Trump presidency predictions

[grange9]

Well said. I totally agree.

[quote=zk]I predict that the shrinking of the middle class will accelerate.

I predict the lower-middle class, working class, and poor will all be economically worse off.

Trump promises to bring back jobs to the middle class. His policies will have the opposite effect. He’ll hurt unions, which will hurt the middle class. He may cause a trade war, which would hurt the middle class. His lowering of corporate taxes will do nothing for the middle class; it will only help raise corporate profits and widen the gap between worker pay and ceo pay. Health insurance will be more burdensome for the lower middle class and poorer. If he is successful in screwing with medicare (which I predict he will try to do), that will really hurt the lower middle class and poorer.

I predict that international relations will suffer. Possibly a trade war, possibly conflicts over Syria, isis, and North Korea, and with Russia and China.

I predict that he will repeatedly act poorly in response to insults/negative comments, resulting in friction between him/his administration and many other entities: foreign countries, senators, congressman, governors, corporations, unions, government agencies, individuals, etc. And I predict that this friction will, in many cases, result in harm to our country and its people.

I predict he won’t build the wall that he promised, and that whatever pale shadow of that wall he does get built, if any, will not be paid for by Mexico.

I predict that the deplorable tenor he has brought to our national discourse will continue for a couple years, until cooler heads prevail, the tide turns against that kind of talk, he’s no longer cheered for it, and trump himself reins it in. But the damage is done.

I predict more made-for-tv deals like the Carrier one. I predict that they will have negligible effect on anything, except distracting from the real economic issues at hand.

I predict that America’s standing in the world will suffer. We may even no longer be looked at as the leaders of the free world (an outdated term, but that’s what we’re seen as).

I predict that he will continue to lie about easily-verifiable things, and this will cost him credibility around the world, as people learn to doubt anything he says.

I predict that his selection of morons like Ben Carson, scary fucks like Jeff Sessions, lunatics like Michael Flynn, and other assorted jackasses/losers, along with his reliance on family and those who have been loyal to him (regardless of their other merits – or lack thereof) will result in a general condition of infighting, incompetence, conflict, and malevolence in the trump administration.

I predict that the right-wing media will either blame all this on the “liberals,” or they’ll say everything is great, despite it not being great. I predict that trump supporters will buy whichever b.s. they decide to go with.

That’s most of it.

I’m hanging it out there, trump supporters. You can point to all this in 4 years and tell me how wrong I am, if I am (I hope I am).

One more: I predict that no trump supporters will have the guts to make any substantive, positive predictions about trump’s presidency.[/quote]

[grange9]

Void

[scaredyclassic]

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contract/

i predict every single contract item will be fulfilled.

[zk]

I predict Putin will play Trump like a fiddle.

(I’m not claiming that these predictions are all original. Many of them, such as this one, are so easy to predict that they might be considered all but inevitable. And they therefore have been predicted by many. But not, obviously, by Trump’s idiot voters.)

Trump’s emotional problems are obvious, and his reactions to praise and criticism are predictable, and Putin will use those tools to great effect in his manipulation of Trump. I predict Putin will be very shrewd and careful in his use of these tools. He’ll probably save the criticism for quite some time, until he’s got most or all of what he can get with praise. Because, as Trump’s behavior to date indicates, once you insult or criticize him, he turns into a small, vindictive, tantrum-throwing child, and it’s hard to get anything out of him. Putin, not being an idiot, knows this. He’ll save the criticism until he wants Trump to do something that only a vindictive, tantrum-throwing child would do.

[zk]

Not sure whether this falls under one of my predictions or not, but it’s pretty easy to predict that this won’t be the last time this happens.

“This” being trump saying something off the cuff and the thing he said having repercussions his simple, narcissism-addled brain couldn’t possibly foresee. Some of these things will be bad for his agenda (and therefore probably good for the country), while others will be bad for the country.

Hopefully there will be more of these:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/16/donald-trump-may-have-just-destroyed-the-republican-effort-to-repeal-obamacare/?utm_term=.b454c00174af

[FlyerInHi]

[quote=zk]

Hopefully there will be more of these:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/16/donald-trump-may-have-just-destroyed-the-republican-effort-to-repeal-obamacare/?utm_term=.b454c00174af
[/quote]

I just love this…

I think that Trump’s election was the last hooray of deplorable culture before we can move on to the modern 21st century.

One day, deplorables will be on Obamacare, driving electric cars, using LED lights fed by solar panels, even though they should have enough incandescent bulbs hoarded up to last a lifetime.
http://www.oldhouseweb.com/blog/8259-reasons-why-hoarding-light-bulbs-is-insane/

“As Government Bans Regular Light Bulbs, LED Replacements Will Cost $50 Each.” Mr. Beck, Rush Limbaugh and conservative bloggers around the country gleefully pounced on the story, once again urging the stockpiling of light bulbs.

Now you can find LED bulbs for 97c.

However, the irony won’t occur or their little peewee non-college educated brains, or should I say their light bulb won’t turn on.

[Anonymous]

Whenever anybody says anything negative about Obamacare, simply respond with this:

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said … “It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.”

[svelte]

Predictions:
(1) a fewer percentage of Americans will be covered by health insurance in 2024 that 2016
(2) health insurance, on average, will cost more in 2024 than 2016
(3) more troops will be deployed overseas in 2024 than 2016
(4) unemployment rate will be higher in 2024 than 2016
(5) deficit will be higher in 2024 than 2016

That’s all assuming Trump gets re-elected. If he doesn’t all bets are off since it will be comparing apples to oranges.

[mixxalot]

same for BMW and Mercedes and German cars. Fortunately, I don’t plan to buy another car for some time. Mine is paid off and cheaper to maintain than buy another one.

[zk]

Is this what you trump voters wanted?

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a52357/betsy-devos-hearing/

Big money buying big things. Well done, trump voters. The swamp is getting deeper.

[Anonymous]

“Flick said he saw some grizzly bears down by Pulaski’s candy store!”

– Ralphie justifying his need for a Red Ryder BB gun.

“… I would imagine there is probably a gun in a school to protect from potential grizzlies,”

– Betsy DeVos justifying the need for guns in schools.

[FlyerInHi]

Wider disparity between the prosperity in first tier cities and third tier cities.

Don’t let your kids move to second and third rate metros because they will never be able to move back.

[zk]

[quote=zk]
I predict that his selection of morons like Ben Carson, scary fucks like Jeff Sessions, lunatics like Michael Flynn, and other assorted jackasses/losers, along with his reliance on family and those who have been loyal to him (regardless of their other merits – or lack thereof) will result in a general condition of infighting, incompetence, conflict, and malevolence in the trump administration.

[/quote]

Am I the only one who feels like maybe he’s trolling us – or the media – with these picks? Picking the worst possible people in order to get a rise out of, say, the Washington Post?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/19/donald-trump-has-assembled-the-worst-cabinet-in-american-history/?utm_term=.45f4692a6497

Mattis actually seems like a pretty good pick, though.

[zk]

On his very first full day in office, all this happened:

I was going to post snippets from the article that illustrated his lying, scatterbrainedness, narcissism, vengefulness, and ignorance, but that ended up being most of the article, so I’ll just post the whole thing. God, what a loser. It’s going to be a very long 4 years.

If the press starts to cower at his aggression toward them, it’s all over. Because after that, everybody will be reading fake news, because that’s all there will be. Then you’ll have an entire country of manipulated people and god knows what could happen then. I love this country, and I never thought I’d consider leaving it, even with as horrible a president as trump. But that’s a scenario where I might actually move to another country.

————————————–

WASHINGTON — President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.
In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency designed to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.
He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.
Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where he delivered a scolding to reporters and made a series of false statements.

Mr. Spicer said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.
The statements from the new president and his spokesman came as hundreds of thousands of people protested against Mr. Trump, a crowd that appeared to dwarf the one that gathered the day before when he was sworn in. It was a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency, usually a time when the White House works to set a tone of national unity and build confidence in a new leader.
Instead, the president and his team appeared embattled and defensive, signaling that the pugnacious style Mr. Trump employed as a candidate will persist now that he has ascended to the nation’s highest office.
Saturday was supposed to be a day for Mr. Trump to mend fences with an intelligence community he had publicly scorned, with an appearance at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies, and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.

“I just want to let you know, I am so behind you,” Mr. Trump told more than 300 employees assembled in the lobby for his remarks.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has questioned the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia meddled in the United States election on his behalf. After the disclosure of a dossier with unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Trump, he accused the intelligence community of allowing the leak and wrote on Twitter: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
On Saturday, he said journalists were responsible for any suggestion that he was not fully supportive of intelligence agencies’ work.
“I have a running war with the media,” Mr. Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”
“The reason you’re the No. 1 stop is, it is exactly the opposite,” Mr. Trump added. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”
Mr. Trump also took issue with news reports about the number of people who attended his inauguration, complaining that the news media used photographs of “an empty field” to make it seem as if his inauguration did not draw many people.
“We caught them in a beauty,” Mr. Trump said of the news media, “and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
Mr. Spicer said that Mr. Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” a statement that photographs clearly show to be false. Mr. Spicer said photographs of the inaugural ceremonies were deliberately framed “to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” although he provided no proof of either assertion.
Photographs of Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and of Mr. Trump’s plainly showed that the crowd on Friday was significantly smaller, but Mr. Spicer attributed that disparity to new white ground coverings he said had caused empty areas to stand out and to security measures that had blocked people from entering the Mall.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Mr. Spicer said. He also admonished a journalist for erroneously reporting on Friday that Mr. Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office, calling the mistake — which was corrected quickly — “egregious.”
And he incorrectly claimed that ridership on Washington’s subway system was higher than on Inauguration Day in 2013. In reality, there were 782,000 riders that year, compared with 571,000 riders this year, according to figures from the city’s transit authority.
Mr. Spicer also said that security measures had been extended farther down the National Mall this year, preventing “hundreds of thousands of people” from viewing the ceremony. But the Secret Service said the measures were largely unchanged this year, and there were few reports of long lines or delays.
Commentary about the size of his inauguration crowd made Mr. Trump increasingly angry on Friday, according to several people familiar with his thinking.
On Saturday, he told his advisers that he wanted to push back hard on “dishonest media” coverage — mostly referring to a Twitter post from a New York Times reporter showing side-by-side frames of Mr. Trump’s crowd and Mr. Obama’s in 2009. But most of Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him to focus on the responsibilities of his office during his first full day as president.
However, in his remarks at the C.I.A., he wandered off topic several times, at various points telling the crowd he felt no older than 39 (he is 70); reassuring anyone who questioned his intelligence by saying, “I’m, like, a smart person”; and musing out loud about how many intelligence workers backed his candidacy.
“Probably everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re all on the same wavelength, folks.”
But most of his remarks were devoted to attacking the news media. And Mr. Spicer picked up the theme later in the day in the White House briefing room. But his appearance, according to the sources, went too far, in Mr. Trump’s opinion.
The president’s appearance at the C.I.A. touched off a fierce reaction from some current and former intelligence officials.
Nick Shapiro, who served as chief of staff to John O. Brennan, who resigned Friday as the C.I.A. director, said Mr. Brennan “is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of C.I.A.’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes.
“Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself,” Mr. Shapiro added.
“I was heartened that the president gave a speech at C.I.A.,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. “It would have been even better if more of it had been about C.I.A.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that he had had high hopes for Mr. Trump’s visit as a step to begin healing the relationship between the president and the intelligence community, but that Mr. Trump’s meandering speech had dashed them.
“While standing in front of the stars representing C.I.A. personnel who lost their lives in the service of their country — hallowed ground — Trump gave little more than a perfunctory acknowledgment of their service and sacrifice,” Mr. Schiff said. “He will need to do more than use the agency memorial as a backdrop if he wants to earn the respect of the men and women who provide the best intelligence in the world.”
Mr. Trump said nothing during the visit about how he had mocked the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies as “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” He did not mention his apparent willingness to believe Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who is widely detested at the C.I.A., over his own intelligence agencies.
He also did not say whether he would start receiving the daily intelligence briefs that are prepared for the president. The agency sees the president as its main audience, and his dismissal of the need for daily briefings from the intelligence community has raised concerns about morale among people who believe their work will not be respected at the Trump White House.
Since the election, hopes at the C.I.A. that the new administration would bring an infusion of energy and ideas have given way to trepidation about what Mr. Trump and his loyalists have planned. But the nomination of Mike Pompeo, a former Army infantry officer who is well versed in issues facing the intelligence community, to lead the C.I.A. has been received positively at the agency.
“He has left the strong impression that he doesn’t trust the intelligence community and that he doesn’t have tremendous regard for their work,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a retired C.I.A. analyst. “The obvious thing to do is to counter that by saying, ‘I value you, I look forward to working with you.’”
“He called them Nazis,” Mr. Lowenthal added, referring to Mr. Trump’s characterization of the intelligence community. Mr. Lowenthal said Saturday’s visit should have been “a stroking expedition.”

[FlyerInHi]

ZK, please keep on updating us. Im counting on you for news. Please share what is most salient about Trump. Im following the news less now, so I might miss something.

I’m smelling the roses more these days.

[Author]

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