I have been very busy all week getting ready for Friday (and a few other things), so I didn't have the time today to write a new article. So I'm re-running an article from early January that was one of the first things I reviewed, when I began looking back over the year that was. It was written a few weeks before Trump took office again, and most of the predictions in it stand the test of time admirably well.

And here's a "watch this space" teaser for everyone -- tomorrow there will be a big announcement here! I'm not going to say what, but I hope everyone will be pleasantly surprised by it, that's all I will say for now. Stay tuned!

Originally published on January 1st, 2025

Donald Trump's "Day One" in office is now less than two weeks away. He promised American voters a lot of action on his first day, but in the past few weeks he seems inordinately focused on some rather odd (one might say: "downright bizarre") goals. He has become a big fan of expanding America in what can only be called imperialistic fashion -- adding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to the American map. Today he floated a new idea, this one not a land-grab but instead of a sort of water-grab: he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," for no particular reason (other than to annoy Mexico, one assumes).

It'd be easy to dismiss all of this as typical Trumpian rambling and bluster -- him getting a bee in his bonnet and then refusing to let it go, no matter how outlandish (pun intended) or impossible the goal. In case anyone's forgotten, this is a routine sort of thing for him. I see it all a little differently, however. I see this all as a monstrous distraction from what he has actually promised he would do, because he is now facing the reality that several of his big promises are going to turn out to be either impossible or incredibly hard to achieve. Perhaps I am wrong -- perhaps it is just Trump's deteriorating mind and his penchant for fleeting monomania about the silliest of ideas. But Trump is the master of distracting the media (and the country as a whole) from any possible bad news which might be blamed in some way on him, so I think this is more of a calculated attempt to toss out lots of red herrings in advance of him actually having to govern once again. Call it a pre-emptive distraction effort.

What is Trump distracting everyone from? At this point, I would guess "all his Day One promises." Because he's promised quite a lot, and while he might achieve some of the ones that merely involve him signing a piece of paper, some are going to be too intractable for immediate solutions.

Since Trump's distractions all seem to be in the foreign policy realm, let's start with that. Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail that he would "end the war in Ukraine" either on Day One or even before he takes office. Somehow he was going to sit the leaders of Russia and Ukraine down and force them to agree to some sort of resolution which would silence the guns on his first day in office. This is not likely to happen. Today, Trump threatened to unleash "Hell" on Gaza if all the hostages are not released on his first day in office as well, which means he's now promising to end two wars by the end of his first day. The Gaza demand has more of a chance of actually happening than a ceasefire in Ukraine, but it still should be seen as a longshot. Benjamin Netanyahu is only going to end the war on his own timeline, no matter what Trump might want, although his affinity for Trump might spur him to do this sooner rather than later. But if Trump floods the media zone with threats to annex Canada or the Panama Canal or Greenland, not as much attention will be paid to the fact that Trump has no magic wand to wave to make wars end on his timetable.

The one thing Trump will be able to at least claim he has accomplished will be "shutting the border down." He will doubtlessly issue forth a number of executive orders on border policies and immigration policies, and he will also (with much fanfare) announce a sweeping roundup of undocumented immigrants, to begin immediately. This will almost certainly involve several staged events of taking people into custody who have committed crimes in America since they got here, but it remains to be seen how extensive (or even how effective) these efforts will truly be. This likely won't matter to public perception -- at least not at first -- as the Trump administration will doubtlessly provide plenty of film of their successes to the media to convince everyone that he's making good on all his xenophobic campaign promises. If I were a Haitian immigrant living in Springfield, Ohio, I would be very worried right about now (to put this into perspective).

Trump will also claim credit for several "culture war" achievements as well. Currently, transgender rights are the biggest scapegoat on the right, so look for Trump to sign executive orders on trans athletes and bathrooms and any number of other such measures. Minority rights in general will also be a target, and at the very least Trump can be expected to roll back pretty much any progress Joe Biden made over the past four years on this front. This will all be red meat to the MAGA base, and Trump will make much of how he's "won the war on 'woke'," much to his supporters' delight.

But the hardest thing Trump is going to have to face is all his own facile promises on the economy. Trump made two outlandish promises to the voters on this front, neither one of which is likely to come true. Trump promised to get prices on things like groceries down to pre-COVID levels, and he further promised to reduce the price of gasoline by a whopping 50 percent -- although his timeline for doing so was rather nebulous (mostly he promised it "within his first year," but sometimes he got even more optimistic and promised it would happen even sooner).

Trump seems to be coming to the realization that he's not going to be able to magically make the price of eggs and bacon come down just by the force of his own personality. He's even admitting as much in public now. From his press conference today: "It's always hard to bring down prices when somebody else has screwed something up like they did. But we'll bring them down." He's been even more pessimistic in other statements as well, which is likely a sign that some people who actually understand economics have sat Trump down and explained that this is just not going to happen any time soon, no matter how much Trump would like it to.

The price of a gallon of gasoline stands at just below $3.10 nationally right now, which means that Trump would have to end 2025 with the price at $1.55 in order to make good on his promise on this front. This could happen -- energy prices fluctuate for all kinds of reasons, and nobody can predict what they'll do over the course of a year -- but the safe bet is that they won't. It doesn't matter what Trump does to change the leasing of drilling sites, since new drilling sites don't come online in the blink of an eye (it's more of a longterm variable). So he is more likely than not to fail at his stated goal of reducing energy costs by half for all Americans by next Christmas.

The question in all of this is whether anyone will care or not, of course. Trump's MAGA supporters aren't overly strict about holding him to his promises (at least, they weren't in his first term, so it's hard to see this changing much now). As long as he makes liberals unhappy, that's usually good enough for them. If Trump manages to make modest progress on any or all of his goals, it'll probably be enough for the MAGA chorus. And he's already starting to claim credit for stuff Biden has managed to do, which will accelerate dramatically once he becomes president again (he'll wake up and notice that inflation isn't "at the highest level ever" but instead is below three percent again, for example). This might also help deflect any criticisms of Trump for not following through on his big promises.

Of course, things could go a different way too. If the economy gets noticeably worse once Trump takes control, it's going to be harder for him to claim any sort of victory (even though he doubtlessly will try to -- or at the very least blame everyone else under the sun for it). If his tariff plans and his deportation efforts and his massive rewrite of the tax code actually serve to drive prices up (not down), then more and more people are going to notice, no matter what Trump is claiming to the contrary. To cite just one example, if gasoline goes up by 50 percent (up to $4.50 a gallon, say) then people are not going to be happy about it, whether they voted for Trump or not.

Throughout it all, Trump will be trotting out newer and more-astonishing distractions. I seriously doubt he's going to order American troops into Panama or Greenland or Canada, but in six months everyone may have forgotten about his imperialistic dreams because he's move on to other obsessions that are even more bizarre.

What interests me in all of this is how effective Trump still is at "winning the news cycle." Like an addict getting his next fix, the mainstream media rushes to focus on all of Trump's shiny, shiny objects, while forgetting to hold him accountable for much of anything else. So I fully expect plenty of wild discussion about "Canada as the 51st state" and how easy it would be for the Marines to storm the Panama Canal and all the rest of it, because that is what the media always does when Trump trots these things out. By the time Day One rolls around, most of Trump's wildly optimistic campaign promises will have been largely forgotten both by the media and by the public -- which is exactly the point of the whole exercise, as far as Trump is concerned.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant