Exilian

So, last year, I had some "median predictions" for Trump's second term. Those were as follows:

2025 predictions

• It's going to be nasty. The things the cabinet and congress can all agree on will be things like border security, deregulating cryptocurrency, and some of the 'anti-woke' stuff: the pointlessly cruel or simply climate-burning bits of the Trump agenda.
• The economic side of Trump's agenda is probably doomed. There may be an outside chance that Trump can sacrifice America's long-term geopolitical position and climate efforts to try and get a short term economic boom: if Trump sacrifices Ukraine and drills a lot he might get oil prices down, though at the cost of America's position in Europe. In general either his protectionism happens, in which case it will be very inflationary and voters will get upset, or business interests and political concerns stave off the protectionism in which case Trump's nationalist base start feuding with the said business interests. I guess I'd say maybe 20% that Trump gets a high by luck more than judgement, 20% his approval slides on bad inflation, 20% his approval craters horribly in a major economic depression, 30% the tarriffs keep getting staved off amid political infighting.
• It's probably not going to retain coherence. The usual popularity dip of a midterm will be more than enough for Trump to lose the house, and if things are going badly the Senate isn't invulnerable either. So Trump has two years, not four, for big changes, and he has a cabinet with very, very different opinions on what those should be, plus senators who'll be being lobbied in various ways. I think that's what's most likely to scupper attempts to seriously gut state structures or move the US more solidly towards autocracy.
• So my midpoint scenario is that Trump's popularity keeps up until maybe April, slumps by a regular amount during 2025, and by this November the wheels are coming off the cart a bit, 2026 up to the midterms then becomes mostly feuding as swing-state senators balk at an unpopular agenda and/or get primaried from the right. And all of this is happening against a background of large-scale deportations, US alliances creaking at the seams or snapping entirely, and a bad economic climate.
• That's a median prediction, so there are options that are less bad (the feuding starts much earlier and they get almost nothing done, Musk is funding a new party by the midterms that splits the GOP vote) and options that are worse (global economic depression, unexpectedly efficient Orbanisation policies).

And here's how I think those are going.

• The cruelty bit: definitely happening. ICE are, as has been observed elsewhere, not operating like a secret police but like visible brownshirts.
• Economically things have held up surprisingly well for Trump so far: I think there's a few reasons for this. One of them is Trump's tendency to back off from or abandon initial maximalist positions (on every issue) - so we've ended up with a rough set of tariffs, but not the scale or level of sea change one might have envisaged at times last year. Second reason is acquiescence by business, who have in several cases moved to invest in the US to placate or buy favour from Trump. Third reason is the AI boom, which has fuelled enormous investment that has no way to pay itself back, which if the bubble pops could be the thing that kills this Trump economy. I think a bit of this I hadn't thought about enough was the extent to which business organisations could and would actively prop up Trump's economy to buy favour.
• It's also important to note that Americans do not think the economy is fine. Whilst a lot of that is partisan bias - opinions on the economy have basically become divorced from the actual economy in the last 10-20 years - Trump's approval rating on the economy is at -15 and on inflation is at -24, which are numbers that require a significant minority of Republicans to be rating his administration badly on those issues. Those numbers have improved since November (-21 and -34 then), and if the economy stays reasonable this year Trump might get some credit back, but if there's an actual crash, given these are the numbers when unemployment is steady and inflation is significantly down from its 2022 peaks...
• I think my general sense on lack of coherence has held up. Trump's admin is pulled between different sorts of far-right, some isolationist, some hawkish, some spend-maxing, some state-shrinkers. A lot of the real hard core of ideologues in Congress have already peeled off (Massie, MTG). We've also got stuff like Venezuela, where Trump has kidnapped a guy to please the hawks but can't follow it up with regime change or boots on the ground because of the isolationists and the enormous cost, so it increasingly looks like nothing will change except the US engaging in some petty piracy of oil tankers.
• I think it's therefore true now that the Trump fascist maximalist position has probably passed its main likelihood window. Nobody serious in US politics currently thinks the midterms will be cancelled, therefore the position for Republicans becomes thinking about seat defence and distancing from an unpopular president, not bowing the knee in case a tyrant liquidates them. That means Trump's actions will be more restricted to immigration and foreign policy this year, and if he loses any part of congress, much more restricted thereafter.
• Trump's approval slumped pretty fast and did not in fact hold up until April. About twenty points of damage happened by the end of April, with a further slide in November that seems to have taken him past the minus ten mark. His current aggregate approval with 538 is -12.3. Biden's in January 2022 was about -10. Democrats did well in 2022 compared to what one might expect from that, but there's gathering evidence that Democrats are performing much better and Republicans much worse in "off years".

Trump approval graph:

Graph image

(https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/nZWxp/full.png)

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So, since we seem to be having midterms coming up, what of those?

• Gerrymandering will probably favour the Republicans, but not by enough to win, a midterm that becomes a referendum on an unpopular president is too big a thing to swing with a bit of inconsistent boundary shifting.
• Current opinion polling for the House suggests a D+4 or D+5 environment but with a lot of undecided voters. I think the economy & cost of living might be key to how those people break and if they turn out: these will be the people for whom the ICE stuff or Venezuela isn't deal-breaking (or they'd already be planning to vote Democrat).
• The Senate is the GOP's to lose, but they might still lose it. Looking at polling the Democrats need to hold all their current seats (tough fights in Michigan, Georgia, and NH should be alleviated by an anti-Trump national environment) and then make four gains to reach 51. Michigan is the one hold Democrats might have problems with, the polling is still very tight there. If they make the holds, the easiest route to 51 is probably North Carolina (Roy Cooper polling ahead, incumbent retiring), Maine (very tight race), Alaska (Mary Peltola polling well and often ahead), and then either Ohio (Sherrod Brown's personal vote keeping the race competitive to regain his old seat) or Nebraska (independent Dan Osborn running again, lost by 6 points last time).
• Florida looks solidly Republican, Democrats aren't really closing the gap in Texas either though it could close in the event of a severe enough economic shock potentially. If there's a "sleeper" surprise win for Democrats it'd most likely be Iowa, where they're only polling about three points behind.
• Don't hold your breath for a subsequent removal of Trump from office, that requires not 51 but 67 votes in the Senate. That would require the Democrats to win every Senate race this round, including ones they're obviously not even trying to win like Idaho etc.
• My general expectation is that Dems will flip the house narrowly but not the Senate. If there's a very severe economic downturn that might shift.

I obviously haven't touched on lots of other things happening in the US, but that's a starting point for considering how the political year might go. We'll see.