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After the 2016 election, people in the news-commentary business swung hard, en masse, against predictions. Everyone resolved to “get out of the predictions business.” Who could blame them after what had just happened? I probably said something along those lines myself—though even back then, I think I tried to be careful about the distinctions between analysis, synthesis, forecasting, and prediction, and (thus) not get too far ahead of myself.
That’s why the predictions/no-predictions binary never sat well with me. You can’t ask anyone, let alone a pundit, to see the future, but you do want commentators to see things clearly, and thus have a decent sense of how things might develop in response to changing circumstances. Or, at least, you should. The perspiration is in gathering facts, understanding them, and explaining how they interact. The inspiration is having a decent sense of what it all augurs for the future.
Taking the most generic example: I argue that Democrats should fight harder for many reasons—but the linchpin of it all is that I assess and believe that it would make the future look a little brighter. Is that a prediction? Not exactly… but it bears a family resemblance.
To magnify these fine-grained distinctions, I write a single, whimsical end-of-year post containing actual predictions, all stated with low confidence. The process is relatively painless: oh I got something wrong? Well, joke’s on you, I barely meant it! But the purpose is to shed some light on why I make the arguments I make the other 364 days a year.
The real accountability comes from readers: Has the writing I’ve published here over the past year helped you better understand what’s happening in the country, and what it would take to make things better? Have you found it mostly enjoyable or bracing to read? Is it a welcome part of a healthy ritual? If so, then you should “hold me accountable” by sticking around into the new year, or even upgrading your subscription!
Ok, on a slightly more serious note, let’s see how I did…
Joe Biden will end his presidency without taking a significant, unconventional step to protect the country from the incoming Trump administration.
Completely nailed it. Best prediction of all time. Alas, a pretty easy one, too. Many progressives were heartened to hear Biden echo Dwight Eisenhower in his own farewell address. He warned of an emerging tech-industrial complex led by an oligarchy “that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
He was right. But let’s be honest, by January 2025, Biden had no juice. Most of the country was ready for him to disappear, and his remaining supporters were heavily demoralized. The oligarchy assembled and started grabbing whatever it could.
Biden squandered basically every opportunity he had over four years to hold Trump and his most corrupt abettors accountable. (Remember when he bailed out Silicon Valley Bank?) After he announced his retirement in the summer of 2024, he could have offered to work with Congress to impose constraints on the presidency that would have applied to all presidents going forward, including whoever won the 2024 election.
It might all have come to nothing, of course. Republicans in Washington are rapacious malefactors. But it would have laid a predicate for acting unilaterally during his lame-duck period. He could have ordered the release of the Epstein files. Or of Jack Smith’s report on the classified-document theft prosecution of Donald Trump. He could have canceled Elon Musk’s federal contracts and stripped any of his extant security clearances. Things like this wouldn’t have saved the country, of course, but they would have protected it by slowing the incoming regime down and weakening it politically. Shame.
After Biden leaves office, we will learn that his advisers urged him to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray in December 2024 and demand quick confirmation of a qualified, permanent FBI director—one who’d have no record to mine for pre-textual “for cause” termination—but Biden was too checked out and resentful to act.
There’s no evidence I’m aware of that the outgoing Biden team discussed the Wray situation at all, after Wray announced his retirement in December 2024. So this is a miss in the literal sense. But I think it holds up OK anyhow, as a corollary of prediction (1) which, as we just discussed, I nailed. Democrats controlled the Senate. Biden could have fired Wray, nominated someone qualified-but-low-profile for the job (