After the crazy, maddening, frightening, frustrating and deadly ride of 2020, what do you predict for 2021? I’ll take serious and funny forecasts, off the wall and right down the middle guesses, and, hopefully, some predictions that actually turn out true. My first prediction is that “Year in Review” viewership for retrospectives on 2020 will be down, way down. Here’s my list:
1. Year in Review viewership hits all time lows.
2. Melania finally gets her pic on the cover of “Trump’s Historic Transcripts and Tweets” a 6,000 page tome sold for $1 a page on Trump’s revenge porn broadcast channel website. The RNC buys 100,000 copies to rocket its first day sales to number 937 on the Times Best Seller list, where it makes the page 1 cover story. Publication of the second volume of Obama’s memoirs, which sets the all time new record for first day sales, is covered on page 28. Times editors claim, after criticism of bias, that Melania’s cover sales were a surprise, hence “news” while everyone expected Obama to sell millions of copies, hence not “news”.
3. An investigation by the Biden administration discovers Florida’s Republican Governor De Santis lied about the number of COVID infections and deaths.
4. Republicans demand a recount of the Georgia run-off elections after both Democrats win. And another. And another. And another . . .
5. Trump sues somebody. He loses.
6. Somebody sues Trump. They win.
7. NY officials issue an arrest warrant for Trump for fraud and tax evasion. He flees to Russia.
8. Russia sends him on to N. Korea.
9. Biden gets inaugurated. Everyone wears masks for 100 days. Pandemic ends.
10. Taxes are raised on the 1%. Four hundred Americans renounce their citizenship and move to Antigua. Four thousand lobbyists defenestrate themselves on K street. Everyone else’s taxes go down. The economy booms.
11. Antigua is hit by climate-change driven strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Four hundred Americans demand rescue.
12. Every Republican in Congress denounces the tax increase on the richest. Describes the deficit as the greatest threat to ever face anybody ever anywhere at any time in history, but must be met with cuts in social services and “entitlements”. Republicans demand cuts in everything—except purchases of wildly expensive military equipment, subsidies to major corporations, subsidies to fossil fuel use, funding for religious schools and other religious groups providing “essential services” such as anti-abortion counseling and running “just say no” programs, funding to build a useless wall, pay raises for members of Congress and funding for excess services fraudulently billed to Medicare and Medicaid. And fancy meeting tables and expensively redecorated offices for their presidential appointees.
13. Republicans demand a Congressional investigation as to why so many Republicans caught COVID while Democrats somehow had far fewer illnesses. Democrats all over US pass out laughing.
Okay. So what do you forecast for 2021?