing my predictions for what would happen during his first term.
The list had three broad categories: Things I was confident would happen, things I think might come true, and pure speculation. This story is an on-going summary of how I scored.
I’ve copied each of the 37 predictions I made in November of 2016 to this story, below. Each original prediction that I made is quoted in italics, unedited. Following each prediction is “live” commentary I have added from time-to-time on how that prediction was playing out.
Keep in mind as you read this, that I commented on these predictions “in the moment” over the last four years. The “tense” of what’s written may reflect reality in 2017 or 2018 or whatever, without the hindsight of what we know now.
In mid-January 2021 as his term was winding down, I came back and issued a verdict for each prediction on a scale of one to five. 1-out-of-5 means I was totally wrong and five-out-of-five means I was basically completely accurate. Yes, the scoring is a bit subjective, but it is what it is.
TL/DR: My predictions were about 75% accurate.
See the very bottom of this story for a summary of the scores.
Note: Some of the embedded links/pictures may be dead. Notably, as of January 2021 embedded Tweets from Donald Trump’s personal account aren’t resolving because he got perma-banned from Twitter. I’m keeping the links in there in case they ever come back.
Things I was confident in
1. Economic Recession
In November of 2020 we will be emerging from, or still in, a global recession brought on by unnecessary and destructive trade wars, policy volatility, tax cuts, irresponsible deregulation, and general economic mismanagement. The recession will be serious and drawn out, but not as destructive as what happened in 2008. The recovery will be especially weak, because Republicans were unwilling to spend money to jump-start the economy.
The stage is being set:
- Deregulation has begun in earnest.
- A foolish tax-cut was passed.
Some share my prediction that the next recession will be pretty bad, for the same reasons I cite.
In 2018, many economists are predicting a recession by 2020.
Verdict: 4/5
By mid-2020 we were in a full-on recession, due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s foolish tax cuts and trade wars didn’t help and made “real” economic indicators weak, but the core reason for the recession was not exactly what I (or anyone) predicted. Still, the mismanagement of the economy before the pandemic and the catastrophically bad handling of the pandemic by the federal government has made the resulting recession significantly worse than it needed to be.
2. Wall along the Mexican Border
There will not be a 30' tall wall along the length of the US-Mexican border that has been paid for by Mexico. At most, there will be a relatively small wall built for show and Mexicans will have “paid” for it only via tariffs, which ultimately will have been passed on to American consumers. The Trump administration will instead try to spin the idea of high-tech border surveillance and more border agents as the “real” wall. In either case, the real or virtual wall will be only marginally more effective than what we have now.
Almost immediately, Trump backed off the promise that Mexico will outright pay for this wall. He’s asked Congress for money for the wall. He more-or-less admitted it was always a ploy in a phone call with the Mexican President. Now it will supposedly be funded by American taxpayers and Mexico will pay for it “eventually” via tariffs or import tax, which, of course, will be passed on to American consumers. Congratulations taxpayers, you get to pay twice for the wall that you don’t want.
A prototype of the wall is supposedly being built in September 2017, but I’ve not seen any actual evidence of that.
Just about a year after being elected, there are already signs that a real, physical wall may not be constructed along the entirety of the US-Mexican border. Rather a “virtual” wall and bureaucratic obstacles will be used to reduce illegal immigration.
In January of 2018, small prototypes of the wall were on display in San Diego. Additionally, Trump asked Congress for $18 billion to build the wall in a section of the south-west border.
Just before the one-year mark of the Trump administration, Kellyanne Conway is walking back Trump’s promise for a full-border wall. Apparently, the totally not narcissistic self-declared stable genius “discovered” that we don’t need a wall for the entire border and can make due with a combination of a wall, better technology, and fencing. And mountains and rivers.
“After conferring with the experts who are involved in this process, Christopher, the president has discovered that part of it, he knows, will be the physical wall, part of it is better technology, part of it is also fencing.” -Kellyanne Conway
Verdict: 5/5
By the time of the election, very little “new” wall had been constructed and Mexico had paid exactly $0.00 for it.
3. Deportation
There will have been a short-lived, violent, relatively ineffective attempt at rounding up and deporting undocumented aliens. Only a small percentage of the alien population will actually be deported. If anything, the collapse of the economy will have done more to get immigrants to return home than any deportation program could ever do. The optics of armed, pseudo-military garbed ICE agents forcibly rounding up migrant families in the middle of the night will go over like a lead balloon. Think millions of Elián Gonzálezes.
Deportations are being pursued more vigorously than before, and Trump has wavered on DACA. However, there’s no substantial pushback on deportation. Yet.
Immigration officials detained and threatened to deport a 10-year-old girl with Cerebral Palsy who was in a hospital where she was recovering from emergency surgery. It did not go over well.
It took a while, but ICE started rounding people up en masse and separating children from their parents. The children were moved into shelters/detention centers. Children being kept in secretive, over-crowded detention centers that are adorned with cult-of-personality propaganda proved naked
Verdict: 4/5
Not only did Trump fail to deport nearly as many undocumented aliens as he claimed he would, but his “border cage” policy was also wildly unpopular. Putting separated children in cages was terrible optics. Somehow he handled this so poorly it upset both the left and the right.
4. Tax Cuts
Massive tax-cuts, aimed at the rich and corporations, will initially be popular but will, like the Bush tax-cuts before them, fail to jolt the economy and will add tremendously to the deficit and debt. The Republican Congress and Trump administration will call every tax cut “revenue neutral” by using some tortured resurrection of trickle-down economic theory that never quite seems to work out.
At the end of 2017, a tax cut aimed at the rich and corporations was passed. So, I was right about that. It is deeply unpopular, so I was wrong about that part.
Naturally, the Treasury Department released a one-page (!!!) “study” of the tax cut that claims it will be revenue neutral because the economy is going to grow at an “optimistic” rate that must be sustained for 10 years running. That optimistic rate is about 30% higher than most other serious studies predict. Because…. magic.
Verdict: 5/5
Tax cuts aimed at primarily the rich? Check
Tax cuts failed to stimulate the economy broadly? Check
Exploding debt and deficit? Check
5. Economic Growth
The economy will have never hit sustained 4% growth.
Verdict: 5/5
It wasn’t even close. Even before COVID hit.
6. Repealing Obamacare
ACA will have been repealed or largely dismantled with nothing equivalent in its place. A larger percentage of people will be uninsured than what we currently have. The Republicans will go through the motions of saying they’re in the process of replacing it, but nothing substantial will ever materialize.
The Republicans in Congress have tried numerous times to repeal the ACA, but thus far it seems that they’re all bark and no bite. They can’t come up with a plan that doesn’t result in millions of people losing coverage, increased premiums, and (at least) tens of thousands of people dying prematurely.
- Better Care Reconciliation Act Leaves 22 Million Uninsured By 2026. Defeated 43–57.
- Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act of 2017 would add about 17 million people to the uninsured pool and raise premiums by 25%. Defeated 45–55.
- Health Care Freedom Act of 2017 (a.k.a. ‘Skinny Repeal’) shot down by one vote. Defeated 49–51.
- Graham-Cassidy in September 2017, killed before it came to a vote.
- The individual mandate was repealed in the hacked-together tax bill passed in 2017. PPACA is still standing, but this repeal hobbles it. The coming spike in premiums and the uninsured (It’s estimated that 13 million people will loose health insurance) can’t be good news for anyone.
- The Justice Department doesn’t want to defend protections in the PPACA guaranteeing people with pre-existing conditions can’t be denied health insurance.
Verdict: 3/5
I’m glad to say that I was wrong in predicting that Obamacare would be largely dismantled or repealed. While efforts are still ongoing, it seems unlikely that PPACA is going away, thankfully. I was right that Trump, and the GOP on the whole, would claim to be proposing a replacement that would fail to materialize.
7. Restoring Manufacturing Jobs
Manufacturing jobs will not have come-back from overseas because they didn’t go overseas. Those jobs were automated away. The government won’t pass laws that tell businesses that they aren’t allowed to replace semi-skilled labor with software and robots.
When you can’t keep people from quitting your American Manufactures Council during the first six months of your term, it’s probably not a good sign that those jobs are coming back.
There is a lot of evidence that automation is replacing manufacturing/blue-collar jobs at an increased pace.
- Robots replacing unreliable humans in Wisconsin
- Bricklaying robot outpaces humans
- The New York Times’ online commenting curator/moderator is being replaced by an AI.
- The automation news getting the most press, by far, is the prediction that millions of professional drivers (e.g. truckers, cabbies, delivery-drivers, etc.) will lose their jobs to autonomous vehicles. I suspect that the predictions are wrong in how fast the change will happen and how disruptive it will be. There will still be plenty of professional human drivers 10 years from now.
Verdict: 5/5
Even before the pandemic, manufacturing was bleeding jobs. By 2029, it’s predicted we’ll lose 444,800 jobs in that sector, even though net productivity is rising, due to automation.
8. Climate Change
We will have experienced (at least) two more of the hottest years on record. We still won’t be converting our energy production to something sane quickly enough.
Quitting the Paris Climate Agreement is not a good sign.
From NOAA’s Global Climate Report in September 2017: “September 2017 also marks the 41st consecutive September and the 393rd consecutive month with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average.” Think about that, every month since January 1984 has been warmer than the 20th-century average.
And, of course, Trump tweeted that a cold-snap in the winter means that we should want Global Warming.
Verdict: 5/5
The world’s seven hottest years on record have all occurred since 2014. Can we please start to take this seriously and act? Please?
9. Trump’s Approval Ratings
Donald Trump’s approval will have wavered mostly between 25% and 45%. If the economy really tanks, it could go lower.
His polls are really terrible so far.
Trump came in second place to Obama as the most admired person. A year after Trump was elected. Ouch.
Verdict: 5/5
Trump’s approval was remarkably stable in the high-30s to mid-40s and it cratered at the end of his term.
10. Democratic Nominee in 2020
If the Democrats nominate a person who is both charismatic (Hillary wasn’t) and obviously competent (Hillary was) they will win the White House in 2020. If this happens, the 2020 election will transfer control of the Senate back to Democrats as well.
This thought-exercise from late 2017 regarding possible Democratic nominees has a lot more (really old) chaff than wheat. Ugh. Still, anyone on this list would be a far better choice than what we have now.
Verdict: 5/5
Joe Biden is very charismatic and pragmatically competent, even if he may not have not always been super transformative. Still, this election was closer than I thought it would be. Moreover, the GOP has followed Trump over the cliff (mostly) and the Democrats have (barely) won back the Senate and kept the House. I’m glad the Democrats eeked out a win, but it should have been a vicious curb-stomping of the GOP.
11. Republican Platform is Unchanging
The Republicans will double-down on what worked in 2014 and 2016 and will not make accommodations to their policies to reflect a changing society.
Verdict: 5/5
The GOP didn’t even pretend. They literally didn’t present a platform at their 2020 convention. That is insane.
12. Balkanized News Media
The 24 hour news cycle in general, and cable news channels specifically, will not have made any meaningful changes. Media outlets will still be ideologically segmented and Balkanized; consequentially people will still consume media that confirms their pre-held beliefs.
Verdict: 5/5
If anything things have gotten worse. Trump turned on Fox News and other right-leaning outlets (e.g. Drudge) when they occasionally told the truth that he didn’t want to hear. OAN and NewsMax, extreme far-right outlets that are little more than Trump/GOP propaganda machines are ascending. CNN seemed to grow a bit more overtly anti-Trump over the last four years.
What I didn’t predict was how social media would both exacerbate and broaden the problem.
13. Fake News and Fact-Checking
Internet/algorithmic based news outlets will figure out ways to inject fact-checking into news media in a useful way. There will be ideologues on both sides that introduce distrust of fact-checking veracity. Even so, this fact checking ability will give these digital news media outlets an aura of legitimacy that threatens television.
One thing I didn’t really see coming was the backlash from the government towards Social Media for allowing fake news to be injected via advertising. Facebook didn’t see this coming either, apparently. #ffff00 journalism.
NewsGuard, a start-up announced in November 2017, will use dozens of humans (journalists even!) to rate news stories for trustworthiness. It will be interesting to see if this sort of approach gains traction, and if it does, if it is scalable. I’d also imagine that this approach might find itself in a never-ending series of lawsuits. If NewsGuard rates a bunch of stories from some website as fake/untrustworthy, will the website sue? My suspicion is that a better approach would be some sort of crowd-sourced system with inlined, live rating system. Imagine an icon associated with news stories linked on Facebook and Twitter that indicates the trustworthiness and fact-check status of the story and/or provider.
Facebook, Google and others are trying to figure out how to incorporate “trust indicators” into some content.
And…. not long after Facebook added “trust indicators” to linked news stories, they’re removing the feature. Instead, they’re automatically adding links to related stories, perhaps exposing users to multiple facets of a particular story.
Google has added a very innocuous side-bar on search results for media outlets as a low-friction method of indicating the trustworthiness of news outlets. This data, added only to sites that third-party factchecking sites have frequently cited as false, is only attached to websites and not to specific stories. Still, some conservatives are in a twist over this because they feel like they’re being disproportionately called out…. Shoot the bearer of bad news. :)
Verdict: 2/5
Television and radio have struggled to fact-check in real-time. Social media has fared slightly better, but until the Jan 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol (a phrase I couldn’t have predicted I’d be writing in 2016) social media was reticent to challenge lies. There have been some efforts to label untruthful “news” as such, but full-throated banning and purging at scale didn’t really begin in earnest until after the election.
14. Trump’s Cabinet
Trump has a cabinet largely populated by second-stringers and erstwhile has-beens because 1) Trump’s id can’t handle being challenged by competent adults so he’ll surround himself with sycophants and betas 2) He can’t attract legitimate talent for the same reasons he lacked/lost endorsements in 2016 3) He has a managerial style wholly unsuited for government. This team of inexperienced and incompetent buffoons causes his administration make a large number of amateurish mistakes and unforced errors which in turn makes it initially very ineffective. This gives the few “adults” in the administration disproportionate power. (Chief-of-Staff Gingrich will wield the real power?) This also empowers Congress to dictate the details of most every bill. The Trump Administration will learn how to maneuver at least somewhat effectively after a very rough start, but they will only appear professional when graded on a curve.
Seems to be mostly true. Nobody wants to work for him. Trump cannot fill 100’s of posts in his administration.
Moreover, those that do come work for him report he’s an abusive, demoralizing boss and many don’t last long.
- Trump called his Attorney General an ‘idiot’ to his face because he recused himself from an investigation.
- John Kelley won’t tolerate Tump’s abuse again.
- Anthony Scaramucci lasted 10 days in the administration and caused beleaguered Press Secretary Sean Spicer to quit.
- Steve Bannon quit or was fired. Does it really matter which?
- 46 U.S. Attorneys were forced to resign, which seems like it should have been a much bigger deal than it was.
- The head of the D.E.A. quit, in part because the President doesn’t understand or respect the law.
- Here’s a list of even more people who left the administration early.
- Rex Tillerson, Trump’s (first) Secretary of State reportedly called Trump a ‘moron’ because of his inability to understand briefing material. Tillerson doesn’t deny doing so.
When there are actual proficient adults in the administration they, unsurprisingly, keep things from going completely sideways. At least for a little while.
Verdict: 5/5
The longer Trump stayed in office and the more unhinged he became, the more difficult time he had attracting and retaining competent adults. He had an astronomically high 85% turnover rate and, well, it shows.
15. Promises Kept From 2016 Campaign
More than half of the outlandish promises Trump made during the 2016 campaign (e.g. a total travel ban on immigrants from “certain” areas of the world) are never followed through on in any meaningful way. When he’s called out on this in 2020, it fails to dissuade his base.
Verdict: 5/5
As of his last week in office, this website finds that only 21 of 174 promises made were achieved.
16. Congressional Investigations into Trump
Despite persistent calls for impeachment from a segment of the population, Trump is never investigated or prosecuted by Congress, as Congress is held by Republicans who don’t want to be primaried by failing an ideological purity test.
Well, Congress isn’t (yet?) investigating Trump, but the Justice Department is. So in one sense, I was wrong. In fact, Trump made one of the dumbest political moves possible when he fired the original investigator looking into Russian meddling in the election and then admitted on national TV that was the reason he fired Comey.
It remains to be seen what the investigation finds, and what actions are taken if indictments are handed down.
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Verdict: 1/5
Trump was impeached twice. Half of all impeachments in the country’s history belong to him. As of this writing, it looks like there’s a decent chance he’ll be convicted by the Senate and may be denied his benefits and barred from running again. I’m glad to have been wrong about this one.
17. Democratic Resistance in Congress
Democrats in Congress put up consistent, but mostly ineffective, roadblocks to Trump’s agenda. Occasionally they offer effective opposition, filibuster, etc., but most of it is for show.
Verdict: 3/5
After winning back the House in 2018, the Democrats provided pretty effective resistance to Trump, impeaching him twice and simply not passing bills to support his agenda. However, he did manage to pack the courts and act unilaterally via Executive Orders.
18. The Resistance
Trump is hounded by protests everywhere he goes in the world for the entire four years, but he never alters his policies because of it.
Day One of the Trump Presidency was met with the Women’s March, which was the largest single-day protest in American History.
Verdict: 3/5
Trump endured pretty consistent protest and pushback, especially after police brutality protests came to head. He never really seemed to care and even tried to exploit bad actors on the left to take a Law-and-Order position in the 2020 election. That backfired pretty badly both before the election and especially after it.
19. Tax Reform
The tax code will not be significantly simplified, but Trump will say it is.
The 2017 Tax Reform and Jobs Act was passed with no Democratic votes and was by all accounts rushed. While the number of tax brackets was reduced, the tax code was not simplified in any meaningful way (in fact it may be more complex and have even more loopholes for the wealthy) and it has the added benefit of adding $1.5 trillion to the debt, eventually raising taxes for 53% of people, hamstringing the PPACA (which may have the ironic side-effect of making more people dependent on government-provided health insurance, so… gg GOP?) removing tools to jump-start the economy during the next recession, and shifting more capital to the wealthiest people.
Verdict: 4/5
The tax code is, if anything, more complex. To his credit (I guess) Trump didn’t make a big deal out of claiming he simplified it.
20. Ted Cruz is Terrible
Ted Cruz will still be the world record holder for douche-bagginess. Everyone, including most members of his immediate family, agrees that he would be immeasurably improved if he would cover himself in dog shit and then run headfirst into a brick wall.
This one is pretty much a gimme.
This interview with Ted Cruz is maybe the most overtly hypocritical thing you’ll ever witness.
Verdict: 5/5
Ted Cruz is possibly the least liked human in the Senate, assuming he’s human. You have to work so hard to be the least liked person in the Senate. It’s a sort of accomplishment.
Things I’m Sorta Confident In
1. Mid-Term Elections
The 2018 mid-term elections will be a bit of a wash. Unless Congress really shits the bed in the next two years (defaults on the debt? Goes back into Iraq or into Iran?) the Senate will probably not go to the Democrats in 2018, as the seats coming up for re-election favor the Republicans, as do most mid-term elections. The House will certainly stay in Republican hands.
As of September 2017, the generic polls show things are looking very good for the Democrats. However, I am not optimistic that 2018 will be very good for the left, due to structural problems in the way we elect Congress.
On the plus side, Democrats did well in 2017 off-cycle elections in Virginia, New Jersey and even won a Senate seat in Alabama (and caused a large number of Trump supporters to side with a credibly accused pedophile, so enjoy that albatross).
Verdict: 2/5
The Senate didn’t switch to the Democrats in 2018, nor did the Republicans hold the House. But the opposite happened, so I’m giving myself 2/5.
2. Trump Drums up a Military Threat
Donald Trump will drum-up some statistically trivial threat into an existential one or pick a fight with some foreign power, probably in the Mid-East, and we’ll be engaged some ongoing mid-grade war. The war will be fought mostly unilaterally. Budget constraints and persistent war-weariness in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan prevent Trump from waging a full on-war.
Trump is drumming up a threat with North Korea, which is so transparently an opportunistic head-fake and, more importantly, pointless. There is no viable military option with a nuclear-armed North Korea that doesn’t result in 100’s of thousands, or even millions, of dead civilians.
Verdict: 1/5
Trump was more of an isolationist than I thought he would be. He talked like a tough guy a few times, nearly bombed Iran once, had an Iranian general assassinated (who, to be fair, was an asshole who deserved it) only to back down after the retaliatory attack against Americans (calling the Americans’ injuries ‘headaches’), and shamefully abandoned allies to be slaughtered. But he didn’t get us involved in a major war.
Ironically, more troops had to be deployed to Washington D.C. to protect the Capitol against further attacks from Trump’s seditious supporters than we have currently stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s a really weird “America First” flex.
3. Balancing the Budget
Congress and the White House won’t even come close to balancing the budget and will very likely not really make any headway in reducing the deficit and debt over the long haul. Any spending cuts will be superficial and temporary and will result in long term debt increases.
The rushed tax reform bill passed at the end of 2017 is expected to increase the debt by about $1.5 trillion.
Verdict: 5/5
This was a gimme. The debt, even before COVID’s mismanagement made things worse, was the highest it has ever been, despite Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the Presidency for the first two years of the Trump administration. Unpaid for tax cuts and a refusal to meaningfully cut spending means debt only had one direction to go.
4. Stacking the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court will be stacked with one to three additional conservative Justices. They will make several “Once-in-a-Lifetime” rulings that prove deeply unpopular. Roe-vs-Wade may be reversed. Gay marriage equality may be rolled back.
Trump came in with one teed up thanks to McConnell’s obstruction.
Verdict: 5/5
Trump “lucked” into appointing three SCOTUS justices, at least one of whom was clearly not qualified. While the remade court hasn’t made any sea-change rulings yet, I’m not optimistic.
5. EPA and Dept. of Education are Ravaged
The EPA and Department of Education will either be entirely disbanded or be rendered so partisan and ineffective that they might as well not exist. Despite calls from the far right of his party to eliminate the IRS, even Trump will realize that it would be virtually impossible to do so.
Sadly, I seem to have been spot-on with this one.
The head of the EPA is a climate-change denier who repeatedly sued the EPA when he was Attorney General of Oklahoma. He’s seems most interested in rolling back regulations and making sure we burn more fermented dinosaurs. Of course the Trump administration took down references to anthropocentric climate change on federal websites and cut related funding.
The head of the Department of Education, Betsy Devos, is an ideologue who couldn’t answer very basic questions about education at her confirmation hearing. She is clearly in over hear head and dead-set on dismantling the Dept. of Education.
Verdict: 4/5
Trump’s appointed heads of the EPA and Dept. of Education were complete trainwrecks both. In the waning days of the Trump administration, the EPA finalized a policy limiting the influence science should play in EPA policy. Because why wouldn’t you do that? The agency was being hollowed out, causing long-term career employees who didn’t leave powerless and morale was reportedly at an all-time low.
And it hardly needs mentioning what a useless disaster Betsy DeVos has been.
6. Prosecuting Hillary Clinton
Despite warnings from insiders to not appear like a Banana Republic dictator, Trump follows through on his debate threat and orders the Justice Department to investigate Hillary Clinton’s emails. Again. A superficial investigation is conducted and a lukewarm recommendation for prosecution is issued. It goes nowhere. Hillary is never arrested or tried.
As of November 2017, Trump isn’t actually pursuing prosecuting Hillary Clinton because just talking about it is a useful headfake to divert attention from his own, considerable, impotence.
As 2017 ends, Trump is attempting to divert attention from his own problems (e.g. Russia) by having the FBI and Justice Department look into the Uranium One deal involving Clinton.
At the beginning of 2018, Trump tweeted that the Justice Department should ‘act’ on Comey and Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s advisor should go to jail. You know, like one of those fun Banana Republics.
Verdict: 5/5
Trump, of course, never prosecuted Clinton (or any of the other made-up bogeymen he created) because 1) there wasn’t a case and 2) that would have taken effort.
7. Guantanamo Bay
The Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility will still be active and will hold significantly more prisoners than it holds now. There still will be very few trials of terror suspects being held, and prisoners will continue to be held indefinitely for opaque reasons.
The Trump Administration has said they’d like to refill Guantanamo Bay with more prisoners, but so far there doesn’t seem to be much action behind that intent.
Trump briefly mentioned sending the ISIS wannabe who killed eight people with a truck in Manhattan to Guantanamo Bay, but then quickly walked that idea back.
Verdict: 4/5
Guantanamo Bay is still operating, prisoners are still being held without trials, and there’s no end in sight. On the other hand, it wasn’t significantly expanded. I guess because we didn’t start any new wars there wasn’t a need.
8. Marijuana Criminalization
The Federal government will make some moves to clamp down on states that decriminalize marijuana. They’ll make a few big arrests for show, but won’t stop the states in any practical way. Several (five?) more states will legalize marijuana by 2020.
Unsurprisingly, Jeff Sessions is signaling he’d like to prosecute medical marijuana concerns. I guess State's Rights only counts for the Confederate states.
And in early 2018, the DOJ backtracked the Obama-era policy on marijuana legalizations in the states.
Verdict: 3/5
Trump toed the ridiculous Conservative line about marijuana being a legitimate Class-1 drug, but they didn’t have a sustained campaign going after users or suppliers in states where it’s been decriminalized.
Meanwhile, as predicted, decriminalization at the state level is gaining even more speed.
9. Stagnant Wages
Average wages will continue to fail to keep pace with productivity. Once the economy starts to weaken, the average worker will go back to receiving little to no raise and will have stagnant or decreased purchasing power. Wealth will continue to disproportionately accumulate at the top. We will be inching closer to a more fully realized Second Gilded Age and/or American Bastille Day. Sharpen your pitchfork.
Despite the relatively strong economy at the end of 2017/early 2018, low unemployment, and strong stock markets and corporate profits, wage growth remains stagnant.
Verdict: 4/5
Wages have budged a little bit, especially before the pandemic hit. A tight labor market and some localized increases in minimum wage drove lower-end wage earners take-home. As it seems it always does, most gains went to those at the top. And the pandemic is going to cause wages to stagnate (and in some cases shrink) for years to come.
10. Congress Drives Policy When Trump is Disinterested
Because of the Trump administration’s lack of experience/naivety and inability to dig into the details, Congress will go hog-wild injecting earmarks and cronyism into spending bills. The really egregious ones that the media calls out will get nixed by Trump, but there will be thousands of silly little add-ons that Congress slips in to send tax dollars back home.
To a large degree, Congress is driving policy insofar as Trump can’t be bothered to wallow into the fight and learn the details. Trump doesn’t understand how Congress works. He was unable to evangelize his effort to repeal the ACA because he didn’t understand the basics of the bill.
Congress more-or-less forced Trump to sign a bill with new sanctions against Russia that he clearly didn’t want to sign.
Congress doesn’t seem to be going overboard with earmarks or otherwise creating sloppy bills so far.
Verdict: 2/5
Republican infighting in 2017–2019 resulted in the longest government shut down in history. And when the Congress was split in 2019–2021, very little got done. The House would pass bills and Mitch McConnell would refuse to let them move forward in the Senate. Aside from packing the courts (which didn’t require much from the White House and nothing from the House of Representatives), not much was accomplished by Congress in the last four years.
11. Democratic Ticket Compensation
The Democratic ticket in 2020 will once again have one woman and one man, one of whom will be Latino.
Verdict: 3/5
I got the one man and one woman on the ticket right. I was wrong about either of them being Latino. VP Harris is, obviously, a minority (South Asian and African American).
Things I am just speculating about:
1. Supreme Court Is Sometimes Popular
The Supreme Court will make a few surprising rulings that prove popular with the center and the left. Citizens United may be partially undermined. Perhaps overtly political gerrymandering of Congressional districts will be successfully challenged.
Verdict: 2/5
The SCOTUS hasn’t really made any major rulings yet. I’ll give myself a little bit of a bump because SCOTUS (and some lower courts) consistently ruled against Donald Trump during his ridiculous legal challenges to the 2020 election, which was a bit surprising considering how many judges he appointed.
As I mentioned above, I won’t be surprised if/when SCOTUS makes some major rulings that are major “wins” for the right. Abortion, gay marriage, section 230, etc.
2. The Democrats Shoot Themselves in the Foot. Again.
The Democrats will fail to nominate someone electable in 2020. This would probably be a very intelligent policy wonk who is deeply popular with the base, but lacks the charisma and charm to appeal broadly. Trump gets reelected and with no need to remain popular enough to be reelected in 2024, he goes full President Snow and the crazy gets dialed up to 11. This in turn, make the 2022 mid-term election a routing of the Republicans, as the electorate will be thoroughly disgusted with the incompetence and immorality of a six-year Republican monopoly led by a narcissistic manchild.
Verdict: 2/5
Thankfully I was (mostly) wrong about this. The Democratic primary looked for a while like it might turn into a circular firing squad with ever-escalating purity tests coming from the left. While I really like a lot of his vision, Bernie Sanders might have been a disaster as a nominee if things had gone just a little different. The Democrats, for better or worse, made the safe choice with Biden and they won. That said, they didn’t do quite as well as hoped in the House and at the State level.
3. Republicans Can’t Outrun Demographics
By 2020, the Republicans find that demographics are finally catching up with them. A significant portion of their base are dying of old age making it increasingly difficult to win nationally. They will internalize what this means too late. I thought this was happening in 2016, but I was clearly wrong.
Verdict: 2/5
I think I once again overestimated the deleterious effect aging demographics would have on Republicans. The Electoral College may mitigate the effect of this phenomenon for a while, but I still believe it will happen. Old, white, rural people — who are the GOP base — are dying off much faster than they’re being replaced and the GOP continues, stupidly, to do nothing to widen its appeal. They made some gains with immigrants in 2020, but not enough to move the needle.
It’s only a matter of time before Republicans start labeling actuary tables as “fake news.”
4. China and India are Rising Powers
The infantile trade policies of the Trump Administration will encourage foreign economies to diversify their trading partners at the expense of focusing on the U.S. This will accelerate the rise of China and India as economic powers. China and India won’t really be peers with the U.S. in four years, but they’ll be a lot closer than they would have been otherwise.
After Trump’s first visit to Asia, the perception was that the vacuum being created by America’s retreat/isolationism under Trump will be filled (in part) by China.
About a year after being elected, the perception is that China is open for international business while Trump’s America is self-isolating. And as 2017 ends, Axios writes about a new order with China rising and America retreating.
The Eurasia Group released a list predicting the top-ten risks for 2018. From the introduction of the list:
“The decline of US influence in the world will accelerate in 2018. The mix of soft power and economic and political liberalism faces a crisis of credibility. With little sense of strategic direction from the Trump White House, US global power, used too aggressively by George W. Bush, then too timidly by Barack Obama, is sputtering to a stall.”
The #1 risk: China fills the power and influence vacuum.
China is attracting more international university students as America appears less welcoming.
One year into the Trump administration and one metric of the Edelman Trust Barometer shows a staggering 37% drop in how trusted the U.S. globally while China shoots up 27%. That’s enormous.
In 2018, China is positioning itself to stand against a schizophrenic US policy of trade-wars with China and withdrawal from leadership, even if it means a new type of cold war.
Verdict: 4/5
China is ascendent in virtually every meaningful measure. India is treading water, and America is diminishing in many ways. With Trump leaving, certain aspects of American influence will likely recover if we’re not dumb (that’s a big ‘if’). It seems unlikely that the US can regain its former heft of being the only superpower, or if that’s even a tenable or desirable thing.
5. Military Doesn’t Play Ball
President Trump orders the military to do something that is blatantly illegal (e.g. overt torture, bombing terrorists’ families) that notable parts of the chain-of-command refuse to execute. Some number of senior military officials choose to resign their commissions rather than follow these illegal orders. There’s a decent chance that these incidents are swept under the rug. A court-martial would expose the orders to the light-of-day and that would be bad optics for everyone.
Of course, Trump now denies saying he wanted to kill terrorists’ families, despite him being on tape literally saying “you have to take out their families.”
The DoD, with the backing of courts, pushed back on Trump’s transgender personnel ban and is accepting transgender recruits. While not quite the Constitutional crisis I predicted, this does show the military telling Trump where to stick his unlawful orders.
The President is remarkably unpopular within the military, especially for a Republican.
Verdict: 3/5
The military, thankfully and smartly, mostly stayed apolitical through all of the madness of the last four years. However, the insurrection on January 6th, 2021 did see the Joint Cheifs of Staff issue a letter that basically said that the military would follow the Constitution, that insurrection was intolerable, and perhaps most interestingly, made explicit mention of an incoming President-Elect Biden. I wonder if that last bit was, at least in part, a polite but firm message to Trump that the military would, of course, be taking orders from their soon-to-be new CiC.
Here’s how I scored
On things I was confident about, I scored about 84% of the points I could have.
On things I was sorta confident in, I scored 69%.
On things I was just speculating on, I scored 52%.
Overall, I scored 75% of all the points I could have. Not too bad.
