My Non-Prediction Predictions For 2025

It's probably gonna be weird...

(Image by allanswart)

Happy New Years Eve, readers.

My last set of predictions—well, they failed to will a better-than-expected 2024 into existence. D’oh! So this year I’m going to try to aim a bit closer to conventional wisdom: A little bit of wishcasting, a little bit of doomcasting, averaging out to something akin to a modal scenario for 2025. Alas, if we were able to run the experiment more than once, I’d replay 2024 over and over again until we landed on one where Trump lost and raindrops were donuts.

This is mostly for entertainment, but I always try to conjure plausible developments, consistent with the kind of analytical approach that defines my “real” work here.

If you’ve appreciated that work over the past year, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription, so Off Message can expand operations in the coming months.

Now, for my “predictions”:

1. Joe Biden will end his presidency without taking a significant, unconventional step to protect the country from the incoming Trump administration.

2. 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.

3. Merrick Garland will publish a self-serving op-ed justifying his failed tenure as attorney general, in either the New York Times, Washington Post, or Atlantic.

4. Biden and Kamala Harris will attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration, but the Clintons and Obamas will not.

5. The first year of Trump 2.0 will be more shambolic than the first year of Trump 1.0, despite the benefit of four years of experience. Trump and his loyalists really will take power better prepared to implement a number of malicious ideas, but will make less progress and create more chaos than they did in 2017 for two simple reasons:

   1. First, because their added increments of preparedness will be swamped by their much greater arrogance, leading them to shed guardrails, fall into obvious traps, and overreach.

   2. Second, because they’ll be inheriting the country at a somewhat less-stable equilibrium than they did last time: highly prosperous, but with less room to maneuver without generating inflation or triggering a recession.

6. Macroeconomic indicators in December 2025 will be worse than they were in January 2025, but economic sentiment will not return to its Biden-era doldrums, because Trump will relentlessly blame the Biden administration for all of his failures, and both the right-wing and mainstream media will play along, in their own ways.

7. Trump will manage to get Senate Republicans to confirm at least one of his most unfit nominees—Pete Hegseth at DOD, Tulsi Gabbard at DNI, Pam Bondi at DOJ, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at HHS, or Kash Patel at FBI—who will quickly embroil themselves in a scandal that drives them from office.

8. Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas will both retire; Trump will nominate Aileen Cannon to replace one of them, but she will have to withdraw from her consideration and accept an appeals court vacancy instead because she won’t have enough votes for Supreme Court confirmation.

9. Early retirements and special elections will tip the House narrowly into Democratic control; Republicans will attempt a House-level equivalent of an insurrection to deny Democrats the speakership, but their efforts will fail. Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, like Nancy Pelosi before him, will resist confrontation with Trump and abdicate the most urgent congressional oversight.

10. Trump will try but fail to end Russia’s war in Ukraine on Russia’s terms; the war will persist; Democrats will use their leverage over government spending to appropriate Ukraine some aid, but Trump will withhold it. Jeffries will turn to the courts instead of Congress’s inherent powers to force Trump’s hand, leaving Ukraine in the lurch, and the legal issue unresolved until either the war ends or the Supreme Court weighs in on the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act.

11. At least one whistleblower will expose a Trump abuse of power more corrupt than the 2019 Ukraine extortion scheme. Between Trump’s presumptive immunity and bipartisan congressional cowardice, nothing will come of it.

12. Trump will be much less imperious as a public figure than he was in the first year of his first term, as age and exhaustion overtake his narcissism.

13. Trump and Elon Musk will try to prove their critics wrong by agreeing amongst themselves that neither of them can afford a bitter falling out. This will work for most of the year, but establish a set of incentives that makes their eventual altercation escalatory: Trump will announce on Truth Social that Musk has decided to step away from DOGE to address conflicts of interest; Musk will dispute this on X; Trump will terminate Musk’s federal contracts or seize control of SpaceX; Musk will transform X into an engine of, and megaphone for, anti-Trump content; Trump will order the Justice Department to indict Musk, again on Truth Social; X will be the main forum for a mysterious “leak” of compromising information about Trump and a number of senior administration officials.

14. Musk’s net worth will fall below $100 billion.

15. A more reliably pro-MAGA right-wing billionaire or consortium of loyalists will buy TikTok U.S.

16. Whether or not RFK Jr. becomes HHS secretary, there will be at least one deadly local disease outbreak tied to the MAGA/RFK-led explosion of anti-vaccine lies.

17. There will be at least one major cryptocurrency scandal and one major artificial-intelligence snafu, triggering a major rethink of both technologies throughout the culture.

18. The Mets will win the World Series.