If Trump Wins: An Analysis

How does The Atlantic write about the future?

The January/February 2024 issue of The Atlantic is mostly dedicated to a series articles titled “If Trump Wins”. As the name suggests, it’s a look forward to potential aspects of a second Trump presidency. This makes it an interesting case study in how people write and think about the future. I’m especially interested in the degree of certainty conveyed. People love making predictions about what will happen in the future, and they’re almost always wrong, even when they predict with certainty (maybe especially then), because people haven’t learned or internalized Dator’s first law. It’s interesting to see how differently the various authors approached the assignment.

Methodology

I read each of the 24 relevant articles in the issue, looking for four different kinds of statements¹:

High certainty: these statements tend to include words like “will” or “would” and sometimes double down with something like “will certainly”. I’ll draw the line somewhere around “will almost certainly”.

Low certainty: the two most common indicators are words that indicate possibility (“might”, “could”, “likely”, etc) and if-then constructions, conceding that the condition is uncertain. Sometimes it’s also just posing a prediction as a question.

Evidence: sometimes, rather than assertions about what will or might happen, actual Trends, Issues, Plans, or Projections are offered. These provide reason to believe that some futures are more likely than others.

Philosophy: sometimes the articles contain statements about how humans think about the future. This is a little off-topic, but interesting enough to include anyway.

This work necessarily includes a lot of judgment calls and isn’t just a word-counting exercise. For example, depending on the sentence, “could” is sometimes a near-synonym for “might” and sometimes a statement of conditional ability. Likewise, merely describing events of the first Trump administration don’t rise in my mind to the level of trends. I will consider fair game both the writing of the authors and the quotes they select from experts.

Results

David Frum (autocracy)

20 high-certainty future statements, 10 low-certainty (two mentions of scenarios, though, of course, the meaning is less precise/technical than what people in the Futures field mean)

Philosophy: there are two interesting quotes revealing the author’s philosophy. The first is from the opening paragraph:

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar.

Hey, persistent gaps in imagination about the future is one of the major reasons that Foresight exists as a discipline!

Later, he says that a second Trump administration “would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between ‘before’ and ‘after’ that a society can never reverse”. The implication is that the future is path-dependent (fair enough) but also that norms can only be weakened and never strengthened (significantly more tenuous).

Anne Applebaum (NATO)

31 high-certainty future statements, 10 low-certainty (including one mention of scenarios)

McKay Coppins (loyalists)

3 high-certainty future statements, 13 low-certainty

Evidence: the article includes details on Trump’s plans for the Justice Department and a short list of potential Attorney General nominees, as well as a plan to reclassify 50,000 federal civil-service jobs as political appointments (known as Schedule F).

Caitlin Dickerson (immigration)

4 high-certainty future statements, 3 low-certainty

Evidence: details of explicit plans by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, including mass arrests, camps, and deportations; elimination of asylum and birthright citizenship and the imposition of ideology tests for immigrants; finishing the wall and further militarizing the border; and making alignment on immigration a litmus test for administration jobs.

Barton Gellman (the Justice Department)

14 high-certainty future statements, 19 low-certainty

Evidence: plans Mike Davis has promised to enact if appointed as acting attorney general, including mass firings, indictments of “every” Biden, and pardoning everyone charged in connection with the events of January 6th.

Sophie Gilbert (misogyny)

1 high-certainty future statement²

Zoë Schlanger (climate)

6 high-certainty future statements, 6 low-certainty

Evidence: outline of a plan being drafted by the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute to entrench fossil fuels despite state efforts and the increasing efficiency of alternative energy sources.

George Packer (journalism)

7 high-certainty future statements, 8 low-certainty

Evidence: the article cites Trump’s promise to destroy “the fake-news media”, and the Heritage Foundation’s plan for using the Justice Department to take action against reporters who report on leaks.

Philosophy: potentially because it’s an article about journalism, it’s unique in that it lays out a path that journalists can take to stay relevant in a second Trump administration. This sense of agency is important in Futures work - even if the future isn’t what you wish, you can still work to shape it³.

Sarah Zhang (science)

2 high-certainty future statements, 5 low-certainty

Franklin Foer (corruption)

7 high-certainty future statements, 7 low-certainty

Evidence: this mentions again Trump’s Schedule F plan to exert control over the bureaucracy, along with more details of how similar plans have unfolded in Victor Orban’s Hungary.

Michael Schuman (China)

4 high-certainty future statements, 7 low-certainty

Adam Serwer (the courts)

4 high-certainty future statements, 2 low-certainty

Juliette Kayyem (extremism)

7 high-certainty future statements, 1 low-certainty

Evidence: it includes Trump’s promise to pardon many of the January 6th perpetrators.

Elaine Godfrey (abortion)

2 high-certainty future statements, 9 low-certainty

Evidence: clear quotes from pro-life leaders about their plans to use the Comstock Act to end the mailing of abortion pills and, eventually, close all abortion clinics.

Megan Garber (disinformation)

1 high-certainty future statement, 0 low-certainty⁴

Clint Smith (history)

2 high-certainty future statements, 0 low-certainty

Evidence: it presents various aspects of Trump’s 2024 plan for education, focused on controlling the content and tone of the teaching of American history and social issues.

Ronald Brownstein (partisanship)

11 high-certainty future statements, 2 low-certainty

Evidence: it mentions various quotes and plans from Donald Trump about how he will use the resources of the federal government to enforce his agenda in states and cities that don’t support him, covering crime, immigration, and homelessness.

David A. Graham (normalization)

2 high-certainty future statements, 0 low-certainty

Evidence: several pledges of illiberal action are presented, including arresting political opponents, investigating uncooperative media, and purging those he disagrees with from government.

Vann R. Newkirk II (civil rights)

4 high-certainty future statements, 8 low-certainty

Spencer Kornhaber (freedom)

5 high-certainty future statements, 1 low-certainty

Evidence: the article lays out the basics of Trump’s “Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity”.

Tom Nichols (the military)

14 high-certainty future statements, 15 low-certainty

Evidence: it presents both the Schedule F plans as well as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Helen Lewis (the left)

2 high-certainty future statements, 1 low-certainty⁵

Jennifer Senior (anxiety)

7 high-certainty future statements, 7 low-certainty statements⁶

Mark Leibovich (America's character)

1 high-certainty future statement, 1 low-certainty⁷

Discussion

I would classify the articles this way:

• Not really about exploring potential futures: 4

• Positive and negative statements balanced or nearly so (the counts are within 2): 9

• Tilted toward high certainty: 5

• Tilted toward low certainty: 6

I have no idea what guidelines may have been given to the authors ahead of time, or how much editors homogenized the content, but this shows that there’s a wide distribution in how people talk about the future. As a believer in open futures, I prefer the articles presenting less certainty, though I appreciate that some of the difference is merely stylistic, and it may simply be the case that the future of some topics is more certain than others. Also, in a bare majority (13/24), some form of future evidence was presented; I understand that the magazine format constrains word count, but some evidence is a reasonable cost-of-entry for credibly asserting that a particular future is plausible. Special credit to McKay Coppins, Barton Gellman, and Elaine Godfrey for presenting the future as open while also bringing evidence.

As for what’s brought up in the evidence, the most repeated and consequential statement of what a second Trump administration would attempt is Project 2025, emanating from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups. This includes a detailed set of policy plans and how to use executive authority to enact them, and a personnel database to make it easy to install thousands of ideologically appropriate staff into the bureaucracy with the enacting of Schedule F. Rarely is such a detailed blueprint for governing available to the public - for US readers, I recommend looking at the plans for a department relevant to you, and consider why the US professionalized the civil service from the 1880s to the 1930s. This should help you stay focused on what matters most to you during what will likely be an election year full of distracting but largely inconsequential events.

1. Note that all of these are contingent on Trump being elected president, so there is one degree of uncertainty/contingency baked into each of these predictions.

2. This article is a litany of past offences and a promise that it will be worse next time.

3. Alternately, it also shows how important it is to consider the way the future is created by the interaction of multiple actors or drivers, rather than just a single driving force.

4. It’s less of a prediction and more of a reminder of how wild it is to live in post-truth times and how it’s a tempting alternative to the shared reality required by democracy.

5. The article is mostly an exhortation to those on the Left to keep their heads, ignore the noise, and stick to the issues that matter most like voting rights.

6. Also, cool bonus, the article quotes Kevin B Smith, who taught my Intro to Political Science class at the University of Nebraska over two decades ago.

7. This article is largely an argument that 2024 will be a revelation of America’s true character, and a Trump victory would clearly mark a shift from what most have assumed were core American values.