Intuition Check, Take 2

I warned that Trump will not stop at just the illegal immigrants, and now he’s made his first move to kick out people who are here legally on H1-B visa. I predicted that Trump would do nothing against Putin, and he is doing literally that: not only has he unconditionally surrendered Syria to Russia and Iran, he’s still refusing to implement the new sanctions against Russia that Congress has forced him to sign. When the Steele dossier first came out, I said it doesn’t seem as “obviously fake” as some of my friends declared at the time, and we keep getting new confirmations of claims in it and claims about it.

Five years ago, my conclusions about militarization of Russia didn’t go far enough. I failed to imagine that Russia could wage a successful war against Ukraine, and have written off Putin’s ambition to recreate USSR as laughable. I’ve learned my lesson, I should trust my intuition. When my pessimist senses are tingling, bad things are coming. Here’s what I think will happen in the next five years.

Democrats will not flip Senate nor House in 2018; a 60-65% majority in the polls will be negated by gerrymandering, voter suppression, disruption of voter registration by hackers in key districts, targeted fake news campaigns through social media, cable and local TV stations, and even open violence against minority voters by alt right. Attempts to address the vote integrity issues will be stonewalled by the Supreme Court. Republicans will not impeach Trump.

In 2019-2020, opposition media will be further marginalized by a combination of libel litigation, selective regulation, and corporate takeovers, will lose their mainstream status and with that, its advertisement market share. Regulation will also block Facebook and Google, the only two Silicon Valley companies even trying, from getting inauthentic content and hate speech under control.

Protest against Trumpism will be gradually pushed out of the media and off the Internet and into the streets. With public conversation becoming dominated by hate and xenophobia, Nazi and KKK attacks will increase and get normalized. With both sides increasingly taking to the streets, violent clashes will become commonplace and will be used to justify increasingly intrusive anti-protest and anti-privacy legislation, until First and Fourth Amendments are rendered completely impotent, once again with consent of Supreme Court.

By 2020, opposition’s ability to get its message out will be so limited that it will lose its last advantage, the majority in the polls, making Trump’s re-election inevitable. The campaign of hate will continue and even increase, triggering pogroms against Muslims, immigrants, and LGBTQ.

In 2021-2022, economic impact of Trump’s policies will begin to show. Redistribution of wealth will reduce domestic demand, isolationism will reduce global demand, skilled labor shortage (driven by immigration restrictions and collapse of public education) will reduce productivity, all together slowing economic growth to a halt. Eventually growing rate of personal bankruptcies by medical bills will crash the once again deregulated financial market and will send the economy into a second Great Depression. Devastated white middle class will blame the remaining Muslims and immigrants and will start another wave of pogroms, rapidly escalating into full scale riots. Martial law is declared.

Eventually, elections are cancelled, Pacific states try to secede, civil war breaks out, Russia is on hand to restore order and protect Russian citizens. Ok, maybe Russia will have disintegrated by then, after an EU ban on non-electric vehicles crashes oil price to $10 per barrel. But the rest, all the way to the martial law, almost inevitably follows from our current trajectory.