Four years ago, I made a series of predictions about Trump's first term. A little over halfway into his term, I posted an update. Today I'll finish out the backtesting -- how well did I do in my predictions? To save myself time, if there's no change between my mid-term report and today, I'll only give you the new developments.
"The next four years will be interesting." Ding ding ding ding -- that one was too easy.
Social issues
I was mostly off on this: "I don't think Trump will be as bad as many of my left-leaning friends fear." Technically this turned out to be true only in that it could have been much worse, but it was still pretty bad. Most of my right-leaning friends don't see this, but they also don't want to see it. I, on the other hand can't unsee what I've seen.
LGBT concerns: Pretty much nailed it.
Obamacare: As I mentioned before, Trump and friends failed to come up with a replacement, and healthcare costs are still high. Will it be a disaster with the mandate removed? It's still too soon to tell.
Immigration: It got even worse in the last two years. Many people don't seem to understand that Trump made it much harder to legally enter the United States. Quotas for refugees were drastically reduced. Those with green cards (also known as those who went through the gate legally) were hit with new rules to make it harder to remain in the country (while one of Trump's people ridiculed the Statue of Liberty). H1-B visas have gotten even more scarce. Refugees were treated contrary to the Geneva Refugee Convention, including deporting them back into danger and sometimes death, and permanently separating over a thousand children from their parents -- helping us to really stand out in the world. He did have portions of his Wall built, but not much. It still remains ugly, symbolic, ineffective, and expensive. Mexicans have already demonstrated that they can climb it and still dig under it.
And Mexico never did pay for the wall -- so I got that one right.
Muslims: Nothing new here -- I pretty much got that one right.
Black people: Tensions certainly increased in the last two years, including some highway protests -- so I'll give myself a thumbs-up on that. I still don't see Trump as racist toward black people, just someone who doesn't know how to handle these tensions correctly. He could have easily helped to diffuse many of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, but he ended up exacerbating the tensions -- I think mostly due to incompetence and thinking a ill-executed "Law and Order" campaign would actually work.
Trump as Hitler
I'll give myself a thumbs-up for saying Trump would not turn into Hitler. I still don't see him as evil. Though ... "Trump will usher in a disaster from his ignorance." A big thumbs-up to me. Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding! Can someone say coronavirus? On this topic alone, I could go on and on and on, which I do in this post.
And though "Hitler" never happened, I had no idea that "Putin" would show up big time in Trump during the 2020 elections and how he tried to upend our Constitution in an attempt to maintain power. I chronicle much of what transpired here, but this doesn't include the Capitol riots. Depending on what occurs over the next couple of months, I may dive deeper into this big hoax, but I really don't want to have to do it.
Fake news
When I said Trump would have "zero effect" in silencing his opponents, I was right in that I don't believe any news outlets got in trouble or suffered. On the contrary, they may have flourished. But I was wrong in that Trump did succeed in convincing millions of Americans that reputable news sources really aren't "reputable."
And something I didn't see at all: fringe outlets such as OAN and Newsmax actually got a big boost after Fox News called Arizona for Biden in early November (they were only following the AP). Such a silly thing to get angry about. Move over Fox News, here comes something scarier!
And at the same time Twitter and Facebook made the stupidest mistake of silencing many of my conservative friends by flagging posts and deleting them. This pushed many conservatives to more conservative social media sites such as Parler, thus creating a dangerous confirmation bias environment.
Now I think we're still in a very precarious situation, and much, much, much closer to that strange civil war I keep warning about. Though, Biden becoming president seems to have already helped to diffuse this greatly.
"Perhaps we just need to take away his Twitter account." LOL! I had no idea how prophetic this sentence would turn out to be!
Money
I hit the money on the Federal Reserve (nothing happened -- really). And corporations really are flourishing. Though our deficit took a big hit -- even before coronavirus hit.
Foreign Relations
I was thankfully wrong about: "we will see one, if not two attacks." We have yet to see our next sizable foreign terrorist attack on our soil since 9/11. Though, domestic violence has increased greatly.
I was also wrong about Trump -- big time -- when it came to his big win helping to broker a peace deal in the Middle East -- didn't see that one coming.
Russia again did try to help Trump maintain power, but looks like it failed. Trump losing actually increases the chances of Putin's rival to gain more popularity and perhaps get into power. Russia continues to influence our social media ... big time, and most Americans still continue to fall into their scientifically-generated traps. (More about that later.)
Trump's Gift to Unite
It never happened. Trump never did rise to this call. He proved time and time again that his ability to maintain power was much more important than anything else. He has divided us further. He has made people more angry -- in particular, his base. He has turned himself into an idol -- bigger than his Party even, and sometimes even bigger than God. He has critically weakened the Republican Party, which is now likely to fall and possibly give way to another party.
It has been a very interesting four years. In some respects we may be better off, but in many others I think we are frighteningly worse off. I think my predictions turned out to be reasonable, though I missed a couple of big items.
Up next -- I will do my own forecast of Biden's upcoming four years. I think that task will be more difficult. Heh.
3 comments:
A peculiar blindness to Chinese influence on US media, academia, and social media, and wildly overrating of the effectiveness of Russian efforts. SMH.
Related:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/441837/
True ... Russia isn’t acting alone. And we (the US) are also trying to influence and meddle with the politics of other countries. It’s all inevitable, but luckily it’s up to us to determine how unsuccessful these attempts are on our soil.
Reading through those interesting articles, I think China is overstating their own influence. I don’t think the US needed China to help Trump lose. For example, China may have given us the coronavirus, but it was Trump’s incompetence that allowed it to spread — so it’s only natural that Trump’s blame on China be criticized on its own merits without help from China — though they’d definitely cheer any such criticism. Compare with this: Africa gave the US Ebola in 2014, but no one ever hears about it because of Obama’s fast action.
Russia’s interference (which goal is to weaken and divide us) through automated social media bots is well documented. There even exist databases of tweets and posts that programmers can use for analysis. And Russian is just one source of these bots. And I do believe their attempts have been very successful — but more on that later.
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