What's Immediately Ahead, Chunks at a Time

Couches rise up in anger and Snoop Dogg is gonna narrate the whole thing.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to put the ball into the air.

OK, I haven’t “chunked ahead” for a while and some of you are new here and haven’t seen me do that yet.

• Which reminds me: Everybody, meet everybody. All y’all, meet all y’all.

“Chunking ahead” is what a futurist does when they’re trying to imagine and prep for phases or stages or a sequence of chunks of time ahead. A chunk of time might be days, weeks, months, years, or even decades.

Here’s how I’m doing it right now.

DURING THE NEXT TWO WEEKS OR SO

• That sound you hear right now this morning is butts-collectively-puckering-in-unison across America in reaction to Trump’s remarks during an interview on stage yesterday at the National Association of Black Journalists annual meeting. I’m not going to recap what he said because damn. But I’ll offer this as a pro tip: If you are a racist and you are going to be interviewed by Black journalists on camera in front of a metric ton of other Black journalists, then you need a better strategy than the one you have.

• Presidential-Candidate-Vice-President-Former-California-Attorney-General-Will-Kick-Your-Ass Kamala Harris will choose her running mate probably early next week. Right now she’s vetting her possibles. And by vetting I mean she’s watching tape of each of them chewing on an opponent until that opponent cries. Mike Tyson is advising.

• She will get the nomination.

• Tomorrow Judge Chutkan will get the January 6/presidential immunity case back from the Supreme Court. I expect that by early next week she will schedule an evidentiary hearing to parse through allllllllllllllll the evidence of what Trump did to subvert the 2020 election and to instigate the Capitol Riot in order to see which pieces are admissible or not. All the evidence. Evidentiary hearings are public. So every bit of evidence, and everyone’s testimony — yes, Mike Pence will testify on camera — will be laid out on TV in front of God and everybody. While Trump won’t be tried by a jury — evidentiary hearings are pretrial, not the actual trial — Trump will be tried in the court of public opinion nevertheless. Right before everyone goes to vote. Maybe early next week we’ll find out when that evidentiary hearing will take place.

• Vice Presidential Hopeful J.D. Vance should complete Round 1 of his Principled Self-Immolation Tour. If he continues on his current trajectory of alienating everyone with gusto and a bad reading of the King James Bible, then by the end of next week he’ll be in the corner in the fetal position while getting beaten up by cats, childless cat ladies, couches, dolphins, dock workers, your church’s embroidery group (secret self-moniker: The Stitch-N-Bitch), the prophet Ezekiel, the Apostle Paul and all his letters, your PTA, ducks, small white dogs, Gerald, Canada, the Navajo, Walmart, and the Dutch. And they’ll only pause their turns in the beating to register to vote. Mike Tyson will advise that Olympic team. Snoop Dogg will do the play-by-play.

• As this chunk ends, Kamala’s probably gonna have a serious sitdown with her Anger Translator to see if Bernice is willing to stay on for a couple of terms and go way big or go home. She may say Babe, we may have to weaponize you in the name of bright shining justice. If you’re willing to wield that terrible swift sword, in Converse we shall march on.

• If you don’t know what an Anger Translator is, it’s your subconscious inner voice that says what you must say but you gotta keep it inside. Obama had one. Meet Luther. His theological statement in the first 10 seconds of this tells you everything you need to know about Luther. He is my spirit animal.

But if you need a more substantial example:

• And if Bernice decides instead to sail with the elves into those Undying Lands and Kamala has to find a new Anger Translator she can choose from any woman in America.

• Special Note: My Anger Translator is. this. Substack. Hi.

BETWEEN MAYBE LABOR DAY AND ELECTION DAY

• The evidentiary hearing(s) take place and the country actually pays attention to what Trump did. Kamala holds rallies daily while Trump steams. Vance twitches in the corner while the two Couch Brothers of Victim #3 stand over him with baseball bats given to them by the World Council of Dolphins and say Yeah, you get up now and see what happens. JUST SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

• Somebody calls Georgia and reminds them that the last time Trump was on the ballot in their state he tried to steal their votes so badly — and on a recording that we’ve all heard by now — that Trump’s lawyers crapped their pinstripe pants so badly that those lawyers’ dogs (who also heard the tape) crapped their pinstripe pants. And then those lawyer-dogs suddenly attained the power of speech, and their first words were Bad Fact.

• The Trump camp continually tries to disavow Project 2025 but it doesn’t work because the Trump folks left a suspicious void in their platform where a Project 2025 suspiciously still seems to fit. And if the Lego continues to fit, then you’ve got yourself a Millennium Falcon.

• The campaign really takes place. We’ll all watch the polls and sleep with our tennis shoes on for the 6am when early voting begins so we can be out the door to bang on the elementary school gym window and shout Myrtle! Walter! I see you in there! Turn on the lights and open the door! Bring in the dog and put out the cat; I want to vote!

• And then we’ll find out who we really are.

ON ELECTION NIGHT

• On CNN, we’ll watch John King, Snoop Dogg, and Mike Tyson call the states as the results come in. John King will be sane, Snoop will say I did not expect THAT out of Maricopa County, and Mike will say Thit, John… Then Doris Kearns Goodwin, unflappable even in the face of apocalypse, will say something smart and true and nice. And we will all love her.

• Snoop will get his own show on MSNBC. It will be titled something like A Normal Person’s Reactions to the News. And his success and sanity in the face of an insane world will make us (1) redefine normal and then (2) question all of our life and professional choices.

BETWEEN ELECTION DAY AND INAUGURATION DAY

As a futurist, I got nothin’. Maybe buy some canned goods and some stuff for the freezer and then lock the door. It’s either gonna be really good or really bad. We’ll be crying either way — out of grief or relief. And we’ll just wanna watch some Snoop Dogg and eat straight out of the can.

THE FIRST SIX MONTHS AFTER INAUGURATION DAY

We don’t know what Kamala Harris will do if she wins. She hasn’t quite told us yet — but then again she’s only been the candidate for 29 minutes now (even though it feels like it’s been four months already) and nobody on the campaign has figured out how to format Microsoft Word yet. So hang on, they just need a minute. But CNN compiled a list of her positions over time that should work for the moment.

We do have some solid ideas of what Trump will do if he wins, if only because he’s been saying so for months and years now.

And some folks have been thinking that through and have been gaming it out. Literally.

• A few days ago Barton Gellman, undisputed king of the black sky exercise, published a summary of some simulations/games that 175 former senior Democratic and Republican officials ran in June of what might happen on Inauguration Day if Trump is elected. They decided in one game that by late afternoon he’d invoke the Insurrection Act and let loose the dogs of war against his political enemies, brown people, and your Grandma. The game spins out to explore such fascinating totally-not-hypothetical questions like whether the Greensboro, North Carolina Police Department can arrest ICE agents in the performance of ICE’s new orders to arrest and deport nonwhite immigrants-who-maybe-are-documented-citizens-and-who-maybe-are-not. Which is a fair hypothetical but still… somebody should call Gellman and see if he’s OK.

• Robert Kagan did a far worse black sky back in November that was so scary he was pressured into doing a follow-up with hope and potential solutions. (The Atlantic did the same here.) After you read both, I wrote my own semi-Anger Translator responses to Kagan here and here.

AND AFTER THOSE SIX MONTHS AND ONWARD

• I forecast that here in my very first post ever. It still holds but soon I’ll explain still why.

• And there’s an upcoming series of TV movies from somewhere in Europe that’s a version of Murder, She Wrote but instead of retiree Angela Lansbury solving crimes it’s former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yeah, you heard me. And by the end of the first episode America will collectively demand that Hallmark+ stream it along with Snoop Dogg every Christmas season. Which should start every March.

BUT IN THE WEEKS AHEAD IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• I’ll take a hard look at the first batch of high quality polls about this new era in the campaign (once we have them in hand) and see what they portend.

• I’ll explain why my scenarios on possible futures for American democracy don’t need to be revised.

• I’ll take a look at potential futures for the GOP if Trump loses this November.

• I’ll explain more on why I don’t believe we will finish out this year wanting to walk into the sea with our clothes on. And why, if you believe only the cynical can be right, you are wrong.

• And I’ll continue to say things it’s too early to believe.