Re: OT: "I'm Worried About Graham". 🙏

A 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...
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.”...
Trump named the most justices to the court since Richard Nixon, and some
now refer to the new majority as “the Trump Court.”...
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...
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...
Trump’s policies on illegal immigration did exacerbate the problem of
migrants attempting to enter Canada...
New reform-minded, tough-on-crime mayors — nicknamed “the New New
Democrats” — were elected in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City...
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...
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...
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 Geneva 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.”...
:-D