It’s time to dust off your crystal balls and make some fearless predictions and projections.
What do you see happening in/to America during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency?
Do you expect any big changes domestically and/or internationally? For better? For worse?
Or will it be business as usual, as in same old, same old?
Will Trump still be president at this time next year? Or will he resign or have been impeached or otherwise removed from office? Will Mike Pence be the president?
Make your projections: the good, the bad and the ugly.
We’ll revisit this a year from now, and see who has the best crystal ball.
— Jillian
Photo credit: Horseshoe Bend Crystal Ball, D. Scott Taylor via Foter.com / CC BY-ND
Jillian Page 
I was wrong about the election result. I predicted a close HRC win. It was a close loss. Guess I might as well weigh in equally heedlessly per your invitation.
Trump will not be impeached. The GOP Congress leadership regards him as a “signing machine” for their bills, and easier to control than Pence would be. Trump’s diet is bad enough to cause a heart attack, but no one can predict the timing of that, so I’ll just say he will gain at least 30 lbs., have liposuction, then deny he had surgery. The Democrats will be as obstructionist as the GOP was over the past eight years. Fair’s fair. They won’t be able to stop the law changes, but will be able to slow confirmations, so we will still have hundreds of vacancies on the courts and elsewhere. Good people will die needlessly from neglect. The rich will keep getting richer. Every aspect of government that wasn’t for sale already now will be. It will be the most corrupt administration since Grant, and most of the criminals will only be indicted by historians. After his second-term loss, Vladimir Putin will call in Trump’s debts to Russian oligarchs and it will be revealed that he has been financially insolvent for two decades. His supporters will say it’s not their fault they were fooled.
Unless he actually causes WW3 by pissing off other countries with tweets, it won’t impact my life one way or the other. I’m white, straight, male, retired, and I have enough money. Anyone not in those categories would be wise to fasten their seat belts for a bumpy ride. HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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Trump will not last a year, and we will be stuck with the Homophobe-in-chief, President Pence, for three more years. Trump will either quit in the first 60-days because he discovers that he is expected to work at the job and that he doesn’t have a sovereign dictatorship, or he will be impeached because his kleptocracy will be so audacious that even his new Republican friends will be tarnished by association, especially when they realize that they will likely lose in the 2018 Congressional elections. Trump will botch relations with other countries that we will probably be in a shooting war by the end of the first year of the reign of Trump. It will likely be with Iran because Trump will abrogate the Iran Nuclear agreement which will piss off a lot of allied countries and give Iran the green-light to develop nuclear weapons. Israel will not sit by and will strike the Iranian nuclear research facilities, then Iran will retaliate, hitting military bases in Israel. We will get sucked into the war because of our treaty obligations with Israel. Trump and Netanyahu are quite eager to start a war. Iran will also begin manufacturing IED’s again. They stopped making IEDs for the terrorist groups under an agreement with Saint Reagan that permitted them to conduct nuclear research. Iran will have allies in the Middle East, while we will have none.
Domestically, our economy will be a mess in a year. There will be job losses, maybe as bad as under Bush the Lesser. Yes, Trump will brag about the thousand or so new jobs that he will take credit for, completely ignoring the tens of thousands of jobs lost. Except that he will blame Obama for those. The country will be even deeper in debt than now due to his tax cuts for the rich. Trump doesn’t plan to invest in infrastructure- he plans to give the public infrastructure to private enterprises who will invest for a profit. Many bridges and roads that are badly in need of repairs will become toll bridges and roads. Oh, and expect a lot of eminent domain property seizures. Trump and the Republican Oligarchy will get very, very wealthy.
As long as Trump will sign any of the regressive right-wing bills sent to him by Congress, they will love him, defend him and promote his fake facts. As soon as he stops being their puppet and more Putin’s puppet, the Republican party will turn on him. The people who will be hurt the most are his base supporters. (AKA White Men).
This is my optimistic outlook.
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I think they administration will work on the “low-hanging fruit” of eliminating all the pro-transgender executive orders. This will immensely please (and relieve) the conservative religionists among them (we trans folk are very VERY threatening to them). The other executive orders from the Obama administration will be eliminated – because it’s easy, very symbolic and will feel cathartic to conservatives. In the first 100 days I suspect we will see this. In the first year we will see a generation of gains in the LGBT community thrown back. By a year we will likely have a conservative Supreme Court, and then all three branches of government will be in conservative hands – expect to see anti-trans set-back generations by the court and expect that Marriage Equality will be under assault if not eliminated. Meanwhile there will be public outcry both in support and against all these assaults against the queer community. By two years, they will have us at least legally & politically where they want us, and they can focus on rolling-back gains for the larger, more “likeable” minorities, with women’s gains being under full assault by the end of Trump’s first term. LGBT gains are gone, likely for at least a generation. Other gains may be held if the republicans loose enough congressional seats in the off-year election: this could preserve gains for racial minorities and for women. The fact that demographics are moving toward white males being in minority will not have any bite for at least two years, possibly four. By then the court will be lost for one or two generations…
…The only bright side I see to this is that minorities (particularly queer folk, and even more particularly, my fellow trans folk) need to be more visible (in a positive way) and need to build relationships. It is ONLY THROUGH THIS that society (any society) will come to value these members as fellow human beings. Once this is done, that legal reforms will come easily – society will protect what it values and will consume those people it doesn’t. What activism & legal reforms haven given the LGBT community up to this point, have enabled us to be more be more visible and relational with a moderately increased degree of safety. It’s becoming unsafe again, BUT many of us are still visible (and I will remain so), and it’s this being present that will slowly change society…
…I harp so much on the LGBT community, but we are the “canaries in the mine” and as society improves, we improve and as it descends we bear a great deal of the hurt. When society is better able to see us as humans, they will already have become better for less marginalized minorities: we’re at the bottom of the “pecking-order.”
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