As Senator Roy Moore is sworn in among the smoking ruins of the failed GOP tax reform bill … wait, neither of those is a thing. But I predicted them both just over a month ago though, pretty much making me Dick Morris – except with a pundit gig and without any weird foot issues.
Don’t google that. Trust me.
The fact is that no one knows what’s going to happen next year, but we can make educated guesses based on trends, probabilities, and past performance, or lack thereof. Sometimes that prognostication goes really poorly, as President Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit can attest between eager gulps of Chardonnay – oh sweet, life-giving alcohol. For a little while, it deadens the pain.
So what will happen in 2018? Well, it will either be terrible, or great, or kind of both. You can take that to the bank.
The odds are that Robert Mueller and his team of elite Hillary donors won’t come up with Schiff, figuratively or literally. There’s no collusion, and there never was, and everybody knows it except for the gang over at Team Kook who breathlessly tweet a succession of wacky “scoops” and “exclusives” that never, ever pan out. Remember how the treason indictments of Trump, his sons, the guy driving the white CNN mystery truck, and everyone who voted for The Donald, were just hours away? They’ve been hours away for a year now, and the Stormtroopers of the Imperial Moon-Wizard of the NCAA Court of Treason and Stuff are getting tired of being perpetually poised to charge into the West Wing and frog march everybody out to the local supermax.
Trump/Russia collusion is the “fetch” of American politics. Stop trying to make collusion happen. It’s not going to happen.
Mueller will eventually figure out that his gravy train for unemployed liberal bureaucrats can’t chug along forever, because at some point, Trump or whoever replaces Zombie Jeff Sessions, will fire this sad-faced loser after he’s so worn out his welcome that no one outside of MSNBC, CNN, and Joe n’ Mika’s party pad will care. Mueller will release a report that will be full of dark innuendo, unsupported allegations, and hammy clichés about “hacking our democracy,” but free of any actual evidence and indictments related to collusion. Mueller will come up emptier than the Clintons’ marriage.
Still, the usual suspects will call the report a “bombshell,” ignoring the fact that bombs tend to explode and that the term for one that doesn’t is “dud.” Tater Stelter and Rachael Maddow will go into an erotic frenzy nonetheless. The has-been contingent of Never Trump Fredocon geebos will get lots of media hits for a week or two before fading back into their well-deserved obscurity. This time next year, look for David Frum to be begging for a chance to share a cruise cabin with Max Boot on one of Bill Kristol’s voyages around the magical paradise that is Cuba; they can do a panel in the Mermaid Galley about “Why Communism Is Better Than Trumpism.” (Spoiler: The answer is because, with the Trump administration, no one cares about these Conservative, Inc., hacks anymore)
What happens in Congress? Well, the Democrats had their buzz from barely beating an accused child molester killed when Trump ended the year with some smashing victories and a long-term, no-cost lease on the real estate inside their skulls. The coastal blue state Democrats get to go home to their professional class constituents in New York City and Los Angeles and explain how great it was that they resisted Trump on tax reform, and therefore deprived themselves of any leverage to negotiate an increase in the SALT deductions people in high-tax, high-cost blue states love.
I look forward to my infuriated neighbors asking my congressjerk, Albert Einstein’s long-lost brother Ted Lieu, why the hell he was unable to perform the basic task of a representative of not letting his constituents get shafted. “Well, of course I couldn’t negotiate to try and preserve your deductions because I was really busy resisting! Uh oh, gotta go on CNN and talk about how Trump’s used Putin-supplied mind control lasers to make people in Wisconsin vote for him instead of Hillary!”
Watching that hapless dork tapdancing up to the November mid-terms as the limo libs I live amongst rage at him will make it almost worth it at tax time, when I expect to see Ned Beatty in a canoe rowing by and yelling, “Hey, sucks to be you!”
Maybe the Democrats will learn their lesson, or maybe they won’t. Will they shut down the government to give amnesty to illegals? I sure hope so. Will the Republicans cave if the Democrats shut down the government to give amnesty to illegals? I sure hope not, but you just know the Jeb!-loving goofs of the GOP establishment would love nothing more than to import a bunch of compliant foreigners to do the toiling for their GOP corporate donor masters. Heaven forbid that the allegedly free market respond to the shrinking unemployment rate by increasing wages and paying American workers more. Luckily, I predict Trump knows his audience and – cognizant that his supporters did not obey him in Virginia or in Alabama – he will realize that if he doesn’t get a super-sweet deal in return for letting the Dreamers make a mockery of our laws, his supporters will turn on him like rabid wolverines.
If the Democrats are smart, they will actually try to find some way to support Trump’s infrastructure initiative.
If. That’s a mighty big “If.”
See, they are so blinded by hatred of the horrible awful terrible stupid moron who beat them senseless – making them…what? – that they can’t see themselves actually engaging with him. To engage with President Trump is to acknowledge President Trump, and they’ve tripled down on shutting their eyes, covering their ears, and holding their breath until January 2021, or until Mueller delivers an earlier deus ex deepstateica,.
I predict most of them will continue down the Elizabeth Warren warpath and obstruct; of course, obstructing didn’t work for the real Indians either. Those who aren’t in Massachusetts or some other liberal reservation are caught between the rock of progressive rage and the hard place of Donald Trump. Those Dems running next year in red states and districts may decide not to go the way of the bison and chose to ignore Big Chief Talking Weasel’s smoke signals.
So will 2018 work out this way? Maybe. But maybe there will be some stunning sideswipe that will knock civilization off its feet. A war with North Korea. An asteroid strike. Ben Sasse going a week without saying something obnoxiously condescending and sanctimonious. Anything is theoretically possible.
I can safely predict the arrival of my third novel, for those who love action-packedliberal-mocking spy books. There’s a term for people like that: Normal Americans.
What else we know for sure about next year is … nothing, except that 2018 it will either be terrible, or great, or kind of both. And you can take that to the bank. But not a bitcoin bank; that cryptocurrency tulip bubble is totally going to burst.
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