Anyone Who Knows What's About to Happen Is Lying
We have no idea what the world will look like after four years of Donald Trump.
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Here’s a simple question: What will Donald Trump’s approval ratings be in the fall of 2028?
A lot of journalists and social media personalities claim to know the answer. Some believe that he will have accomplished such amazing things that he will be extraordinarily popular. Others are certain that he will have wrecked the country to such a degree that support for him will have fallen to unprecedented lows.
Here’s what I think: I have absolutely no idea.
I could easily imagine a scenario in which Trump’s presidency crashes and burns. Perhaps the tariffs he imposes inspire a major trade war and spark a global recession. Perhaps his abandonment of Ukraine lets Vladimir Putin’s troops march into Kyiv, making a leader obsessed with strength appear even weaker than Joe Biden did after America abandoned Kabul to the Taliban. Or perhaps the administration gets so high on its own supply that it misinterprets a (genuine) mandate to right the cultural excesses of the left as a (nonexistent) mandate to impose a new set of reactionary dogmas.
By the same token, I can also imagine a scenario in which Trump’s presidency proves lastingly popular. Perhaps big cuts to regulation, advances in artificial intelligence, and a return to robust growth in Europe and Asia create an economic boom. Perhaps Trump turns his bullying of longtime allies into a popular expansion of American power, whether by striking a lucrative deal over Greenland or raising the Stars and Stripes above the Panama Canal. And perhaps the administration manages to ride the recent vibe shift while avoiding culture war excesses of its own, lastingly changing the culture in the way that Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.
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It’s not hard to imagine Trump’s approval ratings falling to 20% by the end of his time in the White House. But it also isn’t all that hard to imagine Trump’s approval ratings rising to heights that have of late proven beyond the reach for presidents at the end of their terms, say someplace north of the 60% mark.
In the language of statistics, the “confidence interval” around any prediction about the future is especially wide right now. We can make an educated guess about what America, or the world, will look like in four years. But we should recognize that our imagination for what is around the next historical corner is more likely than not to be wildly off. And that means that any serious attempt to get a handle on the future should, at the very least, eschew the temptation to offer one “point estimate” for the likely future—opting instead to present a wide range of widely divergent scenarios.
Trump’s future approval ratings matter for straightforwardly political reasons. If he is highly popular in the fall of 2028, he will likely be able to place a handpicked successor in the White House; a President J. D. Vance (or perhaps a President Donald Trump Jr.) is then likely. If he is highly unpopular, Democrats would be favorites to win the election, even if they can’t renew their political vision or identify a nominee with special political talent. Trump’s future approval ratings matter even more greatly, however, for how he will be able to transform America during his time in office.
There is rightly a lot of concern about the administration’s attacks on democratic rules and norms. Trump sees himself as the one-and-only voice of the American people. Like other politicians who believe that they have such a unique bond with the people, from Narendra Modi in India to Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, this makes him highly impatient with traditional constraints on his power.
The administration has already taken a number of concerning steps. Since taking office, Trump has punished perceived enemies, for example by revoking security details for former officials who have criticized him, and rewarded perceived allies, most notably by pardoning everyone convicted for crimes committed in the assault on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He has tried to sweep aside traditional checks on the power of the president, for example by firing 17 independent inspectors general tasked with tracking corruption and fraud within the government. And he has also attempted to expand the power of the executive in key ways, most notably by empowering the Department of Government Efficiency to fire scores of civil servants and countermand payments authorized by Congress.
The key question now is how much further the president is likely to go. After all, Trump has, sometimes in jest and sometimes apparently in earnest, telegraphed a desire to expand his powers in much more extreme ways. He has, for example, repeatedly promised to prosecute political adversaries, and may well have an eager lieutenant for such an abuse of power in Kash Patel, the recently confirmed Director of the FBI. He has also suggested that he may choose to disregard rulings by federal courts which, in his estimation, illegitimately curtail the power of the presidency. Either of these steps would push America from the foreboding prospect of a constitutional crisis in which we now find ourselves to its full-blown reality.
Much commentary seems to assume that the Trump administration will inevitably take these actions—and that it would certainly succeed if it did. I am less certain. As Trump’s zig-zag about tariffs shows, he often stakes out an extreme position, only to relent at the last moment. It seems to me that nobody, perhaps not even the president himself, knows whether he will really choose to go down that perilous path.
But what would happen if, as certainly seems plausible, Trump does abuse the power of his office in increasingly grotesque ways as his presidency proceeds?
The kind of democratic backsliding that has been most common in the first decades of the 21st century is characterized by the gradual aggrandizement of executive power, not by sudden military coups. Political scientists remain bad at predicting when these kinds of assault on democracy succeed, and when they fail. But one factor clearly does seem to matter. Because this form of democratic backsliding tends to be a slow process, a lot turns on the ability of would-be autocrats to sustain their popularity during their first years in office.
When rulers reluctant to respect traditional limits on their power take office, they are at first constrained by institutions they don’t directly control. Courts rule against them when they overstep their power (as the Supreme Court, despite its conservative majority, just did in ordering the government to pay out $2 billion owed to contractors and grantees of USAID). Parliaments fail to support their most extreme legislative initiatives, with some members of the president’s own party refusing to do his bidding. Bureaucrats sometimes refuse to carry out orders which they judge to violate the constitution. Even in cases in which would-be strongmen ultimately prevailed, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or Vladimir Putin in Russia, the process of weakening and finally eliminating rival centers of power took many years.
When such rulers remain popular during their first terms in office, this gives them the time and the support to undermine the constraints on their power. High approval ratings enable them to demand loyalty from their supporters and to bully their opponents. Checks and balances slowly melt away. The electoral playing field becomes increasingly uneven. Putin and Chávez—both of whom ruled over states rich in oil and gas—were able to consolidate their power in part because commodity prices were unusually high during their first decade in office, driving a booming economy and favorable approval ratings.
If rulers with authoritarian ambitions grow to be unpopular during their first few terms in office, by contrast, their prospects for taking over the political system shrink significantly. While they might try to overstep the boundaries of their authority, their ability to intimidate their opponents seeps away. Legislators from the president’s own party may start to recognize that they can deviate from the government’s line without paying a prohibitive political price. Eventually, some of them might even criticize their leader publicly in the hope of saving their own political careers.
As examples from Brazil to Poland demonstrate, there then is a good chance of such leaders losing their bid for reelection before they’ve had time to bend the system’s rules completely in their own favor. Since they don’t yet enjoy sufficient institutional capture to ignore the will of the people, they are forced to leave office—as Trump, in however reluctant and dishonorable a fashion, did after his first term.
Trump’s ability to sustain high approval ratings is, of course, but one of many variables that will determine what the world will look like four years hence.
A few days ago, I asked members of this community what the next world order might look like. Hundreds of you responded with extremely thoughtful comments. Reading through those wildly different answers, I was once again struck by how wide a range of outcomes thoughtful, intelligent people envisage right now.
It is possible that this moment will serve as a long-overdue wake-up call to European powers like France and Germany. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention; perhaps the prospect of having a hostile Russia at their doorsteps, even as support from the United States seems less certain than it has been at any point since World War II, is just the shock that is needed to return the continent to the historical stage after its long holiday from history.
Or perhaps European elites will, as they did in 2022, quickly fall back into their characteristic reluctance to put their money where their mouth is. In such a scenario, they will allow the Kremlin to claim victory in Ukraine, and decide that appeasing Putin’s demands is the best way to avert further confrontations. Russia will triumph, and Europe resign itself to its seemingly inevitable fate as a pawn of history.
Which of these scenarios is more likely? I don’t know.
There is also a giant question about what will happen in Asia. Ostensibly, some of the leading strategists shaping the foreign policy of the Trump administration want to wind down the war in Ukraine in order to devote their energies to countering the rise of China—ideally, in what some are slyly calling a “Reverse Kissinger,” with Russia by their side as a newfound ally. But while Trump himself is clearly exercised by America’s trade deficit with China, it is far less obvious that he cares about containing the country’s influence in East Asia, big parts of which he seems to regard as Beijing’s “natural” sphere of influence.
So will Xi Jinping, fearing Trump’s unpredictability, decide to hold off on realizing China’s geopolitical ambitions? Or will he conclude that Trump would be no more inclined to stand by America’s allies in East Asia than he was inclined to stand by America’s ally in Ukraine?
I truly don’t know. And neither do the experts who claim they do.
I’ve been publicly writing about politics for about a decade now. You’d think that, over this period, I’d have become more sure about my judgments, and more willing to prognosticate the future. Instead, I find that the opposite is the case.
There is a reason for that: Over the course of this decade, the consensus among supposed experts—including the friends and colleagues I most admire—has again and again proven to be badly mistaken.
Most “serious people” predicted that Britain would vote to remain in the European Union.
Most “serious people” were confident that Donald Trump would fail to win the Republican nomination and certain that he would lose the general election.
Most “serious people” knew that the Covid pandemic would not pose a serious threat to people and that the virus did not originate in a lab leak and that mass events were a thing of the past and that vaccines couldn’t possibly be developed in less than three years and that these new vaccines would stop all transmission of the virus.
Most “serious people” predicted that Russian troops would enter downtown Kyiv within days and that Ukrainians would beat back Russian troops in a matter of weeks and that Russians were on the path to certain victory after all.
And of course most “serious people” believed that consolidated democracies like the United States could never experience democratic backsliding and that extremists would never take power in this country and that Trump would prove so incapable of governing that he would immediately be removed from office and (in many cases without any acknowledgment that they had changed their mind) that he is now sure to succeed in concentrating power in his own hands.
The famous line about the definition of madness, no less true for having been repeated so many times as to become a cliché, is that it consists in doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. That is how I feel about the consensus of the serious people in the room: It is not that it must always turn out to be wrong or that it isn’t worth listening to what experts have to say. It certainly isn’t that we can blithely assume that warnings about the serious dangers which lie ahead will somehow prove to be unfounded. It’s just that, given how poor a record serious people have had of predicting just about everything and anything over the past decade, we should probably recognize that the range of likely outcomes at any one point is far wider than a credulous reader of the editorial pages of the Guardian and the Washington Post—or, for that matter, the Daily Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal—would assume.
We live in disorienting and, yes, scary times. If you want to act in the world, you have no choice but to make an educated guess about what might be around the next historical corner. And since (as my grandfather was fond of saying) it is extremely difficult to make predictions, especially about the future, there is no shame in being badly wrong some of the time. But the one thing that anybody who wants to be effective in their activism or astute in their analysis or merely truthful in their writing needs to do is to acknowledge just how wide the confidence intervals around any of these predictions are—especially at a moment that is as volatile as this one.
We can express our fears about what is happening. We can try to envisage a range of different scenarios. But anybody who is honest with themselves must acknowledge that they just don’t know the outcome of any of the things that are happening right now.
Nobody does.
Great piece. And a real breath of fresh air to hear one of our serious thinkers acknowledge the degree of uncertainly and instability that prevails. Perhaps it's time to recategorize our "serious people" as forming a large group of influential people that happens to contain a tiny group of serious thinkers. These difficult times have shined a bright light on the shortage, among the former, of the latter. More disturbingly, a significant fraction of our most serious thinkers are being sidelined and publicly smeared just at a time when they are most desperately needed. Thanks as always for publishing your certifiably serious thoughts.
Trump is going to lie tomorrow.