John M. Crisp: 3 audacious predictions for an unpredictable era

John M. Crisp, Tribune News Service on Dec 2, 2025

Published in Op Eds

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

Making predictions in print is always risky if not foolhardy. Eventually someone is much more likely to say “You were wrong!” than “You nailed it!”

Still, I’ll take a chance. Here are three not-unrelated predictions, ranked from most probable to least:

First: If Democrats win in 2026, President Donald Trump will not accept the result.

Second: Trump will be impeached for a third time.

Third: Trump will not complete the last three years of his term.

The election: It’s conventional political wisdom that the party out of power polls well in the midterms. Given Trump’s low favorability ratings, the uncertain economy and his failure to accomplish much that he promised during the campaign, it’s possible that the Democrats could retake the House. It’s not beyond possibility that they could win the Senate.

What is impossible to imagine is that Trump will quietly accept the results of such an election. This doesn’t mean that he will refuse to concede, as he has refused to concede the 2020 election. No, he will try to subvert the midterm, as he tried to subvert the 2020 election.

The infrastructure for contesting the election is already being installed, as David Graham argued recently in The Atlantic: Compliant functionaries have been put in strategic positions, lawyers are ready and Trump hasn’t been squeamish about deploying federalized troops on American streets.

You may imagine that Trump will gracefully concede the 2026 election in the noble American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power; I predict otherwise.

Impeachment: Of the four American impeachments, Trump owns two of them. If the Democrats win the House, he will put the all-time record out of reach.

His supporters claim that both of Trump’s impeachments were pure politics. But the concept of checks and balances imposes responsibilities: How can any conscientious House of Representatives—no matter its political makeup—avoid responsibility for oversight when a president is caught trying to bargain weapons for an ally in exchange for a political “favor”?

And what accountable House can overlook a president who tries to overturn an election, as Trump did on Jan. 6, 2021?

A third impeachment is likely. Conviction in the Senate is another matter, however, which leads to my third prediction:

Trump will not complete his second term.

It’s difficult to see how the nation can continue for three more years as it has during Trump’s first year in office. Trump has increasingly pushed up against—and exceeded—the norms, standards, rules and laws that make possible governance by the people.

Even if Democrats don’t win the House, Trump’s unrestrained second administration is committing acts so likely illegal that even a narrowly led Republican House may not be able to look the other way. And if Trump’s authoritarian tendencies—the accumulation of power in the executive branch, the prosecution of his political opponents, the self-enrichment—are to be thwarted, both parties may eventually be moved to act.

But there’s something else: If former President Joe Biden’s performance during last summer’s debate against Trump convinced you—as it did me—that Biden could not successfully complete another four years in office, watching Trump’s 20-minute pardoning of the Thanksgiving Day turkeys might give you the same feeling.

Trump eventually gets around to pardoning the turkeys, but the path to get there is paved with repetitious, unfocussed, sometimes bizarre meanderings, many of them recycled from speeches we’ve heard before. He mocked “Sleepy Joe Biden”; he mused irrelevantly about renaming the turkeys “Chuck and Nancy”; he “joked” about shipping unpardoned turkeys to a prison in El Salvador; he told a few lies (Washington D.C. hasn’t “had a murder in six months”); he called Gov. J.B. Pritzker “a big, fat slob”; and he bragged and bragged and bragged.

In short, Trump neither looks, acts nor talks like a normal, healthy, secure president or person. I’m not as old as Trump, but I’m old enough to know that this sort of disorganized muddle trends in only one direction.

Who will survive these next three years? Our country? Or Trump? I’m still betting on our country, but it’s going to be close.

_____