[Q&A] Political Predictions Repository

Want to make your mark and be GWJ famous?

This is a place to deposit political predictions you'd like to make in public, so that they can be easily found and referenced in the future. Thus, it is not a discussion thread; discussions of predictions should take place in other threads as conversations proceed. Explicit clarification questions and answers are fine, but "Why do you think that?" expositions should occur elsewhere so as not to clutter the repository. Predictions should be narrowly defined; testable with publicly available information at all times; have an explicit date range; and refer to events, people and places explicitly so as to leave no doubt of resolution; and they should be numbered sequentially so that they are easier to find at later dates. Edits must be clearly marked and original text preserved through the use of strike-throughs if the prediction is modified. Please avoid the use of generalities - "The President will change his mind on this topic" is less useful than "The President will change his policy from yes to no on this topic", because the latter prevents a tiny change from being claimed as success. Failed predictions should be marked in bold at the top of the post via an edit, leaving the rest intact.

Things are moving fast enough now I'll make a medium safe prediction: at least one senior official within the Trump administration resigns before June 1st. Several more follow before July 1st.

By 2020, we'll be looking at President Hatch, as the line of succession is tainted at least through Paul Ryan.

Special Counsel Mueller dies of polonium poisoning.

House Republicans chalk it up to a tragic accident.

Putin's White House meeting and transcript actually turns out to be ransomware. 87% of Congress is infected within minutes of the Kremlin emailing it out.

Most major media outlets are uninfected except for, randomly, the Chicago Sun.

Alt right and neo nazi sites immediately create another absurd anti-Obama conspiracy based solely on that fact.

Paleocon wrote:

Special Counsel Mueller dies of polonium poisoning.

House Republicans chalk it up to a tragic accident.

No. Hillary left that polonium lying around. Murder charges are filed, judge laughs.

Reaper81 wrote:

Putin's White House meeting and transcript actually turns out to be ransomware. 87% of Congress is infected within minutes of the Kremlin emailing it out.

Most major media outlets are uninfected except for, randomly, the Chicago Sun.

Alt right and neo nazi sites immediately create another absurd anti-Obama conspiracy based solely on that fact.

Brilliant and scarily plausible. I wouldn't be surprised if Russia has already infected all of those computers, and just adds the ransomware on top just for funsies.

"Wow... Your American cyber security really needs work, doesn't it? We know some people who could help... Nice national Internet you've got there, shame if anything happened to it..."

Jolly Bill wrote:

Things are moving fast enough now I'll make a medium safe prediction: at least one senior official within the Trump administration resigns before June 1st. Several more follow before July 1st.

Proven correct on the first half of my prediction, with just 2 days left!

Mike Dubke, President Donald Trump’s communications director, has resigned

In an odd twist of coincidence, although the news only broke this morning he apparently resigned back on May 18th... the same day I made the prediction. Wild. I'm guessing they begged him to hang on through the end of the foreign trip rather than resign during the height of the Comey firing aftermath.

Edit: This part surprised me as well.

In a notoriously leak-prone White House, Dubke told POLITICO he was surprised that the news of his planned departure took 12 days to leak out.

Very nice Bill!

A terrorist attack, inspired by Daesh, will happen within the next year. It will be of a Paris/Brussels/Nice scale. At first, Trump manages to stay composed and his approval ratings will go up. He doesn't manage to keep playing the role of uniting figure though. A few days later the told-you-so and liberal-blaming tweets will spitfire from his phone. People look for a powerful leader, a role Trump spent a career on faking to perfection, but not a divisive petty man-child. His ratings start plummeting again, as he misses a unique opportunity to finally grow his base beyond the cray-craycists.

Meanwhile his administration fails to copy the strategic brilliance of the Bush Jr era. No emphatic President for all Americans this time, backed by a savvy government who maximized the momentum to push their agenda: the Patriot Act, all culminating in the Iraq War. The sheer incompetence of the Trump administration will make sure nothing substantial actually goes to Congress. This widens the rift with the GOP brass, who are waiting for anything to score political points.

When the dust settles after a few weeks/months, more evidence starts cropping up that the Trump administration failed to prevent the attack. The many vacancies in the DoJ, the infighting that caused people to withhold intel, foreign intelligence agencies fearing to share intel because Trump can't help tweeting, ...

His ratings drop even further, but unfortunately his rabid supporters become even more fanatic. It's all fake news, the fault of liberals, etc. Hate crimes coalesce into riots, crossing the threshold for the police. They couldn't care less about the affected minorities of course, but their monopoly on violence stays sacred. People start dying, Trump and the GOP's reaction is that they understand the frustrations and that the left brought this upon themselves. I honestly have no prediction on how that will or will not escalate.

Yonder wrote:

I suspect that within the next year the White House Press Conference will look quite a bit different. At the most extreme the tradition will be abolished, but more likely I think that some long-time members will be disinvited (even big players like CNN are possible) and some ridiculous alt-right replacements will be made.

Alright I'm officially calling this one for me. I know that I was broad with this prediction, but I think it's completely fair to say that the WH Press Conferences look "quite a bit different" now than they did in 2016.

That's one small step for Yonder, one giant leap backwards for the United States.

I remember reading a BBC article a few years ago with something I thought would happen. It's basically that within the next 100 years America will split into 2 nations. I think it's fair to see from the fact Trump actually got elected (despite getting fewer votes) that there is a big split in ideology in the country. It's so big, diverse and populated that it's hard to see it carrying on with such dysfunctional governments that struggle to get many laws over the line.

Jolly Bill wrote:
Jolly Bill wrote:

Things are moving fast enough now I'll make a medium safe prediction: at least one senior official within the Trump administration resigns before June 1st. Several more follow before July 1st.

Proven correct on the first half of my prediction, with just 2 days left!

Mike Dubke, President Donald Trump’s communications director, has resigned

In an odd twist of coincidence, although the news only broke this morning he apparently resigned back on May 18th... the same day I made the prediction. Wild. I'm guessing they begged him to hang on through the end of the foreign trip rather than resign during the height of the Comey firing aftermath.

Edit: This part surprised me as well.

In a notoriously leak-prone White House, Dubke told POLITICO he was surprised that the news of his planned departure took 12 days to leak out.

So the second half of my prediction has been less successful. A number of officials and advisory positions have resigned, but none of them senior enough to count for the spirit of my prediction. Here we are in late July, with a Sean Spicer resignation. Still curious to see what will follow and if we get to "several more" in the next few weeks.

future 45 wrote:

Now over the last 3 years, with your help, we've done just the best job of Making America Great Again, THE BEST. We can't risk those filthy dems trying to steal another election, we saw what happened in 2016, we saw what happened in 2018 - no more! The only way to keep this going, making America EVEN GREATER, to KEEP WINNING, is for me to become your new supreme overlord.

I don't know what number I am on, should have used a Google doc.

I know this is a long way out, so try not to forget it.

In 2030, after an American equivalent of the Reichstag Fire when Trump declares a permanent State of Emergency and martial law, Trump will still be holding rallies, and he will still be crowing about winning the 2016 election, and the latest, updated election results map.

hmm, in 2030 , 45 would be turning 84, or 2-3 years past the life expectancy for an American male of his generation, so I guess the optimists would be hoping the actuarial tables play out soon.

krev82 wrote:

hmm, in 2030 , 45 would be turning 84, or 2-3 years past the life expectancy for an American male of his generation, so I guess the optimists would be hoping the actuarial tables play out soon.

Only the good die young.

11.1 By the end of his presidency--between the wars, natural disasters with failed responses, etc.--Trump will be directly or indirectly responsible for a higher death toll than George W. Bush was.

12.1 By the end of 2018, we will discover that Donald has paid off at least a dozen women in connection with either sexual assault cases or to hide other sexual activities.

Looks like my "no more than a year and out" prediction is gonna fail.

Robear wrote:

Looks like my "no more than a year and out" prediction is gonna fail.

That's what you get for underestimating the corruption and general ambivalence of the republican party.

Yep. Can't deny that, OilyP.

Now that we're coming up on one year of 45 in office, I figured I'd revisit my predictions.

1) Years of underinvestment in US infrastructure will lead to a large-casualty (>100) incident within the next 18 months.

The Oroville Dam almost giving way is the closest we've come so far, and I'm far happier to have people safe than to have been proven right.

2) The US will withdraw from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the end of the calendar year, citing the threat posed by China.

Definitely a miss.

3) The US will detonate at least one nuclear weapon within the next 18 months.

Our erratic administration's approach to North Korea makes me think we're not out of the woods on this one.

4) The US will be caught deploying special forces within Mexico's borders within the next four years, as friction from building the Wall (and arguments about payment) increases.

The pretense that Mexico will be paying for it seems to have fallen by the wayside nearly without notice, as evidenced by the GOP's willingness to hold DACA actions hostage over appropriating money to begin construction.

5) The US will be involved in at least one new war in East Asia within the next two years.

As with 3, North Korea seems the most likely lightning-rod here.

6) Trump will not be in compliance with the Emoluments Clause for the entirety of his term in office.

This feels like a slam dunk, though the recent lawsuits filed by the Maryland & DC Attorneys General might lead to consequences before 45 can be removed from office.

7) Trump and Pence will not both be on the Republican ticket next electoral cycle.

This still feels likely, at this point.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Now that we're coming up on one year of 45 in office, I figured I'd revisit my predictions.

1) Years of underinvestment in US infrastructure will lead to a large-casualty (>100) incident within the next 18 months.

The Oroville Dam almost giving way is the closest we've come so far, and I'm far happier to have people safe than to have been proven right.

Pretty sure Puerto Rico would disagree, though underinvestment in infrastructure is a lesser factor than crony capitalism in the hurricane's aftermath.

Fair point.

What's happened in Puerto Rico is shameful, and the unwillingness to spend meaningfully on relief and infrastructure rebuilding (instead of simply lining the pockets of political allies) has caused large amounts of suffering, but I didn't count my prediction as accurate because it was specifically about disasters resulting from inadequate infrastructure spending ahead of time.

In part, this reflects a failure of imagination on my part - I really could not conceive of the US utterly failing to provide aid in the aftermath of a natural disaster on the scale that has happened (and is still happening) in Puerto Rico.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

I didn't count my prediction as accurate because it was specifically about disasters resulting from inadequate infrastructure spending ahead of time.

It's hard to say how accurate it is, because this administration is filled with compulsive liars, but certainly they have been claiming that much of the damage to Puerto Rico was due to neglected infrastructure that didn't withstand the storms as well as it should have.

I think Puerto Rico definitely qualifies as inadequate infrastructure spending ahead of time. Service outages and other problems were already common - in September 2016 a transformer fire knocked out power to half the island and took a week to fix. PREPA was far behind on maintenance, had just gone through bankruptcy, was(is) billions in debt, and hadn't invested in any upgrades for decades. It also lost nearly half of its trained workforce over the last five years due to migration and poor work conditions. Finally, there have been numerous changes in leadership, and the utility is currently embroiled in a legal and political control battle with the Energy Commission.

We might disagree on what the solution should be, but there is absolutely no question that the state of PREPA going into Maria was a disaster waiting to happen.

I stand corrected, and will reluctantly chalk that prediction up as accurate.

oilypenguin wrote:
Robear wrote:

Looks like my "no more than a year and out" prediction is gonna fail.

That's what you get for underestimating the corruption and general ambivalence of the republican party.

Credit where it's due: the left has also demonstrated a remarkable enthusiasm for eating its own. The collapse of the opposition into disorganized, petty, squabbling factions and seemingly endless litmus testing has been remarkable to watch. Any movement that would have ousted Trump sooner was smoothered in its crib and torn to pieces.

13.1 When Muller's investigation of the administration makes charges public, they will include something out of left field (so something other than just obstruction of justice and collusion) and provide evidence of crimes other than those connected to the Russian interference in the election.

13.2 Despite clear evidence of this, Congress will do nothing. And the Republicans, especially, will defend the president.