Looking at 2025

As we head into 2025, everyone is wondering what the new year might hold. We all look forward to the new year with hope, showing our optimistic side. At the same time, there’s always a bit of trepidation. After all, none of us is issued a crystal ball when we’re born, allowing us to see the future. Who would have thought on the eve of 2020, that we would all spend most of the year locked up in our homes, hiding from something too small to see and too dangerous to ignore?

I can’t tell you how many hurricanes we’ll have in 2025 or how many forest fires. I have no insight into the probability of California falling off into the ocean, due to a massive earthquake. Nor has anyone sent me a memo telling me when the Yellowstone Caldera will blow, covering much of the nation in volcanic ash. It would be nice to have that information; but I don’t.

There are only a couple of areas where I can even make a guess at what 2025 will bring. Oh, I can guess that we’ll have hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and earthquakes; but that’s about as detailed a guess as I can make in those areas. For something more tangible, the only areas where I can make some real guesses are those where we humans have the most influence.

The Economy

If there’s one thing I feel positive about, going into 2025, it’s the economy. Like many others, I’ve been watching the economy for quite some time, expecting a financial collapse. There is a lot of historical data to back up this idea, especially when we look at other countries who have suffered such disasters in the last few decades. Our government, specifically Congress, has been irresponsible in the handling of the country’s money, putting us in a precarious situation where the national debt is concerned.

That’s not going to change quickly and it’s certainly not going to disappear. Nevertheless, I’m fairly sure that we can put the potential of a financial collapse on the back burner for the next few years. I’m basing this opinion, more than anything, on Donald Trump being voted in as president.

Generally speaking, when a new president comes into office, we don’t have any idea what to expect. The position of President is so singular, that we can’t base our expectations on their past performance in Congress or as a Governor. That norm has been shattered in this case, because Trump is the past and future president. We can look back on what he did in his first term in office, to get a pretty good idea of what he will do in this new term. If anything, he’s likely to double down on what he did before, approaching the same goals with more understanding of how to make the system work.

Donald Trump’s first term in office was good for the economy. He’s a businessman and for the most part, he approached the presidency being the CEO of a large corporation. Many of his moves and decisions were made in an effort to improve the country’s economic situation, such as his efforts to bring manufacturing back home from overseas factories.

His big failure the first time around came about in his efforts to write a budget that eliminated a lot of waste, lowering the overall burden of government spending on the nation’s economy. Unfortunately, he didn’t really understand how to work with Congress at that point, and his budget wasn’t passed.

We can already see that lowering federal government spending is still a priority in Trump’s agenda. His naming of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the new government Department of Government Efficiency shows this. While some are saying that this new “department,” which isn’t really part of the government will be nothing more than a paper tiger; but I don’t agree with them. Trump was smart in picking the very outspoken Elon Musk for this task. If they can’t get the government to dance to their tune, he will use his considerable influence and however much money it costs him to raise up a groundswell of public opinion, pressuring Congress to take action.

Before Trump’s first term in office, the president was Barack Obama. One of the things his presidency was marked by was his nearly ferocious opposition to industry, specifically manufacturing industries. When Trump was voted into office that time, there was an immediate reaction from industry, with major corporations investing in the future, where they had been sitting on their cash reserves before.

We are facing exactly the same situation, once again. If anything. President Biden has been even more opposed to industry than his mentor was, especially the power, petroleum and automotive industries. Now, with Trump preparing to take office, the leaders of these industries are taking a collective sigh of relief. There’s already a positive response from them, as they look to expanding and improving operations under the new administration. That will help the economy overall, especially jobs.

Politics & the News

I’m putting politics and the news together as one category, because they function as one. The news media is actually a political party, even though they don’t run for office and nobody has voted for them. Many speak of them as the propaganda arm of the Democrat party, but in reality they are further to the left than the Democrats are. It is they who are pushing society, government and politics further and further to the left.

Here again, we can see what is coming, by looking back in time. During Trump’s first presidency, the news media made a point of standing strong against him. The editor of the New York Times, supposedly the nation’s newspaper of record, said that they had to reorganize the news department when Biden came into office, because it had been organized to push one story and one story only – the false narrative of Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia.

But there’s more to it than that. Left-leaning and right-leaning people look at things differently. What one side sees as good, the other side sees as bad. This can and does go to the extreme of looking to find the “bad” in something good that the other side does, even if they have to invent that bad. If they can’t invent something bad to say about it, they’ll just ignore it.

We saw that countless times during Trump’s first term in office and we can be sure we’ll see it again. Everything he does will be reported by the mainstream media in a negative light, regardless of whether it is ultimately good for the country or not. There is no reason to believe that we won’t see the same thing played out over and over again, through the next four years.

This doesn’t just go for the news media either. Unfortunately, our political parties have become more and more divided over the last few decades, to the point where they really can’t come into agreement on much of anything. This means that the incoming president will not be able to count on support for anything, from the opposing party. That will be problematic in getting any of his agenda through, as the Senate requires more than a simple majority to approve any bill.

Not only that, but the Republican party is not as good at voting together as the Democrat party is. So, there’s a strong chance that a few Republicans will choose not to go along with some of Trump’s initiatives. That will kill the slim majority that the Republicans have in Congress, causing those bills to fail. It will take a lot of work to get Congress to go along with anything the president wants to accomplish

Public Unrest

The other thing that Trump’s first presidency was plagued with was a lot of public unrest. Many people have blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for this; but that’s not fair. While the Black Lives Matter movement was a major part of what was happening in the country during that time, it was Antifa, hiding behind the BLM movement and using them as camouflage, who were the instigators of most of the violence.

Extreme elements, especially “revolutionary” elements, tend to turn violent. While historically, most of these are on the left end of the political spectrum, they are not all there. We can find right-wing groups that tend towards violence as well. When the two groups are found in the same place, at the same time, a clash is likely to occur.

We haven’t seen any violence since Trump was elected president, as we did the last time around. But that’s probably because the leaders of such movements have learned how little impact their violence had the last time around. That doesn’t mean that they will give up violence altogether; merely that they will be more selective in their use of violence, picking times when their actions can have the greatest possible impact.

There have already been those in Washington DC who have made threats against Republicans in Congress. Most are rather petty threats, such as promising to make their lives miserable, giving them poor service and mistreating them, if they ever eat at restaurants where those people work. While the danger level of such threats is not serious, the attitude behind it could easily lead to much worse.

It would be wise to be on the lookout for potential unrest and violence in the coming months and even years. Avoid any large gatherings, especially those of a political nature. That includes non-political things that people have politicized. In our divided politics, some people will quickly take offence at almost anything, using that as an excuse to react in violent ways.