One of the parts of The McLaughlin Group that I enjoy every week, and at the end of every year, is that they make predictions. One of the things that I don’t like is that they aren’t held to account for their predictions. You can see my predictions for 2019 here — as you can see, they didn’t go so well, although I kinda-sorta called it on Trump being caught doing something even worse than what Mueller uncovered. Hence, we now have Trump in the throes of impeachment.
Let’s go through these one at a time.
- The Mueller investigation, which is apparently focused on collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, will turn up something even worse. I score myself half-right on this one. The Mueller investigation was hamstrung by Barr, and turned up a lot of cover-up, but not much on Russia. However, thanks to a whistleblower, we now have evidence that Trump was trying make foreign aid to Ukraine conditional on Ukraine launching an investigation into Biden — essentially a campaign contribution. For this, Trump is now facing impeachment. He might face worse in 2020. 0.5/1
- Turkish forces will rout the Kurdish forces in Eastern Syria, causing yet another humanitarian crisis. Unfortunately, I was right about this. Even worse, this happened because Trump basically decided to walk away from our Kurdish allies. 1.5/2
- It will come out that hundreds of children have died while in ICE custody. This has not come out yet — even though the extent to which kids are being kept in cages has only grown since a year ago. I still think it will come out sometime in the next decade, and will mostly lead to a few modest reforms and a lot of finger-pointing. 1.5/3
- The Virginia House of Delegates will flip to Democratic control. This happened exactly as predicted. 2.5/4
- Japan's LDP-led conservative ruling coalition will suffer substantial losses in the upper chamber, although not enough to end the conservative majority. This will be taken as a sign of Abe fatigue. This didn’t exactly happen the way I stated it would. LDP lost nine seats. This in and of itself was not a sign of Abe fatigue. But the growing Sakura Festival scandal is tarnishing Abe’s reputation, and could lead to him losing control of the LDP before the next election (in October 2021). 3/5
- The DJIA on Mon July 1st will close at or below 10% less than the Dec 31, 2018 close. See below.
- The unemployment rate June 2019 will climb above 4.5% (up from the November 2018 3.7%). In fact this has been a gangbusters year for the stock market and the job economy, although most of the jobs have been low-wage retail or service sector jobs. 3/7
- The Patriots will win the Super Bowl. Called it. 13-3, Pats. 4/8
- Instagram will replace Facebook as The Irreplaceable Social Media Company, mostly due to younger users. Of course, Facebook, which owns Instagram, will still make money. I’m not convinced that this has happened yet. Instagram is still hot, but Facebook is still indispensable for everything from selling cookies to organizing campaigns and protests, at least in the United States. 4/9
How about you? What did you predict in 2019, and how did those come out?