For those interested in the why and when:

The only genuine goal of trump and his actual close associates is going to be extracting as much money as humanly possible from the American taxpayers and public. They don’t actually care at all about any of the culture war issues or identity politics which they built their entire campaign on. All of these things are simply distractions and were used only to gain support and trick the dump people who voted for him. Shortly after taking office trump will quickly lose focus on moving the needle for any of these initiatives. That being said, there are many followers of his who do truly believe in the conservative agenda and their efforts will be unbridled. Trump will endorse, support, or sign off on virtually any conservative initiative brought to his desk regardless of how cruel, unethical, or unjust it is, so long as the initiative does not impede his true agenda – accumulating money and power. At the same time he will proudly boast and take credit for these accomplishments when interacting with his extremists base, claiming to have delivered on the initiatives which he had run on. Overall, at absolutely no point whatsoever will the focus be on improving the wellbeing and quality of life for ordinary Americans.

Trump will make a deal with Putin, sacrificing Ukraine with the understanding that war will end and that he will not take any more land and will not attack NATO. This will only enable Putin further, and Putin will continue to attack a NATO nation (or take more Ukraine land). The nation will invoke NATO protection seeking assistance from other nations, to include the US. Trump will make up an excuse as to why the US is not obligated to assist and will not send US troops boots on the ground. The other way that this could go is that trump is irate and out of a knee jerk reaction launches a major war against Russia. If scenario A plays out, then other adversaries will see that and in reciprocity allied nations will not come to the aid of the US if attacked, and will likely strike an attack. If this happens the US will ask for help but the requests will be denied. Likely this will occur on far away soil not covered by the NATO agreement, for example Marshall Islands or Guam. In a worst case scenario the land will actually be invaded, likely via the “little green men” method, most likely a minor territory such as Marshall Islands or Mariana Islands.

Major inflation will occur, with certain assets seemingly becoming more valuable; for example the price of bitcoin will increase however this is just as much the value of the US dollar going down as it is the price of bitcoin going up.

Gas will become more expensive, regardless of how much the US adds to production; processing is limited anyways by US refinery capacity. The reason gas will go up is that gas being a product with a non-linear cost/price correlation, meaning that the cost of creating a gallon of gas stays relatively stable regardless of the sale price. This means that oil companies make exponential profits when the sale price goes up even if it’s just marginally. Altogether this means that an increase in gas price will hugely benefit the fossil fuel industry which is already aligned with trump, and the entire presidency is going to be one big money grab with the only real objective being for his circle of wealthy associates gaining as much money as humanely possible. This only incentivizes the price of gas/oil to increase. Additionally increased geographic instability will influence the price of gas to increase. Lastly, of all people elon musk has the biggest inherent motivation for the price of gas to increase, as his electric car company needs high gas prices to thrive. Electric cars are only attractive when gas prices are high. Again, the entire presidency’s primary focus is going to be for friends and family to stuff their pockets as much as possible, especially elon musk.

Housing prices will remain high or could potentially continue to increase based on a few premises. The housing affordability crisis which he ran on claiming to solve will not be resolved. If, by unlikely chance housing prices do start to fall significantly, it will be due to failed economic policies and economic recession (similar to 2008 housing market crash), rather than intentional action and policy. Housing prices will remain high because high housing prices benefit the super rich elites, so long as super wealthy real estate investors are benefitting from housing price gouging there will never be an incentive to truly solve this problem. Additionally to lower housing prices there needs to be an increase in homes being place on the market – younger people who have purchased homes, particularly on lower interest rates, will not be incentivized to sell because the challenge will remain of where to buy (expensive across the board). Additionally they would need to trade their decent mortgage interests rates which is a risk many people of the millennial generation will not be willing to do given the experiences they have had living thru the inflation in the first place. Those who own homes will feel lucky and fortunate to own one, and will not want to part ways with it. When forced to move or relocate many homeowners will acquire their new home without selling their old home and will rent it out as an investment, further limiting the market supply while forcing more people to rent. Being forced to rent keeps people economically depressed, and the more people incapable of buying a home the more people who will be economically depressed and unable to move up. Furthermore, a major undiscussed reason that housing prices are so high, specifically for rentals, is the use of machine learning being leveraged to keep rent prices high regardless of market stock. This is partially a result of corporate landlords owning massive inventories of housing, who can control the market and afford to be inflexible with pricing. Effectively this will decouple the traditional supply and demand relationship historically seen in the housing market. With all rentals being listed online these companies can utilize pricing software to essentially collude with other landlords to keep prices high, without having a clear and identifiable relationship. Even if this was clear, the trump administration will have zero interest in pursuing anti trust legal action because again, they do not care about the common man and only care about benefitting rich people and corporations. The previous efforts at reducing regulations to make new construction will be limited because trump’s base are the ultimate NIMBY’s and any efforts to change zoning laws that could in any way negatively impact these people will be swiftly denied. On the other hand, any building regulations in place with the goal of protecting people – for example accessibility standards, fire codes, and quality requirements can be expected to be reduced or removed altogether in the name of “deregulation”, when in fact the only point is to cut costs for the wealthy elite real estate investors and developers. This problem will continue to harm those who do not own homes because as rents raise their gap to homeownership will only widen, placing them further away from the dream of home ownership as each day passes. As long as housing is primarily viewed as an investment class rather than a commodity the market will always be incentivized to increase.

The price of eggs will rise because the price increases labeled by his administration as “Biden inflation” was really and truly caused by the avian flu outbreak which kills chickens. Given how massively trump had failed in his previous term to respond to a disease outbreak, combined with him and his base’s disregard of science and medicine, this outbreak can only be expected to grow, well beyond what it would have been had a reasonable administration been in charge. Agencies such as the CDC which are charged with mitigating these outbreaks will be gutted and led by clowns, crippling their ability to take meaningful action. The workforces of these agencies are unequally skewed toward highly intelligent people such as clinicians and scientists, these people are among the least likely to tolerate or entertain the trump administration’s nonsense. This will only be compounded by the impending collapse of much of the nation’s healthcare framework meaning loss of coverage for millions of Americans – these Americans without healthcare coverage will be forced to pay cash for care, which is more beneficial for doctors than their bottom line of collections received from insurance companies. This could potentially make the healthcare industry even more of a cash grab, incentivizing doctors to leave public service in search of the highest paying gigs available. If the public service loan forgiveness program is scuttled this could become exponentially worse.

The military’s officer corps will be seriously harmed and will be at the lowest numbers in ages. This will be due to officers either retiring earlier than intended or choosing not to re-up when at their mid career inflection point. Previously this could have been mitigated by many choosing to stick out their careers to earn a pension, however due to the recent devaluing of the military pension for the younger generation this will be less of a factor to encourage members to stay in. Many officers that are academics or intellects simply will not want to be part of an organization led by clowns and people with no ethics or morals, so they will seek the closest exit as soon as possible. Officers with marketable skills (i.e. cyber) will also choose to leave at record rates for the same reasons – they simply will not want to deal with being hamstrung by clowns when they themselves are true subject matter experts in their fields. The only hope at avoiding this would be sharp increases in unemployment, which has historically resulted in higher retention rates for the military. When the officer corps is reduced unfortunately those leaving will primarily be the nation’s brightest and most capable, leading to an event similar to the Reconquista. The less intelligent officers with fewer alternative opportunities will stay in, leading to an overall less capable US military. With significant attrition promotions will become easier, resulting more unqualified and inexperienced officers in senior positions. Patriotism will be hard to find, as our nation will become the laughing stock of the world, which will make recruitment much more difficult. This will be compounded by cuts to military benefits and veterans benefits.

The deficit will skyrocket and the national debt will continue to rise at record rates. Even though the republicans claim to be about fiscal responsibility, history shows that this is only a campaign line and that republican leaders increase the deficit significantly more than democrats. On trumps last term alone he hit record a record setting deficit, and this will repeat itself. Yes the tax cuts will happen, but the spending cuts will not happen in any meaningful way. The only spending cuts that will happen are those that are aimed at programs targeted by conservative activists, such as welfare or scientific research. Spending cuts will be disproportionately aimed at programs which benefit already marginalized or disadvantaged people – for example head start. The fact is that discretionary spending is only small portion of the government’s expenses, and cuts to discretionary spending alone are not capable of truly reducing the national debt. As with everything else, the name of the game will be funneling money into the pockets of the rich elitists. This will be disguised as reducing bureaucracy or cost cutting, but in fact it will just be taking tax dollars from the public and giving them to private companies. For example, the VA healthcare system will be targeted to reduce its organic expenses (staff, operating budget, etc) and there will be proposals to use private healthcare companies to do this; the claim will be that private industry can do it cheaper than the VA, however the reality will be the total dollar amount will increase while quality will decrease. The only difference is that instead of these dollars going into the pockets of VA healthcare workers, these dollars will be going to private companies. We saw this with KBR/Halliburton during the Bush years… a direct pipeline of money from the US Treasury to US Corporations. In many cases there will be significantly more welfare and government handouts, however these will be disguised as incentives or economic development programs. Again, these will be aimed at funneling tax dollars to the wealthy. The new welfare programs will also be used to mitigate unforeseen consequences of foolish economic policies, for example the billions of dollars handed out to soy bean farmers during his last term to compensate for financial harm resulting from retaliatory tariffs. This was heralded as helping farmers and gained unanimous support from republicans due to nostalgic and patriotic image of farmers in our minds, but the truth is this was just one big giant welfare program. In fact giving these checks out is the opposite of everything conservatives claim to stand for – the opposite of regulating markets or government interventions. Farms are no longer what we think of as small, just getting by operations – the fact is that production farmers today are just business men no different than a greedy businessman in any other industry. They simply care about making money and use the country imagery and association with americana as a distraction. Modern US farms are among the most efficient operations in the world, with it not being uncommon for 2-3 workers managing a 1000+ acre farm. Not the cliché economic backbone they claim to be. Military spending will increase, but again the money wont be used in meaningful ways. Troops wont get notable raises, funds wont be used for quality of life improvements, and veterans benefits wont be expanded. Furthermore our nation’s security will not be improved. The money will be geared toward government contractors across a myriad of industries, with very little to show for the spending. Troops and government civilians will be replaced with contractors in the name of efficiency, but in reality these contractors are going to do as poor a job as possible while still getting paid, and the accountability system will be toothless due to the reductions of government staff. When we do see cases of accountability for contractors it will only be in retaliatory situations where the administration seeks to settle scores with those they see as enemies. This entire process is going to shift the focus away from security, capability, and lethality and make the military effectively one big money laundering operation. This is seen in militaries across the world with examples of armies paying $800 dollars for a pair of combat gloves manufactured by a general’s brother, when that money could have been used to support the troops that truly need it. Additionally, tax dollars will be unfairly appropriated to support programs in states which are supportive of trump, intentionally neglecting the states that do not support him out of retaliation. This is particularly ironic because data shows that the overwhelming majority of “welfare states” (states that take more from the federal government than they provide) are dark red, while giver states tend to be blue. The hypocrisy is overwhelming in terms of how much suckling off the government red states do, while blue states run lean and effectively donate to the federal government, just for their funds to be handed to red states who then turn around and attack them.

The surging national deficit will be entirely ignored by trump and his followers, as well as the conservative media (to include any media managed by his social media supporters). It will never be spoken of unless a democrat brings a bill to the floor to spend money, in which case the deficit will be levied as the reason not to fund the initiative. Perhaps the biggest and most blatant hypocrisy in government.

The immigration “crisis” that is repeatedly discussed by conservatives will no longer be a crisis. For starters, it never really was a crisis, yes there were some cities with significant amounts of migrants that overwhelm local services, but the reality is that the issue has been blown out of proportion by media and politicians. In areas where these migrants were set up for success, for example given work papers and drivers licenses they have quickly acclimated and become productive members of the communities. There is no data to demonstrate that immigrants are more likely to be criminals than ordinary people; in fact the evidence suggests the contrary – most undocumented migrants want to stay under the radar and do not want to risk interactions with law enforcement by committing crimes. The claims that “they’re sending rapists and murderers” are not true, it simply is said to capture the attention of and anger dumb people. Yes, some migrants have done these things, but so do Americans from all walks of life, including police officers, clergy, politicians, and frat boys; yet there’s no spotlight on these groups. Furthermore, it has always been DHS and DOJ policy to identify and remove criminal or felon undocumented migrants. In fact, these agencies have operated task forces in every state well before trump’s first term, laser focused on finding and removing these criminals. When interviewed, leadership from these task forces have said that the conservative action against migrants has made their job more difficult by requiring them to shift their resources from targeting hardened criminals to targeting ordinary undocumented migrants. This is the case in communities where local police are tasked with pursuing undocumented migrants and flood ICE’s capacity by sending them streams of people who have no record of violence or criminal activity.

With that said, the immigration “crisis” will go away for two reasons: 1) the conservative media and politicians will stop talking about it because there is no longer a reason to target their opposition with incessant accusations of allowing illegal immigration and 2) more significantly, and most unfortunately, it will eventually no longer make sense for migrants to come to the United States because the quality of life and availability of opportunity here will no longer be significantly better. See, historically immigration rates to the US shadow the wellbeing of the US economy. The better our economy, the more people come, the worse the economy, the fewer people come. This will always be the case. In 2008 after the housing bubble burst and during the recession there was actually reverse migration, where thousands of individuals who were in the US illegally actually chose to depart and return to their home countries because there was no longer opportunity here. Ask anyone who worked airport security during that timeframe – airport storage rooms were filled to the ceiling with saws, power tools, hammers, and other items workers attempted to take with them when leaving the US, but were confiscated for safety/security reasons during the screening process. These immigrants were trying to take whatever they had to head back home in search of opportunity, having seen clearly that America is much less a land of opportunity than it had been when they first arrived. This is how the illegal migrant numbers will decrease – it will be a result of a depressed economy and a lack of opportunity, not a result of effective immigration policy or law enforcement. Nonetheless, trump will take credit for it and he will tell viewers during his rallies the only evidence of this they need is to look around their own neighborhoods and think of how many migrants remain. Unfortunately, feeble minded Americans will believe this, and not understand the actual phenomena that has taken place – they will claim it is more evidence that he is a successful leader.

The midterm elections will be like none other in our nation’s history. It will go one of two ways (democrat success or republican success), and this outcome will depend not on if our nation is in a tailspin, but when. Because the Biden administration is handing over such a great economy, regardless of trump’s terrible polices he will be able to ride the wave of Biden’s accomplishments and claim credit for it. Things like a surging stock market or low unemployment that were never acknowledged under Biden, will suddenly be discussed as if they happened overnight on inauguration day. For this reason, more than likely the true effects of trump’s terrible leadership will not be fully noticeable until about 18 months after inauguration day. Unfortunately, that will be close enough to the mid term elections that even though the country is destined for doom, it won’t yet be apparent and obvious to at least half of Americans. Most people won’t open their eyes and will live in a state of in denial until it is absolutely overwhelming and inescapable. Until that point these moronic voters will stay on the MAGA train, right up until the very end. It will literally be the movie “don’t look up” unfolding in front of our very eyes. If things are not yet completely in the toilet, republicans stand to win the midterms. Shortly thereafter things will in fact go completely into the toilet as poor policies all around will impact every facet of life, namely the economy and inflation and because America will have just voted in a new round of republican legislators there will be no end in sight. We will simply need to strap in and hold on tight another two years. This may actually be the best case scenario because even though it will be at the expense of everyone’s well being and our Nation’s premium status and health, nothing short of absolute disaster will convince the brainwashed MAGA movement that they are, in fact, wrong. Similar to a drug addict or alcoholic, sometimes you just have to hit rock bottom to straighten up and change your ways, and we are as a nation absolutely on a track to hit rock bottom. Another way this could go is things in our nation go down the drain sooner than 18 months, say 12-14 months, and then the majority (but not vast majority) of the American public votes in a democratic legislature in the midterms. Even though this may sound like a glimmer of hope for our nation’s future, this will actually be more harmful than good. This legislature could impeach the president and immediately begin damage control and righting the ship, but this may not be a good thing when the totality of circumstances is considered. This will pull our nation out of a tail spin at the last moment, and thereby prevent hitting rock bottom, which is in fact the only thing that will convince our trump addicted fellow citizens. They will continue to incessantly attack, obstruct, and destroy because they will still be passionately committed to their movement. This could result in trump himself going on a revenge tour and seeking a third term, or a team of his copy cat allies (ron, elon, vivek, etc) doing so on his behalf, preventing us from turning the page on this terrible chapter of our nation’s history and only extending the turmoil into the next decade.

When the pendulum of power does eventually swing back to the democrats, their party will be in the impossible position of repairing our country’s reputation, fixing our economy and restoring civil rights to all Americans. Clinton, Obama, and Biden all had this difficult task (cleaning up and rebuilding after a republican president), but this go around the task will be far more difficult than ever before. By the end of his turn trump will have raised the national debt to unimaginable levels that may actually be literally impossible to overcome. Even if possible, the deficit will suddenly matter to republicans again and this will be used as a reason to oppose virtually every democratic initiative.