On this week's barrage of nightmare scenarios about a second Trump term
Holy CRAP!
Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And one of those ways is to talk about how to understand the difference between facts, forecasts, and nightmare (and utopian) scenarios.
Over the past week — I presume in an effort to get ahead of the Republican primaries next month — several media outlets and commentators have published (1) reports of facts, (2) forecasts, and (3) nightmare scenarios about what Trump might do in his second term if he were to win the presidency next year.
These are three different things and — as futurists — it’s important to understand how they’re different and how they can sometimes overlap.
Here’s what I mean: when futurists want to gauge what a candidate might do in office, they can look to…
reports of facts, meaning the candidate’s own stated intentions, their platforms and policy positions, and those of thinktanks and organizations that are doing some of their thinking and planning for them. In terms of coverage of Trump, the Associated Press and Reuters have compiled lists of what Trump has said he wants to do during a second term. Project 2025, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation, appears to be doing some policy planning for a second Trump term if he were to be elected. If Trump were to win in 2024, I’ll use sources like these to anticipate the policy agenda he would actually pursue. Then there’s…
forecasts in which commentators directly extrapolate how a candidate probably would enact those intentions and suggest the first-order ramifications of their implementation. They tend to be even-handed extrapolations that both a candidate’s friends and foes would agree are reasonable to expect from a candidate’s Administration. The New York Times has a good example of this. And then there’s…
nightmare scenarios about the second- and third-order ramifications of that candidate’s victory, intentions, probable actions, and their costs. Nightmare scenarios are designed to shock the reader into steering everyone away from short-sighted doom. They fearmonger. Robert Kagan’s piece in the Washington Post last week is the most thorough, harrowing depiction I’ve seen so far of what the ramifications of a second Trump Administration might be. It’s a new modern classic of political futures, may turn out to be prescient, and you won’t be able to sleep after reading it. A close runner-up is the new issue of The Atlantic, the entirety of which is on what a second Trump term would look like and would mean.
These can overlap, of course. Forecasts can contain Facts and Nightmare Scenarios are a form of Forecasts. Just like a nice little Venn diagram…
… but here’s the thing: the farther apart those bubbles in the Venn diagram are, the less a society has to worry about its future. The closer they are together, the more a society should worry.
We now have a two-part situation:
(1) We have a candidate who is explicitly saying in his Facts that he wants to enact a Nightmare Scenario — that his Venn diagram isn’t a series of bubbles, it’s a single stacked circle. This means that Robert Kagan’s and The Atlantic’s Nightmare Scenarios are Forecasts instead. I don’t think — based on what Trump has said repeatedly — he would materially disagree with Kagan’s or The Atlantic’s writers’ depictions of his hopes and plans. This also means that we may already have in hand our best possible forecasts for a second Trump term (except for its final year).
(2) Large segments of that candidate’s base either (a) dismiss that Nightmare Scenario as mere hyperbole or (b) believe that Nightmare Scenario is a Utopian Scenario instead.
And there are secular reasons and religious reasons why. I’ll explain some of those reasons next week and how I expect Trump and Biden to campaign in light of them.
NOTE: I’ll do this same exercise with Biden soon but he hasn’t released much about his ideas or agenda for a second term yet. It’s a smidge too soon. Normally candidates don’t start talking about those things until early in the calendar year of the election, closer to their primary seasons. So maybe we’ll start seeing that in January.
See you next week.