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What are your predictions for his Trump's presidency will go?
Overall, I believe we will see a continuation of the trends from 2017-2020, but an increase or intensification of said trends due to Trump's experience in presidency and increased confident position.
- increased deregulation and cutting funding to regulatory bodies across the board
- federal workforce reduction
- immigration workforce reduction, reviving the spike in the backlog of pending immigration cases
- dramatic increase in tariffs. This has many implications, most importantly negative impact on domestic consumers, increase in consumer prices, but also economic war with certain players like China, and causing economic suffering to certain partners such as Mexico.
- Ukraine: this one is hard to predict, as trump is unpredictable on those. There's a good chance trump will push zelensky towards accepting a peace deal with Russia, but equally likely that he will up US' involvement in Ukraine (contrary to what Trump claims)
- Israel / Palestine: Biden admin was the first to show the kind of hesitant rhetoric we see today towards supporting Israel. Trump will reverse this trend, and we will go back to standard neocon Israel supporting. He will likely push for Israel to take over the west bank as a convoluted effort for "peace".
- interest rates: I am less certain of this, but there's a decent chance that trump pushes interest rates lower to catalyze short term economic growth
- job market: if interest rates drop, we will see a short term rally for the job market, especially in big tech. Long term ramifications are tough to predict
- border security: my unpopular / controversial opinion is that trump and biden admins are very similar on this. Although public sentiment about the border issues will likely shift, I do not expect a significant material change or major departure from biden policy.
- Healthcare: Trump didn't make any big moves in 2017-2020. I cannot forecast anything here.
- Abortion issues: with Republicans likely securing Congress, a federal abortion regulation is possible but not certain. Support for some type of regulation is near unanimous among Republicans, but some oppose the degree. Trump himself has flip flopped on whether a federal ban is necessary. I expect that there will be some regulation, albeit limited.
What are your predictions and thoughts?
The Trump cult only mattered up to now; it's mainly irrelevant going forward, except as a source of Brownshirts.
Maybe I’m an optimist, but I think it’s still too early for anyone else (especially Vance, who is not nearly charismatic enough) to hold onto power as a successor in a non democratic way. Could definitely see the story being different after 4 years, though.