“The Year of Chaos” Underperforms
I said 2024 would be the ‘Year of Chaos,’ and while it is easy to point out a large number of things that were chaotic this past year, it’s a big world, and there is always a large number of things that are chaotic.
Since I point out whenever I’m right, I owe it to everyone to point out whenever I’m wrong. (It’s fair and not boasting if you do it with equanimity either way. Then the goal is really just tracking what works and what doesn’t to see if the projected trends are coming in as projected.) If I’m wrong too much, I’ll just go away. I have no desire to write this stuff if I am wrong a fair amount of the time. It doesn’t pay that well.
So, though I’ll point out below some of the extravagant chaos of the past year, let me start by saying I wouldn’t consider 2024 that much more chaotic than any other year and less so than 2020 and 2021 by far. So, I’m not going to give myself a win on this one just because it had its points of chaos along the way, and I think I’ll avoid declaring 2025 as the year of anything, though another year of chaos is certainly tempting in terms of what it looks like it will be.
The biggest fail of my 2024 predictions
To start off with, the biggest chaos I expected was right after the election. If the results were close, I expected either side to fight tooth and nail to claim victory, but that didn’t happen. I think that, because the victory was large enough not to change, Democrats largely tucked their tails between their legs and preferred not to brag about their losses by contending Trump’s victory—better to just let things settle down than keep underscoring how much they lost because there was no way they were going to swing things enough to snatch victory from the defeat in their mouths, anyway.
Of course, that Trump victory narrowed as the days rambled on after election night, but it held with razor-thin margins in congress, but held all the same. The electoral college did what it usually does and tipped a larger percentage of total votes to the victor than popular vote would have. That’s our system. No one has a right to complain it is corrupt when it works against them. They can work to change it legislatively if they want; but, until they manage to pull of that off, it is what it is for everyone.
One could argue that Democrats are just a much better bunch at taking their defeat and living with a president they don’t like than Republicans turned out to be in 2020 where they screamed “not my president” for the entirety of four years after deploring Democrats for having said that when Trump won. I suspect, though, it is more the initial margin of victory that tamped things down. The gap between the two candidates was just too big to cover with screams and tirades about how the election was decided.
To be sure, Trump did all he could to lay the groundwork for claiming the election was rigged if he lost. Then, one prediction on this matter I did get right: he went silent on how corrupt the process is the second he won and won’t be putting any work into fixing it. We haven’t heard a word about how rigged it is ever since. (Now that was an easy prediction to make because that is the same thing that happened last time he won.)
Democrats have shown they are more than capable of violence of their own, which they displayed on steroids for months during the Black-Lives-Matter riots and the Antifa takeovers of Seattle and Portland and other domiciles. But this time, they are actually acting like those who claim they want to save democracy should always act after an election by just accepting the results they didn’t want. Many I will note pledged to leave the country if Trump won, but I haven’t seen a mass exodus across the borders so far, though a few celebrities have made noise about leaving. They are clashing cymbals, I think. Perhaps they can drag a few illegal aliens with them in their wake if they actually do as they say they will.
Of course, twenty days still remain until they could storm the halls of congress and try to stop government from performing its official documentation of the vote, as Senator Jamie Raskin already said he’d do, making himself no better than those he pretended to give a trial to in the monkey courts of congress. (He, too, has been silent about his plan to stop certification of the vote lately, or word has just not made it in my direction; so, maybe wiser heads prevailed.)
I’m actually glad I failed on this prediction of seething election chaos. Seeing some actual civility over the election results, instead of the civil war some on the far Right had threatened (and that I thought we’d see from the far Left if they lost by a thin margin, too) gives me a little hope for the nation. It is, however, a fragile civility, and I count on Trump to do all he can to blow holes through it with his boisterous nature.
Another year of chaos, only this time with actual chaos?
I think, if any year is chaotic, it will be the one ahead where Trump plans to blow the government apart, Left and Right, to the fullest extent he can. To be clear, I’m for many of his goals and blowing some parts up (not literally, of course. You have to make that clear these days or the censors will shut you down); but you can’t dismantle the Deep State and not cause a lot of chaos because the Deep State fights back.
I am, however, also not all that convinced that Team Trump is looking fully up to the job, but it is better suited than the last team he assembled. That was the biggest mess of a conglomerated swamp creature I ever saw, so there was never any way he was going to drain the swamp back then. It drained him.
This time he’s assembled a mix of swamp busters and seasoned swamp creatures, led by billionaires everywhere you look, so I’m certain it will, above all else, be a good year for billionaires. But when is it not? After all, according to today’s news, billionaires did swell in the past year, too. Go figure. The world’s Fortune 500 in people passed $10-trillion wealth this year. I’m just not sure how that will go for me.
With the billionaires all busting it and in charge of assembling the new government as presidential advisors, let’s just reflect a bit on Trump’s first term as #45.
People are hoping the lies of the Biden administration will be destroyed by Trump, and I’m sure some of those lies will be destroyed, but they’ll just be replaced by a whole new pack of lies. Do you seriously think we are going to get anything resembling truth out of Trump?
You have to have been beaten on each side of your head by each party until punch drunk if you do. Politicians are no more honest on the Right than the Left when it comes to hiding their own nefarious deeds or never seeing their own biases and pumping us all full of helium about how well their ideas will fly and then trying to convince us they’re going better than they are. So, Trump as a new bastion of truth?
The man lies all the time–boasts about everything he does as being ten times bigger and better than it really is, leaves people hanging on projects for millions of dollars, promises things he never accomplishes, makes up his own fictitious conspiracy theories. Let me give you some reminders:
Did he ever come up with a plan that was “better, so much better” than Obamacare? He never came up with any plan at all! And that was a major campaign plank last time. It didn’t look like he even TRIED to come up with a plan. He just let congress squabble all over the place because he loves the negative energy of a big fight. The Republican congress he won with his first presidential victory, also always promised it would repeal and replace Obamacare. All they did was prove unmistakably that it is easier to criticize any plan that exists than it is to come up with anything new of your own that actually works and that you can actually agree on. Congress never came up with a plan. All they did was prove Republicans cannot govern.
Did Trump use his mandate to manage congressional members to pull them together to make deals? I saw no visible deal making going on to create a new medical plan. There was no artful leadership, pushing and pulling individuals together and bringing in the brightest minds. It was a total mess. That is why he was practically silent about Obamacare this time around. In the end, no one is going to repeal the existing plan when everyone knows you have nothing better to replace it with.
You’ve heard me say it before, but did Mexico pay for the wall? Never. Not even through tariffs. The whole “Mexico will pay for it, and it will be EASY, just you wait and se) was always ballyhoo. The tariff money was paid by US importers and exporters and not that much of it was passed along via price adjustments to Mexicans who told us to get lost—said they’d buy their beef from Argentina, thank you very much. And the government money that did go into the wall was already fully appropriated in defense funds. So, he didn’t get any additional government money approved. He just moved the earmarks over a little.
As for all that tariff money that was collected and paid for mostly by American businesses that couldn’t convince Mexicans to cut their prices enough to compensate, that money went to the general fund to be spent by Biden the following year on educating your children on how to change gender and to pay for their reassignment surgeries if they joined the military. Most of the wall money came from Trump’s own supporters. (Talk about getting taken to the cleaners. They paid far more in tariffs than Mexicans ever did in price adjustments because so few prices were adjusted so little. And then they paid again through crowdsourcing, which mostly got ripped off by Bannon & Co. Trump didn’t even orchestrate the construction, and he told all of us, he’d be great at that because he’s a builder. It’s what he does. Instead, his supporters had to hire their own contractors!
It was a four-year parade of lies from both parties—about Trump and Russiagate, etc. from the Left and by and always about Trump from Trump. If there is one thing he knows how to do well, it is blow his own horn all the time. So, no, I don’t have a lot of confidence about how well all of this will go, except that it will be chaotic from all sides: but, hey, I said that last year, so take it with a grain of salt. I clearly don’t know how to call my chaos.
As for what Trump has told us is coming, here’s a broad stroke of the brush:
Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president for the second time on January 20 2025. During his election campaign Trump made a number of dramatic promises, including pledges that he would “end inflation,” pay off “a tremendous amount” of the U.S. national debt and end the Russia-Ukraine war if he was returned to the White House.
We shall see. If he accomplishes just those three things, that would be a big change, but (getting more specific than just predicting “chaos”) I think the first two of those three things will go the opposite way—at least for the first couple of years. The last of the three, may happen in 2025, and Trump will take credit for it; but Putin is practically spent into the dust already. So, is Ukraine. So, I imagine both are more ready to deal than they were a year ago. They’re just fighting to gain some leverage in the negotiations.
As for the “Year of Chaos’“
Sure, 2024 was chaotic, even a bit more than normal, but I’ll take it over 2020 and 2021, which were disastrously chaotic by design, upsetting the way the world works forever. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, lets take a shortcut and look at …
“2024’s chaotic news cycles in one chart”
If it wasn’t all of that, it would have been all of something else.