Predictions for 2023: Biden and Trump won’t run, Hunter gets a plea deal, and more

OPINION:

Predictions are, of course, a sucker’s game. In a universe with billions of planets and on a planet with billions of people, there is simply too much randomness to try to guess about any specific combinations. But let’s ignore all that and plow ahead with predictions for 2023.

Neither President Biden nor former President Donald Trump will ultimately run for president.

The most pressing political issue in 2023 will be Mr. Biden’s health, which, because it will affect all kinds of electoral decisions, will eventually infect almost all political calculations at the national level. That conversation will become increasingly fraught, as The New York Times, which has been engaged in a sotto voce campaign with respect to the president’s health, increases its volume on the topic.

Mr. Trump will be indicted. Hunter Biden will not. Rather, in an attempt to protect his father, he will be given a deal in which he pleads to a handful of misdemeanors and does no jail time.

Tom Brady will regret losing his wife and acknowledge that regret publicly (probably after the Buccaneers make a hasty exit from the playoffs). On a related note, Pete Davidson will wind up dating Gisele Bundchen before the end of the year.

Congress and others will investigate Ticketmaster for various reasons. Nothing will come of it. Nor will anything come of most of the oversight conducted by the House Republicans.

The value of Twitter and Tesla will each be halved (compared with their valuation on Jan. 1) by the end of 2023.

Tom Cruise will finally win his Oscar.   

The Yankees will miss the playoffs. Because ownership knows that Yankees fans are chumps, they will make no meaningful alterations to the team or its management. Yankees fans, because they are Yankees fans, will keep spending $100 per ticket.

The Mets, despite having the highest payroll in the league (by far), will not win the World Series. Mets fans, because they are Mets fans, will be surprised.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, on the basis of his two years in elected office in a midsize commonwealth, his personal wealth, his sweater vest fashion sense and his overall tallness, will announce his presidential bid, as will many others.

The House Republicans will extract some meaningful concessions (probably related to border security) as part of the debt ceiling increase in the second half of the year. Similarly, they will extract meaningful concessions (probably related to spending) in the fiscal 2024 appropriations process.

We will, yet again, have an end-of-the-year omnibus because Congress just can’t help itself.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy will start the next Congress as speaker.

As part of the fiscal 2024 appropriations process, and after furious lobbying by the environmentalists and the automakers, the domestic content provisions of the energy tax credits embedded in what Mr. Biden has called “the Inflation Act” will be attenuated. These provisions require that supply chains for electric vehicles and batteries originate mostly in the United States.

Someone in official Washington is eventually going to acknowledge the problems associated with employment in the United States (there are still 400,000 fewer people working in the United States than there were in February 2020). Around the same time, official Washington will acknowledge the recession in which we find ourselves.

Global oil prices will close 2023 slightly north of $100 a barrel. 

The slow-motion energy and economic catastrophe in Europe will continue apace. Despite increasing global greenhouse gas emissions and the new record in the use of coal globally in 2022, no one will suggest that the entire Kyoto Protocol regime (which has overseen a 50% increase in greenhouse gases globally since its creation in 1992) has been a failure.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will leave office, dead or alive, volitionally or otherwise, before the end of the year.

Communist China continues to be stressed on all sides by adversaries, economic slowness and (most ominously) demographic challenges. Nevertheless, it takes the opportunity provided by our obsession with Ukraine, the concomitant deterioration of deterrence capability, and the crumbling physical infrastructure of our leadership to attack Taiwan.

It turns out that living in a rough neighborhood sharpens the senses. Japan, having foreseen the rise of communist China and the delay of the United States in responding to this ascendance, accelerates the tempo of the recrudescence of their military.

The Bills will win the Super Bowl. The rest of us will spend the next 30 years having to hear about it.

If you’ve made it this far, join us in predicting the future and send us your predictions. We’ll print the best and spiciest (let us know if you want to remain anonymous).

• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, co-hosts “The Unregulated Podcast.” He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.