This afternoon, I chatted with Matt Yglesias of Slow Boring, who probably needs no introduction to Silver Bulletin readers. Matt and I both like to make predictions (a status update on my 113 Trump predictions is coming soon). So with this being the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, we thought it was a good time to check in and see how it’s going. Which things have been surprising and which have been predictable?
You can find the video above. What follows below are a few notes I wrote to myself in prepping for the chat with Matt and the 113 predictions column. I’m going to go ahead and run the whole video free — note that there may be some deadspace at the end due to a Substack glitch — but we very much appreciate subscriptions.
What the headline is about
At the risk of a slight spoiler alert, I was pleasantly surprised that of the 113 predictions that can be resolved so far1, they seem to be reasonably well-calibrated. There are some caveats to that, however, such as a couple of predictions are technically correct but where the spirit of the forecast was perhaps wrong.2 Also, few worst-case scenarios are off the table; there are still three years left! A handful of very high-leverage events that I regarded as being unlikely to happen (invading Greenland; Trump successfully being listed on the ballot for a third term) would lead to a dramatically different assessment.
At the same time, I don’t think the thesis of Michelle Goldberg’s recent New York Times column, “The Resistance Libs Were Right”, should pass without scrutiny. This is Goldberg’s thesis statement (emphasis mine):
Both ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis and Trump’s threatened seizure of Greenland are part of the same story: An increasingly unpopular regime is rapidly radicalizing and testing how far it can go down the road toward autocracy. If people had predicted back in 2024 precisely what Trump’s return to the White House was going to look like, I suspect they’d have been accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. But the shrillest of Resistance libs have always understood Trump better than those who make a show of their dispassion. As the heterodox writer Leighton Woodhouse put it on X, “The hysterical pussy hats were right.”
So let me bring up some points of agreement and disagreement.
13 notes on the first year of Trump 2.0 and the political moment
One way in which people like me can miss the forest for the trees is by focusing on the recent trend rather than the absolute level. Suppose it’s true that things in January 2026 fall basically within a reasonable boundary of what a well-informed person in January 2025 would have expected. Well, what about from the vantage point of a person in January 2015? Many of the headlines would indeed look like a fever dream. We do try to apply a more long-term perspective from time to time here at Silver Bulletin and maybe we should do more of that.
It’s hard to evaluate anyone’s predictions — let alone the beliefs of an entire political movement like #TheResistance — when they aren’t written down on any sort of systematic basis. For some reason, making testable predictions seems to be more of a wonky center-left trait. The lack of systematic predictions can also lead to the “predicted nine out of the last five recessions” problem. If you’re constantly predicting a disaster, especially in vague terms that are hard to pin down, then some of the predictions are going to seem right.
Precise predictions are hard. For example, here’s one from among a series of predictions by Brian Beutler. (Who is sort of an exception to the rule above by being fairly #Resistance-y but still having an annual predictions column.) Beutler predicted that by the end of 2025, Elon Musk would ”transform X into an engine of, and megaphone for, anti-Trump content; Trump will order the Justice Department to indict Musk.” Wrong! But Trump and Musk did have a falling out. There can be a sort of Mad Libs-like quality in filling in the often ridiculous blanks of any given day in the Trump White House, like the opposition leader in Venezuela literally giving Trump her Nobel Peace Prize medal. If you had predicted such precise details as these, you might well have been accused of “Trump derangement syndrome,” as Goldberg writes. But it’s obviously not a surprise that foreign leaders are trying to win Trump over through naked flattery.
I wonder how much of this is stylistic rather than substantive. “Trump bad” is the one thing all the various factions of Democrats — the Resistance Libs, the Abundance Libs, and the Left — agree upon! But the Resistance Libs run hot in how they express this — Goldberg sympathetically cites a writer who refers to them as “hysterical pussy hats” — whereas others “make a show of their dispassion,” taking a more detached and analytical method (raises hand). The Resistance approach might feel more emotionally right, but I’m not sure it’s actually been especially accurate. Then again, it’s not like the Resistance’s goal is to win some prediction contest; rather, they’re trying to generate a sense of solidarity.3
One widespread prediction after Trump won in 2024 was that we were in the midst of a conservative vibe shift; my own take on that was fairly agnostic. I’d argue that, with some exceptions like a conservative takeover of several mainstream media institutions, there’s been more of a backlash than a vibe shift. But from a liberal’s point of view, that’s a favorable update; something that’s gone better than expected.
One point where I strongly disagree with Goldberg is in her notion that “an increasingly unpopular regime is rapidly radicalizing and testing how far it can go down the road toward autocracy.” Instead, I’d argue that Trump would be more dangerous if he were more popular. Indeed, Trump is pretty unpopular, even showing signs of lame-duckness, despite the economy not being all that bad. While with some overlooked exceptions, the Congress and courts haven’t resisted Trump as much as I’d like, they’re likely to be at least somewhat responsive to public opinion.
Meanwhile, the extent to which Trump cares about public opinion is ambiguous. He almost certainly cares less than a normal president would. But the fact that he sometimes backpedals or chickens out makes evaluating his performance harder. If you’re always focusing on the seemingly rising threat, you can neglect those cases where Trump backs off, even if they basically amount to Resistance victories.
I’d argue, and this is a point that Yglesias made too, that the Resistance Libs are sometimes spectacularly unfocused. There can be a mismatch between what stories are “objectively” most important and what tends to get the most news coverage. Jeffrey Epstein is one example of this; it’s probably contributing to Trump’s unpopularity at the margin, but I’m not sure I’d say it’s one of the dozen most important stories affecting the future of the country. In the first term, Russiagate was another. I’d argue that, for example, what RFK Jr. has done on vaccines, or how Trump has sought to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve, will have more important long-term consequences.
Relatedly, I’d also argue that actions that squander the leadership and credibility of the United States often deserve more attention than the daily headlines. These don’t necessarily lend themselves well to predictions, admittedly, given that the time frames might be 10, 20, or 30 years out. I’ve updated negatively on America’s long-term future.
The Resistance Libs deserve major demerits for, nearly to a person, denying how profound a political and substantive problem it was for Biden to try to run for another term when he was clearly unfit to do so. The worse you thought a second Trump term was, the more cutthroat you ought to have been in wanting to replace Biden and/or trying to find a more popular replacement for him than Harris. In this respect, the revealed preference of the Resistance Libs in their nonchalance toward Biden didn’t match their stated concern about Trump.
Although this is obviously contestable, some of what people like Yglesias I argue is that Democrats should fight back through more or less normal political means, like doing popular things and winning elections — even if times are highly abnormal. I’m sympathetic to the message that democracy is under existential threat, though it’s good that there weren’t any shenanigans surrounding the 2024 or 2025 elections. But it became a tiresome message for voters after it was a central theme of the Clinton, Biden, and Harris campaigns.
I tend to find the debate over whether Trump is a fascist to be largely unhelpful. If you are a historian, then sure, it’s worthwhile to point out some of the parallels between Trump and early- to mid-20th-century European fascists. (There are certainly some scary parallels, as well as some differences; the fascists had a modernist streak that I’d argue Trump largely lacks.) But this is not exactly a novel observation, and “fascism” is also a historically contingent term in many respects. To the extent it illuminates more than it obscures, it ought to result in being able to make better predictions about Trump’s future behavior. That’s another reason that I’d like to see the Resistance Libs make more concrete, testable predictions.
Matt and I both agree that January 6 was very, very bad — I’d argue that it’s the worst thing that Trump has done by some margin, perhaps even by an order of magnitude. And January 6 could very easily have been much worse. The whole notion of fighting back through normal political means fails if the integrity of elections and peaceful transitions fails. A laser-like focus on election integrity, and on things affecting the terms of engagement on future elections, like redistricting — Gavin Newsom and other Democrats deserve credit there — is superior to raising vaguer concerns about democracy.
Most have a duration longer than one year.
Such as whether the capture of Maduro respresents a “territorial dispute” as described in the 113 predictions column.
And perhaps also Substack subscriptions.
