Over the next four years, there will be no shortage of people telling you how bad things will get with Donald Trump’s second term. If he’s willing to leave his most devoted supporters literally out in the cold with nothing but an expensive commemorative ticket to his inauguration, then there’s no reason to believe he’ll give much thought to the welfare of all Americans. Also, he was already President for four years and we saw how that played out—riding the coattails of Obama’s economic recovery until he encountered a real crisis with the pandemic and floundered. It’s fair to say that after nine years of Trump on the political stage, we have a fairly good measure of who he is.
But this measure only serves us insofar as a general idea of how he falls short as a leader. Beyond that, we don’t know how bad things will get because we don’t know what crises will emerge or how submissive his cabinet and the GOP will be toward him this time around. If he wants to nuke a hurricane, he might just go ahead and do it. However, the point remains that we don’t know what he’ll do, which makes everything so unsettled. The horse is back in the hospital.
My advice for dealing with this is two-fold. The first is don’t let people who don’t have your interests at heart define your present. You know trans people are people, so don’t let a bunch of chuds say that trans people don’t exist. You know if your city is an overrun hellscape or not; don’t let people go out and say that you live in the Mad Max wasteland while their rural town is a haven of peace and tranquility. When Trump calls his political opponents “vermin,” you know the connotations of that language, and you don’t have to accept that as politics as normal. Furthermore, just because a lot of people voted for Trump, that doesn’t make him and his policies inherently correct. A lot of people went to see Crocodile Dundee in 1986; that doesn’t make it a good movie. History shows us that the masses are not always right.
But just as important as not letting others define your present is not letting others define your future. It’s one thing to be pessimistic about the future; it’s another to try and game out exactly how it will unfold. Before Trump’s election in 2016, The New Yorker tried to predict what his first term would look like. Some of it turned out to be accurate, but others didn’t. What’s more, attempting to predict Trump’s behavior wasn’t all that useful or operative. It was at best, a coping mechanism to try and envision the future so that it wouldn’t be as painful when it came to pass.
I empathize with those on the left who think their predictions of doom can better prepare people for what’s to come, but I’ve seen this show before, and you kind of have to live with it. Predictions are meaningless. There’s no prize for getting them right and no penalty for getting them wrong. That’s not to say we shouldn’t take Trump at his word for what he plans to do insofar as his brutal plans. I’m certain we’ll see mass deportation raids; I’m less certain he has “concepts of a plan” for healthcare.
There’s a lot of media power in someone confidently telling you what comes next, and there are those who can draw from history, political theory, etc. But to quote the noted political commentator Gandalf the Grey, “Not even the very wisest can see all ends.” It’s easy to masquerade as savvy, and little consequence for being totally off the mark. But even if someone can predict an outcome 9 out of 10 times, that doesn’t make them seers, nor does it mean you should outsource your mental health to what they say the future will be.
Whatever comes, we should confront it as it arrives, not try to play fortune teller so that strangers on social media think we’re clairvoyant.
Recommendations

It’s not on sale (hopefully it will come back in stock), but it is now on 4K: Quentin Tarantino’s best movie, Jackie Brown. The film wasn’t properly respected in its time because people expected another Pulp Fiction, and while it wears the clothing of a crime thriller and contains numerous Tarantino-style needle drops and cinematic references, at its core, the movie is a romance between two people who thought they were too old and jaded to find love. As good as the supporting cast is here, Pam Grier and Robert Forster are at the top of their game, and while Tarantino usually likes to end his movies on a violent note (as he notes in Cinema Speculation, he feels like violence is the emotional catharsis), the bittersweet melancholy of Jackie Brown makes it his strongest feature.
Note: I get a small percentage of sales made through my Amazon Associates link.
What I’m Watching
I’m trying to grind my way through Alfred Hitchcock’s final five movies, but it is not easy. I don’t want to write these movies off, and it’s not difficult to access them (they’re included in the second and third volumes of the Classic Collection 4K sets), but after seeing Marnie and Torn Curtain, I’m a little pessimistic about Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot. It’s not that Hitchcock’s talent is absent, but at least in the case of Marnie and Torn Curtain, it feels like his interest is wandering and the scripts are no longer the tight tales of suspense audiences had come to expect. But since I spent most of last year watching or rewatching Hitchcock’s filmography, I’d be remiss if I skipped these, especially since I already own them.
As always, if you want to keep up with the films I’m watching, follow me on Letterboxd.
What I’m Reading
I’m still working my way through Demon Copperhead, but I hope to have that wrapped by next week.
In other reads:
Yes, The Brutalist Used A.I. It Only Gets More Complicated From There. by Sam Adams [Slate] - We’re in the Oscar silly season where whisper campaigns are used to sink awards hopefuls rather than honestly engage with the movies themselves. That means people are mad about The Brutalist using A.I., but as Adams points out, there are degrees of A.I. at work here. We should be on the defensive against generative A.I. that seeks to take people’s jobs and replace them with slop generated by theft, but that’s not what happened in the case of The Brutalist. In this case, it was a fairly innocuous fix from post-production tools, and if it had just been called a large language model, no one would have batted an eye. The issue is that A.I. is now becoming a catch-all due to marketing efforts (it’s why every tech product now has “A.I.” even though no one is bothering to define what that means for their product.
Mark Zuckerberg Has a Funny Idea of What It Is to Be a Man by Jamelle Bouie [The New York Times] - It’s funny watching a dork-ass loser like Mark Zuckerberg try to define masculinity and masculine energy, although it becomes slightly less funny when you know he’s going to try and force these malformed ideas on the rest of us. As Bouie points out, Zuckerberg or his Silicon Valley cohorts have no idea of what being a man means in terms of responsibility, empathy, or gravitas. “We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys,” writes Bouie.
The Browns gave Deshaun Watson what he wanted. Now they’re paying the price by Jason Lloyd [The Athletic] - The Falcons went after Deshaun Watson hard, which was clearly a mistake not only because his level of play didn’t warrant the fat contract he was looking for, but even if it did, that didn’t paper over the fact that he was accused of sexual assault by two dozen women. The Falcons only missed out because the Browns were the bigger fools, and it’s certainly rewarding to watch that front office suffer for their mistake. While the Browns will look to move on from their costly error, that is a doomed franchise as long as owner Jimmy Haslam is in charge. And speaking of doomed franchises…
The Falcons are an incoherent franchise by Dave Choate [The Falcoholic] - Earlier in the season, my brother and I remarked that even when the Falcons were winning games, they weren’t particularly fun to watch. They lacked an identity, and consequently, they imploded pretty easily in the back half of the season. While it would be nice to hope that new quarterback Michael Penix Jr. is the answer to the team’s woes, I’m not too optimistic. Until this team settles on how they want to win (Are they going to try and pile on points? Beat other teams in the trenches?), they’ll continue to be NFL filler—a team that’s not bad enough to be a tire fire like the Browns or the Jets but never good enough to take a serious shot at a Super Bowl title.
What I’m Hearing
Thinking of Jackie Brown got me thinking about how Tarantino expertly deploys Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” to bookend the movie. That song comes from the film of the same name, which is excellent, but also a little tough to track down (there was a Kino Lorber Blu-ray about ten years ago, but it’s out of print now; I’m hoping it gets the 4K treatment sometime soon).
What I’m Playing
I’m getting slightly back into Balatro, but for the most part, it’s still punching folks in Sleeping Dogs. Beyond that, I’ve got my eye on the Nintendo Switch 2, but part of me feels like I should let the early adopters work out the kinks and use my money on something I’d get more use out of like a PlayStation Portal.
Housekeeping
If you paid to subscribe to my newsletter for the brief time it was on Beehiiv, please note that I’m in the process of deleting that account. You should no longer be charged for a publication that doesn’t exist, but be sure to check your auto payments. If you believe you paid erroneously for the Beehiiv version, just shoot me a message and I can gift you a free year of this Substack publication.
Also, if you don’t want to pay any more, that’s fine too! I’m not going to say I don’t need the money because that would be a lie, but I’m also not a hard-sell guy. If you want to become a paid subscriber, that’s wonderful. If not, I totally understand.