9 November 2024
Well, the US election happened Tuesday, 5 November, and Trump actually won the popular vote and the electoral college and both houses of congress. His first victory. Wow. As you know from reading my stuff I am a firm believer in democracy. It is a messy system of government that takes constant honing, negotiation, disagreement, and compromise. Unfortunately, starting back in the 80s and some would say the 70s with the Powell Memo and changes, post Watergate, of campaign financing laws, the republican party no longer does any of the needed honing, negotiation, or compromise. They are all about blame, not solutions. More to the point, democracy has voters. There is no education requirement and nothing to stop voters from choosing based on skin color, gender, lack of information about the economy, or lack of any type of information at all. There is nothing stopping people from voting against their own self-interest or voting on one narrow topic (abortion affects .3% of the population, the gay/trans population is around 4%, undocumented immigrants commit less than half the crimes of native the born).
As in 2016 I will make some predictions for a trump administration. The first few I have no doubt will happen, after that the variables become greater and the likelihood more difficult to predict (disclaimers are us).
As in the first trump administration (admin 1) they will pass a massive multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich and corporations (only large corporations of course). This is the only thing they accomplished in his first term, so this is easy to predict. They will greatly cut the capital gains tax rate ushering in a surge in the stock market that will drop in 2025 so the rich can take advantage of the coming rate cut.
The project 2025 plan is to gut the bureaucracy. A right-wing hope from the 70s to gut the regulatory state. The parts that remain will be filled with right-wing worshipers vetted by the heritage foundation. This will have devastating effects on normal life and the economy. E.g. the national weather service will be given over to profit organizations. They tried this in admin 1 but it did not work. The result of this will be airline fees rising as they have to pay for what is now free weather reporting. Deaths will result as the national weather service is what predicts hurricanes and tornadoes and warns the population for free, this will cease. Your phone service charges will rise as the GPS system is not offered by the government for free but will become a profit center and google and apple will have to pay for your map service on your phone. That is just two of several departments that will be changed. The subsequent millions of public employees who are laid off will increase unemployment and help to devastate the economy.
Some departments will cease altogether. The EPA and Dept. of Education to name two favorites of the right. For the EPA, this is a right-wing, large business goal since Nixon created it in the 70s. The effect will take years to be obvious. Those of us who remember the 60s and 70s will know what a disaster this will be. Project 2025 has more on deregulation, the supreme court is all in for this idea. This will show up faster as they eliminate food and water safety requirements (just ask Flint Michigan what this is like). This will affect republican states most since democratic states will make their own state regulations until large companies move, or threaten to move, out of the state.
They will eliminate the Dept. of Education. This will allow for essentially segregated schools by eliminating major federal funding for poor neighborhood schools. Republican states will shift public money to private schools. Although this exists in Canada and works fine, those private schools have to follow all the British Columbia Ministry of Education standards in order to keep funding. This won’t be the case in the US. Other items that will cease to exist in schools are requirements for disabled access as these programs are promoted by offering federal money for compliance and disabled children will also loose supports in their classroom education, again supplemented by the Dept. of Education for compliant schools.
Show trials will begin in June. This may only be senate and house hearings instead of actual trials (remember Benghazi?). The list will include Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Raskin, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson (especially her since she is a very intelligent black woman). The latter two so trump can put Eileen Cannon on the court as a reward. The supreme court literally sanctioned “sham” investigations when they gave trump immunity as president in trump v US.
IRS funding will be cut, it will go back to only investigating poor people as it did under Bush. It will also begin to investigate trump’s enemies list which will most likely include media people who spoke against him and any person or corporate owner who spoke against him. Any political enemy or organization will be audited.
By September the price of groceries will skyrocket. Food will remain rotting in the fields as immigrants will be, as in admin 1, afraid to go to work picking your food. Other costs will rise because immigrants and their families, legal or illegal, will be deported (construction workers, janitors, etc.). Brown people will be afraid of being caught, imprisoned/detained in concentration camps, and deported. Trump claims 10 to 20 million brown people will be removed. He and Vance suggested this may be violent. They said they will make a special force to do these deportations (ala the nazi brown shirts and SS). Guaranteed they will not be discerning between citizens and illegal immigrants. They will take anyone who is brown—except Vance’s wife of course.
The detainment and deportation will bring protests like it did with the Muslim ban in admin 1. This time the trump administration will use the Insurrection Act to put down protesting and will get violent and put protestors in jail. They will expand this to curtail any free speech that criticizes trump.
And the kicker of them all is the 25th amendment. It is possible this should be at the bottom, but I think trump is too stupid, too lazy, too flaky, too disorganized in thought and speech, for the project 2025 authors who will be doing all the work to not go here to stay in power forever.
The prediction: Within the next two years trump’s cabinet will invoke section 4 of the 25th amendment and remove trump from office replacing him with JD Vance. Why? Vance is a true believer in project 2025 and the fascist states of America with him as dictator. Trump does not want to actually do work and knew the project 2025 authors would do all the work for him. And trump, as demonstrated in the final days of the campaign, is quite old and nuts. I suspect trump will get a large payout from congress in the process.
Some of the rest of these may be prevented or watered down if project 2025 authors are able to see the negative consequences of their actions and distract trump from their implementation. That is a big if!
Media will begin to change to Trumpian messages. Keep in mind, there is no media bias. Media sells advertising (the news is what happens between the ads) and if trump follows through with jerking licenses for outlets that reported negative news about him, as he stated many times, the outlets will change their message to stay off his radar, keep their licenses, and keep their ad revenue. (Why did Bezos not have the Washington Post endorse Harris?). Fake news will be the only news.
Childhood pandemics of disease will begin due to elimination of vaccinations in public schools in republican controlled states. Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, etc. will all return with a vengeance. And they will all wonder why……
Trump will implement his 10 to 20% tariff plan. The cost of clothes, phones, cars, replacement parts for almost everything will rise by 10 to 20% since tariffs are charged to the exporting company who raise the price of the product and then is added to the purchase price by the importing company so consumers pay it in the end. This happened in admin 1 where the money the government got was then paid to farmers in order to offset the negative effect of the tariff. A little deeper here: the tariffs created a trade war; American farmers who are large scale food exporters were blocked from exporting because of retaliatory tariffs by food importing countries; American farmers could not beat world prices and so lost money; Admin 1 paid the money from tariffs to American farmers to offset the fact they could not export their product because of the tariff trade war started by trump in admin 1. American wheat exports will end when the trade war begins, farmers will suffer like in admin1. It is possible that pressure from corporate farming companies will prevent this and many other tariffs making trump solutions non-existent. Other affected areas will be housing costs, much of construction materials are processed abroad and shipped to the US, thus subject to tariffs. Clothes will all rise by 10 to 20% since very few, if any, clothes are manufactured in the US. Corporations will begin to move offshore again. Biden actually brought many back through the CHIPS act but they will need to leave again as the trade war begins from trump tariffs. Companies will need to move offshore to be able to ship their products to other countries outside the tariff trade war. This will also affect Canadian companies as most of the products sold in Canada are imported from the US. Even if Canada has lower tariffs imposed by trump other countries will hurt Canada to not benefit trump.
There will be a national abortion ban with no exceptions. This one is problematic since abortion is wanted by more than 60% of the population and congressional members must know that. Although republicans prove over and over, they cannot think of the consequences of their actions. There is the argument that adoption will solve the problem of unwanted pregnancy once abortion is eliminated. About a million kids per year will be added to social services which, being socialist, will be cut by the new trump administration. The system, as it is now, cannot handle the number of kids, so add one million more per year and think of the result. Abortion is very complicated on an actual human scale. Just banning abortion is the least thought-out solution. Within four years there will be a lot of scandals with social services. The system is already overwhelmed. Adding a million more to it, annually, will create so many shortages in personnel that predators will become foster parents and social workers for lack of staff, lack of vetting, and sheer desperation for personnel.
Ukraine: trump will get out of NATO; he will probably send military aide to Putin because Putin will ask. Ukraine will keep on fighting even with the enormous pressure from the two most powerful armies in the world. Little countries can beat big ones (Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Finland all did it). With trump aid to Putin he will invade other countries, Finland because Finland was Russian for a long time, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will all be on Putin’s list and trump already said about Putin, ‘he can do whatever the hell he wants.’
Trump will give massive military aide to Netanyahu. Bibi will then invade Gaza and Lebanon and annex them. He will stay in power and Israel will cease to be a democracy as it too is on the edge with Netanyahu.
Those are some of the predictions. I know I can think of more stuff. All are based on project 2025 and trump and Vance’s statements. We will see, in two or so years I will take this out and see how close I was.
Hark 