Top 3 political predictions for 2024

I’ve been told my brain works in threes. So that said, here are my tres big predictions for the new year 2024. First, I feel like I should issue a disclaimer right up front: Nothing I say in the next four minutes is guaranteed to actually happen. In fact, there’s a good chance it won’t happen. I’ve gotten so many things wrong in recent years that I really ought to put away my crystal ball. In fact, I threatened to do just that back in 2016, when I and just about everyone else in the media failed to predict that real estate mogul Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton and ascend to the presidency. We’re never gonna live that down. Now, as Trump vies for a second term, my vision of the future is so blurry, that I can’t be 100% sure of what’s out there, or what’s around the corner. But I can piece together a few clues. And here’s what they tell me.

Prediction number one: U.S. aid to Ukraine will collapse, not because of Republican opposition, or because Democrats wouldn’t give into the legislative blackmail of passing a border security bill to get Republican votes for more aid. Rather, it will collapse as the Russian invasion becomes yesterday’s news. So the American people, who have famously short attention spans, we’ll get impatient and conclude that we’ve already spent an obscene amount of money on funding to Ukraine to date, more than $75 billion and counting. And the two warring parties, Ukraine and Russia, have fought their way into a stalemate that could last for years. We’ll decide that we want to cut our losses, and this will please Russian President Vladimir Putin. But Putin’s grin will fade quickly when the next shoe drops, and NATO puts its arms around Ukraine and welcomes it into the international fraternity – the very thing that Putin has been trying to avoid.

Prediction number two: The long-standing and mutually beneficial relationship between Israel and the United States will continue to be strained until the unthinkable happens. It finally breaks, with President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the helm of the respective nations. Biden is going to get more and more fed up with Netanyahu’s hardline and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, as the number of civilian casualties soars past 30,000. But Biden is not the only one itching for divorce. Netanyahu is going to get more and more resentful of the Biden administration’s condescending attempts to babysit him from the safety of the Potomac, which is far away from the everyday life and death concerns of Israeli civilians. The good news is that this relationship will blossom again in years to come under new leadership in both countries.

Prediction number three: Despite desperate last ditch efforts by panicked Democrats in late spring and early summer to nudge Biden out of the race and replace him with a younger, stronger, more appealing alternative candidate, who they believe will be more electable, Biden will fend off the coup attempt, and he’ll limp into the general election in November, where he will face off with Trump in the rematch that no one wants. This will literally be the matchup that’s being demanded by, well, no American in his or her right mind. Third parties will become all the rage. But still, the election will indeed come down to the five battleground states that political observers are spotlighting now: Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. Turnout will be low among Latinos, African Americans, and voters under 30, all of which will hurt Biden, so much so that our 45th president will indeed become our 47th. Heaven help us! Like I said, I’ve been wrong a lot lately. Just ask my wife. I’m wrong on the regular. Let’s hope for the sake of the country that my streak of wrong continues.