16 May 2026
Now we are a year and a half into the trump administration. An unmitigated disaster to date. I am going to update these predictions I wrote just after the election that trump won in November of 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 2025 so called ‘big, beautiful bill’ tax cut estimate was at least 4.5 trillion dollars. This is over 10 years in the usual political disingenuous way of passing bills beyond their own term in office. The capital gains tax is harder to figure out. The corporate rates seem to have stayed at 35% from mid-1993 until 2017. Admin 1 dropped the rate by 14 points to 21%. I do not see anything in the 2025 numbers to say it was lowered again by this congress, but the 2017 congress was Trumpian. The details for actual people with this 4.5 trillion-dollar tax cut is interesting. The top 1% will save around 61,000, the top .01%, 250,000. I suspect this is annually over ten years but I have not seen that written anywhere. The former is almost the same as the total median household income in the US in 2025 and the latter is over four times that median income. In terms of income discrepancy, the median household income is around 62,000 and the top one percent is 8 – 10 times that number. As usual in Republican governments the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The divide causes social problems. Much of the tax cut is being paid for by cutting public assistance at many levels including Medicaid and government subsidies for rural hospitals and health care insurance support.
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.
Well, the general idea of this is true. Air traffic controllers were fired and several planes had accidents. This may not be completely related to the firings but it looks suspicious. The admin put Elon Musk in control of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) without any oversight and gutted several departments. The DOGE claimed 135 billion dollars in saving but the actual accounting showed around two billion. That sounds like a lot except for the fact they started out claiming they would eliminate the debt of two trillion dollars. Their claim to save does not account for the cost of the wrongful dismissal suits many of which they lost. They fired a large number of prosecutors and FBI agents from the department of justice who had been working on the January 6th investigations. Many other DOJ members quit in protest. Several weather early warning systems failed, most tragically in Texas where a flash flood warning did not go out because the lack of staff meant there was no one to provide warnings after business hours – 135 died. This list could go on a long way.
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 were not as successful with eliminating departments since departments are an act of congress and cannot be eliminated without passing a law in congress. From the Washington Post this is a list of departments: “Departments of Education, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs faced significant layoffs and personnel reductions, with hundreds of thousands of workers affected by 2026”. They defunded everything they did not like politically, cut staffing to the point of structural incapacitation (thanks google for that phrase), or put people in charge that were trump worshipers, incompetent, and/or corrupt. John F. Kennedy Jr. as the surgeon general with his anti-science conspiratorial health care ideas. The list of incompetent and corrupt is worse in Admin 2 than it was in Admin 1. Check out this Guardian article.
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.
Because they could not eliminate the department of education itself they just defunded most federal programs that helped public schools. Funding cuts caused many disabled programs to be cut across the country. As usual with Trumpism, many of the voters who voted for trump also were affected by these cuts and shocked that their vote affected them. These are just a few:
K-12 & Teacher Initiatives: Elimination of Teacher Quality Partnership grants and Equity Assistance Centers.
Targeted Cuts: A proposed 6.5 billion reduction in targeted K–12 funding for students with the greatest needs, along with the elimination of various adult education programs.
Tribal Education: Repeated attempts to eliminate federal funding for Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) and related grants.
Grant Freezes: The administration froze over 6 billion in education grants, impacting programs such as summer and after-school initiatives, music, foreign language programs, and the hiring of school counselors.
Civil Rights Office: The role of the Office for Civil Rights has been shifted away from protecting marginalized children to focusing on issues like transgender athletes in women’s sports. (An aside, Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault more times than there are trans athletes in the NCAA. The NCAA has 1100 schools represented and over 500,000 athletes. So, as usual, Republicans creating an issue that does not exist. And another aside, the right complains that gays and minorities get too much attention but then they create this whole culture giving a tiny group all their attention. Another of the many many ironies of the right.)
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.
They have not been successful in show trials per se. The reason is they have become so inept that few of the indictments get to court. This is one list:
James Comey (twice): Former FBI Director who was investigated and indicted on charges related to lying to Congress. This was thrown out of court due to the instigator at the DOJ was illegally appointed. The current, may of 2026, case is about a picture of seashells that formed 8645 which they have taken as a threat, though they admit they are not going after anyone selling T-shirts that say that.
Letitia James: New York Attorney General targeted for investigation. This was thrown out for the same reason Comey’s was. Subsequent attempts to get two grand juries to approve indictments have failed.
Adam Schiff: California Congressman under investigation regarding his personal finances and mortgages. No indictment so far.
Lisa Cook: Federal Reserve Board member targeted with allegations of mortgage fraud and threatened with removal. The irony here is that trump was convicted on similar charges for lying on mortgages to get better loan and tax rates (Republicans do not care that their deity breaks the law, only that democrats can be accused, proven or not against them.). This case was thrown out at the federal level, but trump appealed to the supreme court which is still pending.
Trump has gone after many who investigated him on his own felony indictments. Some have been thrown out due to DOJ incompetence, lack of evidence, lack of standing, etc. Pam Bondi just got fired due to the lack of success in taking trumps enemies list to trial and getting them convicted.
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.
IRS funding was cut by around 11 billion dollars. Staff was also cut drastically. So far there does not seem to be much success by trump in using the IRS to investigate people he does not like. There have been questionable audits of at least two trump enemies but no proof these were caused by trump. There is a federal law making this use of the IRS illegal but trump has immunity even if his underlings do not (though it may not apply to this as it would not be an official act of the president, I would not trust the supreme court to hold the line here). Nixon tried this back in Admin 1 too. Again, the irony is the right has whined that this was happening to their non-profits without any proof and now they want to do it to the left’s non-profits. The Nixonian maxim: Do unto them before they can do unto you.
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.
This is mostly correct but more than just the kidnapping and fear tactics against brown people. In Admin 1, immigrants were afraid to go to work, they are now afraid to even leave their homes. ICE is the brown shirt equivalent of a paramilitary force not required to follow the law. Admin 2 is taking innocent brown people off the street (which is illegal), forcing people to ‘prove’ their citizenship (which is illegal when done for racial purposes), and shipping them off without due process to concentration camps (some of these camps were used to inter Japanese citizens during world war 2). All of these tactics and others have been condemned by the courts, but trump has ignored these rulings. They have killed two innocent protestors so far, one they executed in the street after disarming him of his cell phone which is the ‘weapon’ he had out, not for his legal firearm, they shot him in the head and other times. The other victim, a mom trying to move her vehicle was shot three times and then refused medical assistance for fifteen minutes, until she was dead. The admin followed the latter up by trying to indict the woman’s spouse for protesting against admin policy. Six prosecutors resigned over the abomination of Trumpism. The irony is they did not do an investigation of her murder but did investigate her spouse for exercising her freedom of speech.
Trump started the term with already high egg prices going higher because his cuts to the centers for disease control. Not allowing medical reports to be published by them did not warn farmers of a bird flu outbreak that caused the egg industry supply problems. Then his tariffs increased the cost of all kinds of goods moving internationally, added a tax on imported goods that caused the companies to raise prices and thus cost all Americans more. It also caused other countries to cut their trading with the US and open markets with other countries. Items built in the US were then not purchased by other countries and thus cut American jobs.
And now there is his war in Iran. The price of a barrel of oil started in November of around $60 per barrel, it began to rise in mid-December, it spiked starting mid-February one week before trump started the war where it was at $77 and it peaked at around $112 April 6. It has dropped a little since then (ca. $96) due to a possible cease fire (this cease fire was removed 20 hours into it as the trump admin tried to change the negotiation parameters). This wont last. On May 12 the 52-week range of oil prices was $54.98 to a high of $119.48. On May 12 the price was roughly $107 per barrel. Average gas price in the US is around $5 per gallon.
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.
As many times as trump has tried the courts have stopped him in his attempt to invoke the insurrection act. In LA, Portland, and Minneapolis he has lied and said they were protecting democracy. But Christie Noam said in LA that they wanted to make it possible for the ‘right people’ to be running the government. No mention of the elected people.
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.
Well as of this week of 10 April even trump’s staunch followers like Tucker Carlson are calling for the use of the 25th amendment. This came from his call for Iranian genocide. I do not believe for a second that this will last. As Bryan Taylor Coen said today, all it will take is a timely dinner at mar a logo by trump with these people and they will go back to towing the line for trump. I still believe the amendment will be used if the republicans get destroyed in state and federal races this November. It looks like they will lose a lot but ‘destroyed’ may be too much to wish for. As of May the supreme court gutted the voting rights act and states are falling over themselves to redraw maps to eliminate the possibility of blacks being elected to office. It is not about democracy for them, only power, their power only.
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.
Trump has managed this on several levels. He has sued and been paid out for several lawsuits against media outlets who caved to him to avoid license fights. He has managed, albeit fleetingly, to have some comedians fired or just taken off the air. The same with some news people. He has taken away reporter access from neutral or ‘unfriendly’ newspapers or reporters. This week he lost a case where the DOJ yanked news outlets that Hegseth thought were putting up unflattering pictures of him. The court ruled this illegal but then they defied this by just yanking all the reporter passes.
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……
A large Texas epidemic of measles with Trumpian parents wondering what happened.
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.
All of this came true. Some additional things happened. Canadians began a campaign to not buy any American products. This is not completely possible since a large majority of what Canadians buy come from the states, but this made a dent on the American economy. For instance, Canada buys more bourbon than Americans. Both BC and Ontario removed all American products from there shelves and for the most part they are still unavailable in BC. Some companies, like London Drugs, have stopped buying American products. John Deere moved one of its lines to Europe from the US, though they still produce most of their products in the US. Canada has made major deals with the EU. Trump has claimed he will take the tariff money collected and give it out to keep oil prices low. So, taking American tariff money (a tax on Americans) and paying oil companies to keep oil prices lower. So, in other words, adding a huge gas tax onto the price of gas but hiding it by charging tariffs (misdirection) and giving the money (along with all the other tax breaks oil companies get) to the richest companies in the world—right, that makes sense.
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.
This did not happen at all. I do not think the republican congress even introduced such a bill. They realized they had lost every court case and every election that had abortion access in the mix. This does not mean there have been any movement to return an abortion right. I suspect, if the democrats take the house federally and majorities in the states we will see an attempt as allowing abortion nation wide. This seems less and less likely as republican legislatures are gerrymandering their voting maps to eliminate democratic possibilities.
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 is essentially out of NATO due to his attitude and public ranting against all the European countries. Ukraine is still fighting and Russia is still losing. All attempts by trump to give Putin all the parts of Ukraine they occupy have failed to date. And, Ukraine has offered to help the US with their drone missile defence which trump rejected but some Arab countries being bombed by Iran have taken them up on it. The aid trump has given Putin is related to the Iran war trump started. In a counter intuitive fashion when Putin gave Iran targeting information to hit US bases in the middle east trump released the embargo on buying Russian oil. Thus, giving Putin a huge rise in finance to help him fund the war with Ukraine. Another thing, Russia is not manufacturing the drones that Iran is dropping on American troops, bases, and allies in the middle East.
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.
This ended up being indirectly true. There is the idea that trump went to war with Iran because Netanyahu wanted him to so the war expenses would be on the US. Israel then invaded Lebanon.
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.
Not bad, the only thing that I missed was there was no attempt at a federal abortion ban. They have not tried to ban porn either which was a goal of project 2025. I suspect they found all the other bits they wanted to do more difficult than they expected and, keep in mind, that red states consume more porn than blue states. Republicans will abandon any issue that does not serve them to stay in power or keep the graft in this kleptocracy. They abandoned the federal abortion ban promise; Trump has made millions to give pardons to international drug dealers, and pardons to pedophiles and racists.
Hark 