In the midst of my yearly frenzy putting together the annual awards column, the "predictions for next year" part sometimes gets a little shortchanged. It's the last item on the "Part 2" list, therefore by the time I get to it I'm usually pretty loopy and have lost a certain amount of focus. But on the last week of 2025, my mind has been turning to thinking about what to expect next year again, so I thought I would just share some random thoughts I've been having, in no particular order.

Healthcare showdown 2.0

This could easily lead to "government shutdown 2.0" as well, since the budgetary ball was only punted until the end of January. During the first month of the new year, Congress will engage in a battle over what to do (if anything) about the premiums which have skyrocketed for tens of millions of Americans.

Republicans, as usual, can't agree on much of anything. Also as usual, they've got a bunch of half-baked ideas that will not actually address the simple and fixable problem (the premium spike due to the loss of Obamacare subsidies), but will allow them to vote for something that they can claim "isn't Obamacare." This is still a big deal for Republicans, although they have at least stopped dreaming their "repeal and replace" fever-dreams. In over a decade of attacking the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Republicans have never -- that is: not once -- come up with anything that would even remotely "replace" Obamacare in any meaningful way. I don't expect this January's legislative fight to be much different.

Donald Trump has (also as usual) never come up with his own plan, despite promising one for an entire decade now. He has now latched onto one idea, but it is ridiculously inadequate. He wants to somehow "stick it to the insurance companies" by sending money directly to health insurance consumers -- who would then turn right around and give the money to those very same insurance companies. The amounts of money Trump (and other Republicans) are talking about in these plans is nowhere near the amount of the Obamacare subsidies, which (obviously) is just not going to solve the immediate problem at all. But Trump's got a bee in his bonnet, so he very well may force all the Republicans in Congress to knuckle under to his grand vision.

Democrats, of course, are going to continue fighting for a clean extension of the subsidies. And they once again have exactly the same leverage, since the budget will run out at the end of January. So the odds that we'll see another shutdown come February have got to be seen as at least 50-50, at this point.

Congress

For the entire rest of the year, Congress will manage to get almost nothing done. Well... unless Trump demands that they do something, in which case they will burst into action and comply.

State Of The Union

At some point, either at the end of January or perhaps early February, Trump will give a State Of The Union speech to Congress and the rest of the country. This will be the usual thing -- an absolute blizzard of lies, bragging, gaslighting, and outright denial of reality (with plenty of statistics and numbers that Trump just made up out of thin air) -- but it will be notable for containing more venom and complaining and outright mean-spiritedness than ever before.

Slow-walking a war

Trump seems to be slow-walking an actual war with Venezuela, which can only be expected to continue and escalate. Today, he casually announced the U.S. had struck a target in a Venezuelan port, which (if true) would mean we've started attacking sites inside another country's borders -- which is one textbook definition of what "war" means.

Republicans in Congress will likely continue to either look the other way and completely ignore their constitutional duty, or actively cheer Trump on. The worse things get for Trump domestically and politically, the worse this war is going to get. Eventually, Trump may even claim extraordinary "wartime powers" in domestic affairs as well, as a result of this (which could manifest itself in all kinds of frightening ways).

Epstein files

More and more Epstein files will be released, but there will always be "more to come," which (ironically enough) will keep the scandal alive for months on end. What is released will be redacted to remove any mentions of Donald Trump, as well as any of Trump's personal buddies.

The Justice Department is already in violation of the law Congress passed which forced the release of all the files, but the problem with this is the Ghostbusters refrain: "Who you gonna call?" Lawbreakers are prosecuted by the Justice Department after all, so what can anyone do? Refer the matter to Pam Bondi? Don't make me laugh....

SCOTUS weighs in

At some point, the Supreme Court is going to hand down some rather momentous decisions. Some of these (gasp!) might even rule against Trump and his lawless administration. Oh, sure, there'll be plenty of decisions that use pretzel logic to come to the same conclusion: "The president can do anything he wants, as long as it is a Republican president," but I am at least hoping that two of these cases will prove to be a bridge too far for even the openly-partisan Roberts court.

I think Trump is going to lose in a fundamental way on his "birthright citizenship" case, as the justices proclaim that the Fourteenth Amendment actually does mean exactly what it says. And, while I am less personally hopeful on this one, I also think that the high court will strike down Trump's unilateral use of tariffs as well. Perhaps the court will allow Trump to skate on all the money he's so far collected under these tariffs (they'll whip up some legal language that essentially states: "It'd be really hard to figure out how to pay everyone back," and leave it at that). But they will reaffirm the basic constitutional fact that it is Congress who has the power to levy taxes, not the president.

We'll see whether this is wishful thinking on my part. There are other big cases pending as well, but these two seem the most constitutionally important, at least for now.

Trump will probably go on losing in the lower courts on multiple issues, but he'll appeal every single loss all the way to the top so the only thing that is going to matter is how the Supreme Court rules in the end -- that's a pretty easy prediction to make, at this point.

Questioning the numbers

After a break in the data flow (due to the government shutdown), we are finally getting economic data once again from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So far, these numbers have been fairly reliable, although the hiatus in data collection has led to the most recent numbers being seen as not quite as reliable as usual (due to a paucity of data, not political manipulation). So everyone is looking to see the December numbers, which will be released in January.

Donald Trump threw a hissy fit earlier in the year, when the jobs numbers weren't as good as he would have liked. He fired the head of the B.L.S. and tried to nominate an ideologue as a replacement. The Senate, however, balked at this move, and the nominee wound up withdrawing. No replacement nominee has been announced, but if the unemployment and jobs numbers again begin to annoy Trump he will likely move to name a new replacement.

Since the firing, the bureau has been headed by the person who held the number two position previously -- someone who is qualified for the job, in other words. Which is why up until now the economic data hasn't been seen as questionable. However, if Trump does manage to get a sycophant confirmed in the job then every monthly report from that point on may be seen as being a lot less believable, especially if the numbers paint a much rosier picture than economists believe the reality to be.

Having politics play a huge role in the official governmental economic indicators is going to have enormous consequences for the American economy, since all sorts of sectors of the economy rely so heavily on the reports to know what the current economic situation is. If the numbers are seen as untrustworthy, it will inject a huge amount of uncertainty into the economy as a whole.

The Fed

In a related topic, Trump will get to name a new chair of the Federal Reserve early next year. He has already telegraphed that he is interested in installing someone who will do his bidding and lower interest rates no matter what it does to the rest of the economy.

This could be disastrous -- it could lead to inflation running rampant with nobody even attempting to get it under control. And if the economic numbers (like inflation) are suddenly seen as suspect (because of that previous issue with the B.L.S. leadership), then this could cause massive economic turmoil.

That, of course, is just the worst-case scenario, but Trump has made no secret of the fact that the only thing he cares about in a Fed chair is a willingness to follow Trump's lead and slash interest rates no matter the consequences, so it has to be seen as a real possibility.

Tax cuts

Republicans are betting that the upcoming tax season will somehow magically turn the tide of public opinion and that all of a sudden life will become rosy for all American taxpayers and they'll all gratefully thank the GOP for making things wonderful again.

This is probably not going to happen. There will be new tax breaks for tips, overtime pay, and seniors, but they don't go as far as promised ("Social Security benefits will be tax-free!" is not true, for instance) and they won't benefit everyone.

For those who don't benefit from the new tax breaks, there will be little difference in their taxes or their tax refunds. What the Republicans accomplished with their big, ugly bill was to halt taxes from going up for most people. So they'll have to make the argument: "Your taxes would have been a lot higher if we hadn't acted, so be grateful that they stayed the same!" which is not all that great a political message, really.

For most people, tax returns are like a little savings account that turns into a yearly bonus. And the difference between last year's return and this year's will be minimal, if it even exists. The big, ugly bill is already unpopular, and I seriously doubt that it's going to suddenly rise in popularity even after everyone finishes doing their taxes.

The midterms

Donald Trump may have settled on his messaging for the midterms (although this is very recent, so it could change). To counter Democrats hammering him on "affordability" he is going to talk about "pricing." Yep, that's it -- that's his magic silver bullet to fight back with (at least, as I said, at this point -- he may develop other strategies later).

But you can call it "pricing" or you can call it "affordability" or you can just call it the "cost of living" -- no matter what label you use, people are still having serious sticker shock at the grocery store each week. Prices remain high and are still going up. Not just on groceries, but on just about everything that people have to buy to live.

Economic malaise is a political giant-killer. Many entire elections have turned on the issue. When people don't feel good about the economy, they blame the party in power. And right now, that is Republicans -- in both Congress and the White House. Trump can try to blow sunshine up everyone's skirt by simultaneously claiming that: (1) "Everything is wonderful! It's the best economy ever! Prices are down on everything! -- way way down!" but also that: (2) "If any prices are still high for some strange reason, well that is all Joe Biden's fault!"

Good luck with that. Come January 20th, Trump will have been in office for a full year now. And throughout 2026, he'll be in his second year. It is already not believable when he tries to blame everything bad on Biden, and it will get more and more impossible for him to do so as time goes on. And the more time goes on, the more Trump's tariffs will raise prices pretty much across the board.

The big question with the midterms is: if Democrats do manage to ride a big, blue wave and win decisively across the board, will Trump accept the results? That is a very scary question indeed. Will he sic his Justice Department on all the elections boards across the country where Republicans lose? Will he use the power of the federal government to try to overturn results he doesn't like? We've already seen how prone he is to doing such things, and if he's facing losing control of at least one chamber of Congress then anything could happen, really.

Happy 250th!

The year 2026 is a notable one, since it will see the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Trump is gleefully preparing for the big show, which will (as was the bicentennial in 1976) be a year-long series of events marking America's big birthday. But unlike what took place 50 years ago, not everything will be a dignified or joyful celebration. Instead it will (quite literally, at times) be nothing short of a parade of tackiness and schlock, which will all be designed to celebrate Donald Trump more than the 250th birthday milestone.

There's nothing much we can do about this -- Trump is going to have his egomaniacal orgy of tastelessness no matter what anyone else has to say about it.

[Sorry to end on a low note, but I just wanted to make sure everyone is fully prepared for this explosion of tackiness before it descends upon us all....]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant