On the menu today: Setting the time machine for just short of four years in the future. . . .
An Optimistic Peek into the Crystal Ball
October 27, 2028 — With Vice President J. D. Vance the favorite to defeat two-term Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro in the 2028 election, the second term of 82-year-old Donald Trump, America’s 45th and 48th president, approached a triumphant conclusion.
“Expect the unexpected” became the unofficial slogan of Trump’s second term, beginning with the fact that he did not become the 45th and 47th president, as everyone had assumed he would after Election Day 2024. President Joe Biden belatedly followed the advice of Kamala Harris’s former communications director, Jamal Simmons, and announced his resignation at midnight on January 18, 2025 — making Harris America’s first woman president for 36 hours. Biden believed it would be seen as “healing” and “historic.” Subsequent polling found most of the public deemed it “condescending” and “pointless.” The 36-hour period was widely mocked as the “Participation Trophy Presidency,” although it did turn the preprinted “45-47” Trump-inauguration paraphernalia into collector’s items.
In her post-presidential life, former president Harris signed a lucrative two-book deal, including a presidential memoir, got a programming-development contract with NBC’s Peacock streaming service, and became a visiting professor at Howard University — a post-elected-office bundle of lucrative gigs nicknamed “the Obama package.”
Much like in 2017, the news that Trump was returning to the Oval Office spurred a sharp reduction in migrants’ attempts to illegally cross the southern border and a sudden increase in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations. The rate of repatriations ranged between 100,000 and 150,000 per month, ironically mirroring the heights of the Biden presidency.
Prosecutions of human traffickers of all kinds skyrocketed as they had during Trump’s first term, and employers found hiring illegal immigrants and paying them under the table became an increasingly risky proposition. While Trump never quite completed his “big, beautiful wall,” more than 500 miles of a “border-wall system” were completed during his second term, a total that included both new wall and upgrades of previously built, dilapidated fencing, as well as secondary border walls, sensors, lights, cameras, and access roads.
Trump’s policies on illegal immigration did exacerbate the problem of migrants attempting to enter Canada.
Economic growth was shaky at the start of the second Trump term, but the beginning of 2026 saw three consecutive years of the U.S. gross domestic product increasing by more than 4 percent per year. Trump’s tax cuts from his first term were extended for another ten years, largely intact. Trump’s long-threatened barrage of across-the-board tariffs was averted when a wide variety of countries announced reductions in or the elimination of tariffs on goods and services imported from the United States. Congress was persuaded to make a 10 percent tariff standard on imports from any country that permitted, turned a blind eye to, or insufficiently prosecuted slave labor.
“Just like Abe Lincoln, I’m freeing the slaves,” Trump declared.
U.S. energy production continued to increase, and U.S. energy consumption continued to decrease. The long-delayed reembrace of nuclear power accelerated.
Trump’s effort to cut the federal bureaucracy scored more wins than his critics expected; some of this was spurred by federal employees who found working for Trump’s appointees intolerable. Many Environmental Protection Agency employees found new administrator Lee Zeldin intolerable, and sought new employment with nonprofit organizations or agencies at the state and local levels. While environmentalists insisted that Trump was destroying the planet and “baking us alive” with his policies that prioritized economic growth, U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions continued to decline.
Throughout Trump’s second term, a surprising number of American liberals, feeling that the 2024 election had been an irrevocable turning point in the country, chose to emigrate to other countries. “It’s like the old saying: America, love it or leave it,” Trump quipped. “We’re better off without them.”
Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito separately announced their intentions to retire at the end of the court’s term in 2026. Justices Barbara Lagoa and Patrick Bumatay — the first Asian American on the Supreme Court, and the first openly gay justice — were confirmed on largely party-line votes in the U.S. Senate. Trump named the most justices to the court since Richard Nixon, and some now refer to the new majority as “the Trump Court.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who once said of the Court’s decisions, “Every loss truly traumatizes me in my stomach and in my heart,” had several health scares during Trump’s second term but hung on, at least through Election Day 2028. Trump’s second term included another 200 judges appointed and confirmed to the federal bench.
Democrats argued that the 2026 midterms — the loss of one Republican seat in the Senate and two seats in the House — represented a stinging rebuke to the president and the GOP, but the widely touted “blue wave” never materialized. The Democratic Party, still reeling from a defeat in 2024 that it had defined in apocalyptic terms, remained deeply divided between hardline progressives who demanded “total war” and elected Democrats who recognized that leftist positions had proven toxic at the ballot box. Democrats in safe blue states, and their media allies, kept contending that “the woke revival” or “reawakening,” was just around the corner, but it never arrived. New reform-minded, tough-on-crime mayors — nicknamed “the New New Democrats” — were elected in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Corporate America, having touched the hot stove of taking sides in the culture wars, had no interest in being burned again. “Institutional neutrality” took root in an increasing number of American colleges and universities. Growing numbers of faculty and administrators recognized that in the closing years of the Biden administration, and particularly after the 10/7 attacks on Israel, antisemitic and radical campus protesters had inflicted permanent damage on the reputations of higher-education institutions. The pushback was slow, but steady, as pro-Palestinian protesters found themselves a popular scapegoat for Trump’s victory, even though a majority of Jews voted for Harris and a surprising number of Muslim Americans voted for Trump.
Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national-security adviser Mike Waltz, didn’t speak softly and carry a big stick in foreign policy; it spoke bluntly and directly and used the stick intermittently as a warning and deterrent to the world’s bad actors.
By 2028, Hamas had effectively ceased to exist. Throughout the Middle East, all but the most extreme Islamists begrudgingly recognized that the 10/7 attacks had been a strategic disaster that had only immiserated the Palestinian people. The Abraham Accords were restarted, and Saudi Arabia began the most tenuous steps toward recognition of the Jewish state. In a 2025 speech at the American embassy in Jerusalem, nicknamed “the eff around and find out” address, Trump boasted, “Hamas is beyond the ash heap of history, they are history, totally and completely dead, and their murderous ideology died with them. Nasrallah and Sinwar died like dogs!”
Israelis would never describe their lives as completely safe, but the Trump administration reinstated the toughest possible sanctions on Iran, which, coupled with additional acts of covert action and sabotage, meant that the Mullahs in Tehran had only the most tenuous grip on power.
As with the reduction in attempts to illegally cross the border, the presence of Trump had a deterrent effect on the problems that had bedeviled his predecessors. Within a year of Trump’s taking office, the number of NATO countries spending 2 percent or more of their GDP on defense jumped from 23 in 2024 to 31 in 2025, and Spain, the final straggler, hit the mark in 2026. Trump frequently threatened to have the U.S. withdraw from NATO if other countries didn’t “pay their dues,” but never acted upon the threat. Once every NATO member country hit 2 percent, Trump said it should be raised to 3 percent — a number of NATO countries had begun to hit that mark — and griped that too many non-combat military expenditures such as search-and-rescue, radar systems, and military pensions counted as military spending.
Taiwan greeted the new administration with a spree of spending on U.S. defense systems — Aegis destroyers, Northrop Grumman’s E-2D Advanced Hawkeye radar systems, Patriot missiles, and F-35 jets, as well as retired Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Perry-class frigates. The Taiwanese buildup was largely seen as a concession to Elbridge Colby, one of Trump’s key advisers on defense issues, who had long argued that Taiwan needed to spend more on its own defense, to demonstrate that it recognized the threat from China and wouldn’t attempt to be a “free rider” on America’s defense expenditures. The administration made steady progress in the backlog of completed U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
At first, it appeared that Trump had indeed negotiated away a significant portion of Ukrainian territory in pursuit of an end to the war spurred by Vladimir Putin’s invasion. But an early indicator that Trump would be tougher on the Russian leader than his critics expected was his post-election call with Putin, where he “advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.”
Putin clearly had no intent of honoring the cease-fire or the terms of the settlement, and continued “little green men” raids after the May 2025 peace ceremony in Geneva. Trump had seemed initially reluctant to return to the issue, but Trump’s advisers and congressional Republicans eventually convinced the president that Putin had tried to play him for a fool.
In January 2026, President Trump delivered his now-famous “Vlad, I warned you,” speech from the Pentagon, announcing that in response to Putin violating the peace accords, he was authorizing the sale of huge arms caches to Ukraine, with no restrictions on how or where they could be used, boasting that America had “the best weapons, the deadliest, so much stronger and tougher than what Russia has.” In exchange for the massive cache of weapons, Ukraine agreed to give the U.S. a share of an estimated $26 trillion in mineral deposits to be developed after the war. Trump boasted, “It was the best deal since we bought Manhattan from the Indians.”
White House sources even leaked that Trump was contemplating selling Ukraine a nuclear weapon if Putin crossed Trump’s unspecified “red line.” The notion of the U.S. becoming an international nuclear-arms dealer sent a shudder through every world capital, including Moscow, Beijing, Taiwan, and Pyongyang. Even Trump’s top advisers weren’t sure if the president was seriously considering it, but the mere prospect of additional U.S. allies toting their own nuclear deterrent forced America’s enemies to reassess the level of risk they were willing to accept and halt a series of increasing provocations that had begun during the previous administration.
In a stunning vindication of Trump’s version of the “madman theory,” by mid spring 2026, the Russian government announced that Putin had suffered “an unexpected health issue” and that offensive operations in Ukraine were “on hold.” Putin was never seen in public again, although he was, as far as Western intelligence could tell, under house arrest. First, acting president Mikhail Mishustin, and then Sergey Sobyanin, the former mayor of Moscow, negotiated a settlement where Russian forces withdrew from occupied portions of eastern Ukraine but kept Crimea, a resolution that pleased no one but that both sides found preferable to continuing the war.
Xi Jinping watched the way Trump handled Ukraine and contemplated the risks and consequences of a nuclear-armed Taiwan.
China’s generals concluded that the risks of an invasion — including the likelihood of an unprecedented calamity for the global economy — outweighed the potential benefits. Xi believed he had hardened the Chinese economy against the possibility of a trade war or shooting war, but throughout the 2020s, China faced severe economic challenges from an aging population and declining birth rates. Worsening infrastructure, debt, and environmental challenges left the Chinese people increasingly frustrated with their government, and even Xi’s extensive propaganda efforts couldn’t persuade the average Chinese subject to believe that a high-risk war to retake Taiwan was the solution to their problems.
The window of opportunity for a successful invasion of Taiwan slammed shut.
As November approached, Vice President Vance and his running mate, Virginia governor Winsome Sears, appeared on a path to recreate the largely red Electoral College map of four years earlier, although it was too early to count out Shapiro and his running mate, Maryland governor Wes Moore. Vance’s slogan, “Let’s keep it going,” alluded to the widespread perception that despite Trump’s erratic nature, he had delivered four years of relative peace and indisputable prosperity.
In a late October address from the Oval Office that many Democrats contended was pure electioneering for Vance, Trump took a victory lap and began by quoting Ronald Reagan’s farewell address: “My friends: We did it. We weren’t just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.” Trump then added, “We did it even better. We did it the greatest. Nobody even came close.”
ADDENDA: Longtime friend of National Review Bruce Webster urges the bureaucracy fighters of the incoming Trump administration to read The Weed Agency for a quick, light, and funny primer on how permanent government employees outlast the ambitious reform-minded cabinet officials above them.
I don’t know about you, but I’m less than shocked to learn that Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from the state of Denial, used to hang around with Stacey Abrams (pardon me, former “governor” Stacey Abrams).
I second Dan Foster’s suggestion that, assuming Marco Rubio is confirmed as secretary of state, the next senator from the great state of Florida should be that excellent American, Charlie Cooke.