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As is often true of presidential election years, 2024 was very eventful. The twists and turns of the campaign alone—Donald Trump’s trials, the great switcheroo from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, brat summer, the two assassination attempts on Trump and the decisive election night victory that surprised so many (including the people paid not to be surprised [ [link removed] ])—made the year more momentous than usual.
Politics dominated the news in many other countries as well, and—as in the United States—incumbents often didn’t fare well. In Great Britain, for instance, 14 years of Tory rule came to an end with a landslide victory for the Labour Party. In France and Japan, voters gave parties in power a bad bloody nose. And in India, the mighty Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP lost its majority in parliament [ [link removed] ] for the first time in a decade and was forced to depend on other parties to stay in power. Look for more of the same in 2025, particularly in Germany and Canada, where ruling parties are likely to be thrown out of power by huge electoral margins.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, both sides made some small gains, but the overall conflict remained a grinding war of attrition. In the Middle East, however, Israel showed the world that the best way to win in war is… to win in war—something American presidents don’t always seem to understand. Israel’s decapitation of Hamas and especially of Hezbollah as well as its successful attacks on Iran sent shock waves through the region. The brutal regime of Syria’s Bashar Assad (one of Iran’s most important allies) was the first collateral damage in this conflict, collapsing in a matter of days. It may not be the last.
In much of the rest of the world, things got on pretty much the same, for both good and ill. On the negative side of the ledger, there were at least 83 school shootings [ [link removed] ] in the United States, and monkeypox spread across Africa and into Europe [ [link removed] ]. And we lost some incredible people, from Quincy Jones and Maggie Smith to Alexei Navalny and Jimmy Carter. But there was good news too. Inflation was roughly cut in half. A beautifully renovated Notre Dame in Paris reopened in time for Christmas, just three and a half years after being devastated in a fire. SpaceX pulled off an awe-inspiring feat, catching its huge new Starship booster upon its return to Earth in giant metal arms it calls “chopsticks.” [ [link removed] ] And while Ben and J.Lo divorced about a month after their second wedding anniversary, Taylor and Travis made it through another year, continuing to put to rest rumors that their relationship is merely a publicity stunt.
What will happen this year is anyone’s guess. But that didn’t stop us from asking some of our regular Discourse contributors to pull out their Magic 8 Balls, chicken entrails or whatever they use to divine the future. And so, for the second year running [ [link removed] ] (can we call it a tradition yet?), here are their predictions for 2025. Enjoy!
Michael Ard on American Foreign Policy
The major theme of 2025 will be “MAGA Meets World.” How will the Trump administration 2.0 cope with international crises when key national security appointees seem more concerned with fighting internal battles within U.S. institutions? I predict MAGA priorities will soon be overwhelmed by “the pitiless crowbar of events [ [link removed] ].” Hard choices must be made.
First, while Trump might want to focus on ending the war in Ukraine, this will be superseded by the pressing crisis of Syria, with a Turkey-backed neo-al-Qaida movement now in charge in Damascus. How can we stay out—“not our fight [ [link removed] ],” Trump has said—when we currently have 2,000 American troops [ [link removed] ] in the country? Instead, we will increase our presence in Syria to block Turkey’s ambitions, back the Kurds and reassure Israel. Likewise, the Trump administration will seize the opportunity to roll back Iran, first by having the Navy finish off the Houthis’ piratical campaign against international shipping, and then by demanding Tehran end its nuclear program.
Then there are the failed states in our hemisphere. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will reinitiate the aggressive sanction and diplomatic policies against crumbling Cuba and vicious Venezuela, although this will likely fuel the immigration crisis. As a wild card, warlord-ruled Haiti—the recent voodoo-inspired [ [link removed] ] massacre is only the beginning—will become an unignorable humanitarian issue, with U.S. intervention openly and hotly debated.
Christina Behe on Austen Adaptations
This is perhaps less a prediction and more a plea to the universe, but I’m hoping 2025 will be the year for a slew of new Jane Austen adaptations. The last big Austen surge happened in the aughts, with the Keira Knightley “Pride and Prejudice [ [link removed] ]” feature film in 2005; a “Jane Austen Season” on the U.K.’s ITV in 2007 featuring “Mansfield Park [ [link removed] ],” “Northanger Abbey [ [link removed] ]” and “Persuasion [ [link removed] ]”; a new “Sense and Sensibility [ [link removed] ]” from the BBC in 2008; and a four-part “Emma [ [link removed] ]” BBC miniseries in 2009. Since then we’ve had a few scattered adaptations here and there, including a Netflix offering of “Persuasion [ [link removed] ]” (the less said about this, the better), but I’d love to see new versions of all six full-length novels. And since 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, the timing seems perfect!
Addison Del Mastro on Bringing Back America’s Small Cities and Towns
In last year’s predictions roundup [ [link removed] ], I predicted that 2024 would see the housing crisis, and urban policy more generally, become more of a mainstream issue. Of course, that didn’t happen all at once, but I feel pretty good about the trajectory of these issues’ salience. This year, I’m thinking about a laterally related issue that may have the wind at its back: the question of economic revitalization in small cities and towns.
However much (or little) the incoming administration may do in terms of housing affordability or lifting the fortunes of deindustrialized or “forgotten” places, the hope that they might do something about it was certainly a factor in Donald Trump’s victory. And a lot of small cities and towns are seeing new construction in their old downtowns for the first time in decades. The eye-watering expense of housing in the biggest metro areas, the rising appreciation for classic urban patterns and the sense that perhaps we owe something to places that have lost out to globalization, may all combine to create a real movement or effort behind bringing back America’s intact but battered small old cities and towns.
Jon Gabriel on the Dawn of Post-Woke America
Last February, investor Santiago Pliego wrote an influential piece [ [link removed] ] on Silicon Valley’s “Vibe Shift,” arguing that tech leaders had begun speaking previously unspeakable truths and promoting a return to freer expression. A few years earlier, commonsense statements would have gotten a tech giant canceled; today, he said, the audience shrugs.
The “vibe shift” has now spread across big business, politics and culture, intensifying greatly since Election Day. Woke scolds still shriek, but few listen. The hectoring just seems so ... 2017, you know?
As major institutions reduce DEI budgets, Hollywood scuttles social-justice messaging and businesses ignore campaigns to get people fired, progressive shaming has lost the power it’s wielded for many years. But it won’t go quietly.
Several progressive politicians and many activists now lionize [ [link removed] ] a spoiled rich kid for murdering an up-by-his-bootstraps healthcare CEO, while others joke about targeting [ [link removed] ] enemies [ [link removed] ] they couldn’t beat at the ballot box. Serious threats should be taken seriously, of course, but this is mostly the last stage of the cultural bully: impotent rage.
Most Americans have already rejected the division and will continue to seek a return to normalcy in 2025, especially in the private sphere. Trump has never been one to back down due to media or activist attacks, and he’s no longer the outlier in this. When cable news levels unproven charges against his cabinet nominees of various “isms” and “phobias,” their dwindling audience will shrug.
Bryan Gentry on Higher Education
Universities will embrace viewpoint diversity and ideological debate with various degrees of reluctance. Some will do so out of sincere conviction. Others will do so to escape conviction in the court of public opinion. Some campuses will assign Musa al-Gharbi’s “We Have Never Been Woke [ [link removed] ]” for the first-year common reading in hopes of convincing the world that they never were woke, while others will assign the book to spark sincere self-reflection. The number of universities committing to not issuing public statements about political issues or world events will continue to increase. Institutional neutrality is the new black.
And the Department of Government Efficiency will eliminate the Department of Government Efficiency just so Elon Musk (or I) can tweet, “It’s a DOGE-eat-DOGE world.” #AskingForAPun
Nathan Goetting on State Bans on “Gender-Affirming Care”
To the surprise of detractors who believe that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court are “partisan hacks [ [link removed] ],” I’m pretty confident that in 2025, the court is going to choose legal principles over politics by reversing a lower court ruling that upheld Tennessee’s ban on “gender-affirming care” for minors [ [link removed] ].
Three Republican-appointed justices—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—have previously ruled in favor of transgender rights or expressed a similar devotion to textualism, a belief that judges should be guided by the precise language of the laws that they’re interpreting. Under Tennessee’s statute—on which the court heard oral argument in early December—girls cannot take masculinizing drugs for the purpose of masculinizing themselves, but boys can. Likewise, boys can’t take feminizing drugs for the purpose of feminizing themselves, but girls can. This law so plainly treats biological boys and girls unequally that I suspect the textualist tendencies of these justices will not allow the lower court’s finding of nondiscrimination under the Constitution’s equal protection clause to stand.
However, that won’t end the case. The court has ruled [ [link removed] ] that laws that discriminate on the basis of sex are nonetheless constitutional if they substantially help to achieve an important state interest. Having found the Tennessee law discriminatory, the court will probably remand the case back down to the lower court, which will in turn uphold it once again, this time by finding that that ban on gender-affirming care helps promote the important state interest of protecting children from making a premature decision that may permanently alter—or even sterilize—their bodies.
While one can never be certain how the court will decide a case, U.S. v. Skrmetti [ [link removed] ] will likely be only a short-term victory for the by-then-former Biden administration when the court hands its ruling down in the summer of 2025. In the end, Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care—and others like it in 22 additional states—will stand.
Martin Gurri on DOGE vs. The Swamp
The year 2025 will reveal the winner of an ancient epic fight: that between an immovable object and an irresistible force. The immovable object is the federal bureaucracy, aka “The Swamp,” an obese tentacular beast that has done nothing but grow for the past 250 years. The irresistible force is President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, headed by tech luminaries Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Normally, the odds would heavily favor the bureaucrats. They have seen off past waves of reformers without getting as much as a scratch on them. But Musk is the man who fired 80% of Twitter’s workforce after purchasing the company in 2023. He’s too outcome-obsessed to settle for half measures and too autistic to care what people think.
So, we may just have a fair fight on our hands. Either way, grab a seat by ringside—and don’t forget to bring the popcorn ...
Sahil Handa on Elon Musk
Elon Musk does not take on projects halfheartedly, and that includes his latest one, which is running the federal government. Will his laser focus help usher in a more tech-forward, efficient government, or will he first be thrown to the wolves like most Trump allies?
If recent U.K. history is anything to go by, he’s for the wolves. Dominic Cummings is famously the architect of Brexit [ [link removed] ] and of Boris Johnson’s climb to power. Later, however, the radical reform [ [link removed] ] he proposed to overhaul the government was too much for Johnson, who was horrified it might make him unpopular. Scandal soon broke out, and Cummings was pushed out. Like Johnson, Trump is desperately afraid of becoming unpopular and equally afraid of losing the limelight.
Of course, Musk is an entrepreneurial beast and very different from Cummings. He is one of the most laser-focused and effective people alive. He has always won by disregarding the norms and getting stuff done faster than anyone else. What’s more, I believe he has taken on this new mission because he wants to show the American people how government should be run, not—as some have charged—to benefit his various businesses.
And yet, he still might fail. Entrepreneurs have freedom to assemble an organization of people who think just like them. This is not true in politics. [ [link removed] ]Indeed, the harsh realization most successful tech leaders face when they enter government is that it is almost impossible to fire people.
That being said, I expect Musk to make some progress this year, and Trump to take all the credit for it. And since Musk is South African and therefore cannot become president, he may survive because he’s not a direct threat to Trump. (Trump openly admitted as much [ [link removed] ] days ago.) Musk may also be helped by the fact that political popularity in America is more immune to scandal than it is in Britain. Indeed, in the U.S.’s hyper-digital age, controversy is often rewarded. But if a backlash grows from the MAGA base—over immigration policy [ [link removed] ] or China tariffs [ [link removed] ], for example—or if Musk begins to outshine his master, he will quickly find himself ejected from Team Trump.
James Lileks on Iran
After years of sanctions, resolutions, whipsaw swings in U.S. policy and military attacks on key facilities, Iran nevertheless develops an atomic bomb. The entire leadership of the Islamic state gathers in a remote location to view the first test, something they know will be detected by its enemies. Thus will they show they have the determination and technical skill to bring down their neighbors. They will sow fear and reap victory and domination. The ayatollah’s hand pauses over the detonation button, considering the billions spent, the enormous cost to the economy. All worth it, he thinks, and presses the button. Take this, Mossad.
Three miles away, the bomb flashes, then turns into a pager.
David Masci on the American Economy
The funny thing about the American economy is that no matter how hard the political class tries to slow it down, it usually keeps on going and growing. Last year was no exception. In 2024, the U.S. economy likely chalked up close to 3% GDP growth, alongside continued low unemployment. Perhaps more importantly, American productivity hovered [ [link removed] ] at or above a healthy 2% growth rate, as it has for the past few years.
In 2025, the U.S. economy is likely to do even better. For starters, the incoming Trump administration has pledged to embark on a major deregulatory push, to encourage more energy production and to renew or even reduce already low corporate tax rates—which were enacted in 2017, during the president-elect’s first term. These sorts of actions will not only help most businesses in their existing day-to-day operations, but also likely encourage new capital investment and new hiring.
But the biggest economic boost may come from the already good news about productivity getting even better. The productivity rate may be the most important number in the large mosaic of government economic data. That’s because when workers become more productive, they allow businesses to do more with the same number of people, prodding the economy to grow faster without triggering inflation. Down the road this leads to more business activity, more hiring and more growth.
In 2024, we began to see the stunning recent advances in AI start to meaningfully trickle down into the real economy, as businesses of all kinds figures out how use this new technology to do things better and more efficiently. Expect this trend to accelerate in 2025. That in turn will help lead to greater productivity and all the positive knock-on effects described above. This is exactly what happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when personal computers and the internet became ubiquitous. Back then, productivity rates soared above 3%. The same thing may well happen this year, driving the American economy forward at a faster and more sustainable rate.
Christine McDaniel on Trade
In 2025, international trade will continue, but maybe with more chaos. Expect one of three scenarios: an all-out global trade war with aggressive moves and retaliations, a series of messy trade spats like what we’ve experienced in recent years or chaos that is followed by a wonderful new trading system. The third scenario is most intriguing. “Wonderful” as defined by President-elect Trump includes reciprocity, but not the kind etched in stone 30 years ago where, say, India puts 25% duties on U.S. merchandise while those same products can enter the U.S. duty-free. That’s common now with many developing countries, and it’s not reciprocal—at least not in Trump’s eyes. Rather, reciprocity is when the United States and India (and any other U.S. trading partner) charge each other the same duty. If U.S. consumers are lucky, that duty will be zero. For that to happen, we’ll need skilled negotiators to set new global trade rules that finally address the elephants in the room, such as uneven market access, overcapacity, asymmetric tariff schedules and countries’ collective frustration with China. Unlike his predecessors, Trump will not ignore these elephants. Let’s hope our trade negotiators take advantage of the coming chaos and make something good out of it.
Andrey Mir on a Possible Second Trump Bump for the Media
As Donald Trump’s return to the White House legitimized the shifts in the political tide, a central theme in 2025 will be rewriting dominant narratives. Revealing the facts and stories concealed or skewed by the previous narratives will be the most energizing part of this revision. It offers new business opportunities for the media, much like Gorbachev’s glasnost (“openness,” “disclosure”) after the collapse of communism in the late USSR, when exposing the abuses and privileges of former elites turned news outlets into goldmines.
One platform already poised to thrive on this is X. More traditional news outlets will face a choice between political allegiance and professional instincts: cling to their alliance with progressives and bureaucracy, yielding little business return or tap into the public’s demand for revelations once dismissed as conspiracies and nothingburgers. Topics like vaccine deals with Big Pharma, bureaucratic spending priorities, the state of education, migration and crime as well as President Biden’s health and governance during his tenure offer rich material for investigations. The more they were suppressed, the greater their potential to drive readership and viewership now that the tide has turned. This and other revelations will reward news outlets and may even lead them to a new Trump Bump [ [link removed] ].
Matthew Mittelsteadt on AI and Autonomous Vehicles
While AI may have felt new at the tail end of 2023, one year later the tech feels almost banal. Image generators are a dime a dozen. ChatGPT feels like just another office product. The sheen has worn off. Change blindness [ [link removed] ] has set in: Since people already “know” AI, they are blind to just how drastically it continues to transform just offscreen. Driverless tech is the best example. Unrecognized progress has been nonstop, and I expect its improvement to demand deregulatory attention in 2025.
For those not paying attention, driverless vehicles have quickly gone from buggy and accident-prone to arguably superior to human-driven vehicles. Illustrative is one December study of Google’s driverless cab service, Waymo, which found autonomous vehicles (AVs) yielded [ [link removed] ] an “88 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily injury claims.” Another analysis from September corroborates, [ [link removed] ]finding Waymo vehicles were just one-sixth as likely as humans to get into the most serious air-bag-triggering accidents. Remarkable. It’s no surprise that Waymo is now expanding operations: On top of service in L.A., Phoenix and San Francisco, Waymo now will expand to Miami [ [link removed] ] starting in 2026.
Though driverless cars won’t appear overnight, these exceedingly positive studies and the sudden expansion of these services into our largest cities will spark attention and a new policy push to set things up for an imminent driverless future. Dotted with countless human-centric regulations, including pedal and mirror requirements and hours-of-service regulations [ [link removed] ], the regulatory code will require a face lift. Thankfully, deregulatory chatter [ [link removed] ] from the incoming Trump administration suggests interest is indeed peaking, and a real conversation suddenly appears imminent. More specifically, Elon Musk’s direct AV interest and knowledge vastly increase the likelihood this issue will edge to the center of the tech policy agenda.
That said, the AI future is unpredictable. Countless converging AI trends and policy distractions could veer policy attention toward other priorities. My hope, however, is that this uniquely practical AI application with proven promise gets the attention it sorely deserves in 2025.
Natasha Mott on Uncertainty
Last year, I suggested we’d embrace absurdity, and while I was being a bit facetious, I genuinely expect more of the same in 2025 ... starting with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Unexpected Absurd Phenomena (UAP) will be everywhere—literally and figuratively—but don’t count on clear explanations of what’s happening in the skies over New Jersey or anywhere else. What you can count on is that uncertainty will fuel progress through people seeking more agency in their lives.
Rising vigilantism, reminiscent of Joker-esque justice, signals a society on edge, born of frustration and uncertainty. In this chaotic climate, those comfortable with ambiguity will seize opportunities, blurring the lines between heroes and villains. Legal battles between AI accelerationists and decelerationists will dominate headlines, with decelerationists leaning on this tactic to give society more time to see if there is righteousness on both sides. Innovations in hard tech and mini-manufacturing boom-bust cycles will be driven by efforts to reshore production and retrofit an aging infrastructure for a new world. Those who don’t understand what’s happening will be relegated to actions like feckless mass resignations [ [link removed] ] in fields like science publishing, but the most compelling movements will come from projects with nebulous, conviction-driven outcomes like “building better science [ [link removed] ],” led by people with a sense of agency and confidence in their ability to improve the system. In this strange world, we may not understand everything, but we can see that both the Joker’s villainy and the hero’s courage stem from a shared desire for agency and justice.
Meanwhile, the white-collar recession and corporate bankruptcies will continue to consolidate capital, and we’ll see innovation in education at the top where wealthy parents begin to grapple with a new form of literacy. Generation Alpha’s [ [link removed] ] unique contextual understanding of language and ability to embrace polysemy holds seeds of hope in phrases like “skibidi, [ [link removed] ]” which feel nonsensical at first, but embody a cultural literacy that values interpretation over rigid meaning.
This isn’t just brain rot—it’s the compost from which new ideas will grow. If uncertainty thrives, autonomy survives, and that’s something worth holding onto. Keep an eye on balanced news sources like Ground News [ [link removed] ] and debates about free speech. Whether you are 18 or 80, there’s still plenty to learn. Let’s hope 2025 continues to teach us how to use uncertainty as a tool for both personal and societal growth.
Michael Puttré on the State of the World
The various insanities that have bedeviled the world this millennium will recede somewhat as normal(ish) people dampen the mayhem inflicted by the red-green internationale we endured in recent years. Reassertion of sanity will bring early elections and a recoil from disastrous leftist policies in Europe and elsewhere. There will be new prime ministers in the U.K. and Canada, a new chancellor in Germany, likely a new pope and possibly even a new president in France. As with the new U.S. president, the class of ’25 will be more about a reassertion of the popular will and consciousness than a counterrevolution.
The bad guys not subject to the ballot will retrench. Putin will make a deal, and Xi will put the Taiwan project back on the shelf. The mullahs in Iran will revert to waiting for the 12th Imam to save them. Meanwhile, NATO will be stronger than ever with all the Nordic Valkyries assembled and Poland armed to the teeth. World War III won’t happen “Götterdämmerung”-style, but war will still sputter on here and there in that modern (and ancient) way we all just have to get used to.
The oceans will pretty much stay where they are despite how many EVs go unsold on discount lots. Mandates will be postponed indefinitely or quietly forgotten. Having netted zero with renewable energy, planners will remember that nuclear reactors can reliably boil water and run turbines. The reemergence of actual science and technology in a new period of international stability will create opportunity and prosperity for those who strive rather than sulk.
Dan Rothschild on U.S.-India Economic Relations
Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are both tariff men, in the former’s famous phrase; Trump because of a sense that American workers are being cheated globally, Modi out of traditional infant industry [ [link removed] ] concerns. Indian tariffs are generally high [ [link removed] ] and among the most complex [ [link removed] ] in the world, and Trump is threatening a trade war [ [link removed] ] with India.
The two leaders, however, enjoy an unusual personal rapport—and this may be the key to making 2025 a year of closer ties in the massively growing [ [link removed] ] economic relationship between India and the U.S.
Some sort of trade deal with a growing [ [link removed] ] India is one of the few deals Trump could strike [ [link removed] ] that would redound to the benefit and approval of three elements of his base: free traders, American business interests and China hawks. Lowering barriers to trade would make [ [link removed] ] India a logical beneficiary [ [link removed] ] of the rise of “China plus one” strategy of foreign firms, and it would help increase (rapidly falling [ [link removed] ]) foreign domestic investment in India—something Modi desires both for economic and national pride reasons.
While a full-on free trade agreement this year remains unlikely, 2025 may be the year that American and Indian policymakers begin to pursue closer economic relations. Like Nixon going to China, only the tariff men could pull it off.
Jennifer Tiedemann on Institutional Confidence
Last year, I wrote that despite weak polling on confidence in American institutions, our institutions would remain strong in 2024, and I’m happy to say that this prediction seems to have been correct—and not just because I like being right. It’s great for all of us when our institutions remain healthy—though we should keep a healthy dose of skepticism about what they can accomplish.
Perhaps the biggest institution-related question going into this year was whether we would see another contested election in 2024, with something akin to January 6 kicking off 2025. Looks like we won’t, which is certainly fantastic news: A peaceful transition of power is one of the clearest signs that Americans respect political institutions.
At first glance, Gallup’s long polling trend on confidence in institutions doesn’t seem to offer up many positive findings, but when you delve into the data, there are some things worth giving at least one cheer for. Small businesses, the military and the police still garner “a great deal” or “quite a lot” [ [link removed] ] of confidence from a majority of Americans. And while confidence in most institutions hovers at or near historic lows, the decline does seem to have leveled off, with many institutions (including the Supreme Court, public schools and organized labor) even showing a very slight uptick [ [link removed] ] in confidence over the last year.
So here’s my hot take: I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see confidence in at least some institutions climb in 2025. Those Americans who didn’t back the president-elect may view outside institutions as an important counterweight to a second Trump administration—that we need strong institutions to ensure the presidency doesn’t become too powerful, regardless of who is in office.
Rob Tracinski on the New Administration
As a critic of Donald Trump, I’m expecting all sorts of bad things from his administration: tariffs and mass deportations [ [link removed] ] that would be an economic disaster and cruel in their implementation, and attacks on freedom of speech. (Trump is already threatening to sue a newspaper over a poll [ [link removed] ].)
But what if it all just doesn’t happen? What if he files lawsuits that get thrown out and then drops the whole thing? What if he stages a few deportations for show, but under pressure from businesses that rely on immigrant labor, he lets most of them stay?
Remember the border wall in his first term: He did just enough to create a few photo ops and claim victory, but then quietly abandoned the project. Perhaps this is what his voters really want: They want to cheer on Trump as he makes the “elites” angry—but they’re not all that concerned with whether he achieves actual results.
This is the most annoying way this all ends. All the things we fear most just melt away, lost in legal challenges, bureaucratic inertia and political incompetence. And then people complain, “You said terrible things would happen if Trump got elected, and none of it happened.” But it didn’t happen because some of us spent sleepless nights working to prevent it.
In some ways, from my perspective, this is the best outcome we can expect—but like I said, it’s also the most annoying.
Tevi Troy on What To Be Optimistic and Pessimistic About
As a new year begins, it always pays to be optimistic rather than pessimistic. I think that in 2025, the U.S. economy will continue to be strong, fueled in part by AI and Trump’s deregulatory push. Illegal immigration will also slow somewhat, given an administration that is actually interested to preventing illegal border crossings. China will not invade Taiwan, and Russia and Ukraine may end up at the negotiating table. Israel will continue to press its strong hand and will likely get some kind of hostage deal, although at too dear a cost.
That said, it won’t be all wine and roses in the year ahead. U.S. debt levels will remain too high, and neither party will show much interest in doing anything about it. Universities will continue their downward slide, forcing parents to look for alternatives outside the Ivy League and so-called elite colleges. Hollywood will continue putting out woke movies that people don’t want, and right-wing businessmen will remain go-to movie bad guys. Marvel will continue to be unable to regain its footing after the successful “Avengers” saga. And finally, the mainstream media will continue with its biased coverage, pushing more and more Americans toward alternative platforms and podcasts to get more balanced perspectives.
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