Will Biden and Trump remain the frontrunners? Will Putin remain in charge of Russia? Will China start a war? These and other forecasts of the year to come.
This will be the fourth year in a row that the staff of Future Perfect has given itself the task of trying to predict, well, the future. It’s in the name of the section, but forecasting is something that can benefit you as a thinker whether or not you can accurately see what’s to come. As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote last year, “the most critical skills for forecasting are thinking numerically, being open to changing your mind, updating your beliefs incrementally and frequently instead of in rare big moments, and — most encouragingly — practicing.” Practice makes Future Perfect, in other words.
So here are our best guesses — with probabilities attached — to what we think will happen as some of the most important stories of 2023 unfold. Will we dip into a recession? Will inflation continue unchecked? Will China launch an invasion of Taiwan, and will Vladimir Putin still be president of Russia at year’s end? Will the Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl? (This one might be of interest only to me.)
It’s important to remember that each prediction is made probabilistically, meaning we assign each event a probability of between 10 and 95 percent. A very high percentage — say, 80 percent — doesn’t mean that an event will definitely happen (something we all should have learned after the 2016 election). It simply means that if we make five predictions at 80 percent, we expect four of them to come true. And we’ll be keeping track, reporting back next year on how we did. (You can read our review of our 2022 predictions here.) —Bryan Walsh
The United States
Joe Biden will be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination heading into 2024 (70 percent)
Presidential reelection years are approximately half as interesting to political reporters as open-seat races because only one party has competitive primaries. Naturally, this means that every such year features rampant speculation about improbable primary challenges or running mate swaps by the incumbent: Maybe Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan would challenge Trump in 2020! Or George W. Bush would swap Dick Cheney for Rudy Giuliani in 2004! (Neither happened.)
“Will Biden run again?” is perhaps the most understandable of these speculation cycles, given the incumbent’s age — he’d be 82 on Election Day 2025 — but I think it’s very unlikely he declines to run. The last two incumbents to decline an attempt at reelection (Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman) were former vice presidents who ascended following the death of their predecessor, had already served more than a full term, were prosecuting increasingly unpopular wars, and, most importantly, faced tough primary challenges.
Biden, by contrast, is not facing any equivalently large backlash within the Democratic Party. Moreover, there seems to be a substantial incumbency advantage to the presidency, making Biden by far Democrats’ most electable option. That’s why I think he’ll be the frontrunner heading into the election year, as measured by Polymarket (or, if Polymarket shuts down, another high-volume prediction market). —Dylan Matthews
Donald Trump will be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination heading into 2024 (60 percent)
We might as well start with the polls: Despite a recent dramatic outlier, the most recent ones listed by FiveThirtyEight tend to show Trump ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has emerged as his most likely challenger.
But of course, polls can only tell us so much this far out, especially in primaries, which tend to shift more rapidly and dramatically than general elections. Maybe Trump gets indicted by this or that prosecutor, which damages — or maybe helps! — his standing with GOP primary voters. While Trump dominated the 2016 primary cycle, there was a brief moment when Ben Carson was beating him. Anything’s possible.
My belief that Trump’s the frontrunner (and will remain so per Polymarket come December 2023) comes from having seen Trump perform in a competitive national primary before, and from knowing that DeSantis has not waged a campaign at this scale, and not against Trump.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24323527/GettyImages_1441714759.jpg)
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Those of us who watched all of the 2015 debates will recall that Trump wiped the floor with his myriad opponents. In retrospect, this makes total sense: He’s a TV star who has spent decades practicing that kind of performance. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that Trump’s performance in debates and ability to control the news cycle wouldn’t be enough to overcome his inexperience and alienating persona. But they were enough. I suspect they’ll be enough again, though the messiness of primaries means my confidence is relatively low. —DM
The Supreme Court will rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional (70 percent)
My colleague Ian Millhiser listened to the oral arguments in the Students for Fair Admissions cases challenging affirmative action at both the University of North Carolina and Harvard, and left persuaded that explicit racial preferences for admission are a goner: “Even if one of the conservative justices who expressed some reservations today surprises us,” he wrote, “that would still likely leave five votes teed up against affirmative action.”
That makes sense. As Millhiser notes, there are six Republican appointees on the Court today, all by presidents opposed to affirmative action and all reared in a conservative legal movement where opposition to the policy is taken for granted. Even the most comparatively moderate of them, Chief Justice John Roberts, is famously hostile to considering race in attempts to address past discrimination.
The reason I’m not more confident is due to a nuance Millhiser noted, which is that Roberts appeared open to racial preferences at military academies, noting the federal government’s argument that the military needs a diverse officer corps to succeed. If such a carve-out is included in the ultimate ruling, my prediction here will be wrong: I’m predicting they’ll strike down affirmative action across the board at public or publicly funded institutions. —DM
The US will not meet its target for refugee admissions this fiscal year (80 percent)
President Biden has set the refugee admissions target at 125,000 for fiscal year 2023 — the same level as in 2022. I think the US will fail to hit that target for the same reasons it failed last year (when it admitted fewer than 20,000 refugees). Chief among them: The Trump administration gutted America’s resettlement infrastructure, and it still hasn’t fully recovered. Under Biden, there have been efforts to restaff the government agencies that do resettlement and reopen the offices that had been shuttered, but advocates say the rebuild has been too slow. There just doesn’t seem to be enough political will to make it a priority.
You might be wondering: What about all the Afghans, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans that the US has welcomed? Well, the thing is, those who came to the US via the legal process known as humanitarian parole only get stays of two years. They don’t count toward the number of refugees resettled as refugees are given a path to permanent residency. I hope the US will grant full refugee status to the full 125,000 it’s targeting for 2023, but sadly, I doubt that will happen. —Sigal Samuel
The US will slip into recession during 2023 (70 percent)
“The state of the economy is weird,” as New York’s Eric Levitz put it in a recent piece. The US keeps gaining jobs, and unemployment remains near historic lows. Inflation is declining, as are gas prices. Yet there is striking uniformity among economists and business executives that a recession is incoming.
What gives? Not the Federal Reserve, which has shown no sign that it is ready to significantly moderate interest rate increases, as it seeks to curb spending and investment and tame inflation. Pulling that off without thrusting the US into a recession would require orchestrating the kind of soft landing for the economy that the Fed hasn’t pulled off since 1994, as my Vox colleague Madeleine Ngo wrote recently. Every part of the economy that is vulnerable to high interest rates — home purchases, manufacturing output, retail sales — is already slumping.
Put the current data and the historical analogies together and it’s hard to believe that the US won’t avoid at least a mild recession next year, especially since economic decision-makers are all basically acting as though one is imminent. As John Maynard Keynes put it, many of our economic decisions — from whether to buy a house to whether to close a factory — come down less to hard data than “animal spirits.” And the spirits are flagging. —BW
Inflation in the US will exceed 3 percent (60 percent)
This past year, I predicted that inflation would stay below 3 percent because that’s what the Federal Reserve and private forecasters predicted. That was extremely wrong: The surge in household cash resources from various stimulus measures, combined with shocks like the semiconductor shortage and the disruptions of the Ukraine-Russia war, meant that prices by the Fed’s preferred metric were 4.9 percent higher in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the third quarter of 2021.
So, how does one go about trying to predict 2023 inflation when major forecasters all got 2022 wrong? For one thing, I’m going to be less confident. I was 80 percent certain last year; I am much less so this year.
As of December 14, the Fed is projecting that inflation will fall between 3 and 3.8 percent in 2023, and the Survey of Professional Forecasters suggests inflation will start at 3.8 percent in the first quarter and fall to 2.7 percent by the end of the year. So an undershoot below 3 percent is certainly possible, especially if the Fed continues to tighten and especially if the economy dips into a recession (see above).
But wage growth remains quite strong as of this writing, in a range where even the doves at Employ America think some tightening is required. That’s why I think a rate above 3 percent is more likely than not. —DM
There will be no Supreme Court vacancies in 2023 (90 percent)
Last year, Vox’s Dylan Matthews correctly predicted that Stephen Breyer would retire from the Supreme Court. Now, the whole court is relatively young, with four justices in their 50s and none in their 80s (the eldest justice, Clarence Thomas, is a spry 74 years old).
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24323531/GettyImages_1431398148.jpg)
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Could Justice Sonia Sotomayor have retirement on her mind since there’s a high likelihood Republicans will gain control of the Senate in 2024? Hard to know for sure, but a 2023 retirement would certainly be premature — if she goes that route, she could wait until the summer of 2024. Aside from retirement, there’s death. Using the Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables, the cumulative odds of any justice dying in 2023 (based on age alone) is a little over 11 percent, with Thomas the highest (3.1 percent) and Barrett the lowest (0.3 percent). But the justices aren’t your average Americans — their high education status and wealth reduce their chance of early death and increase their likelihood of survival, so I’m predicting just a 10 percent chance of a vacancy. —Kenny Torrella
The world
Vladimir Putin will still be President of Russia (80 percent)
This past year has likely been the worst for Putin’s survival chances since he first ascended to the presidency at the end of 1999. He launched a brutal and illegal war that made his nation an international pariah; the resulting sanctions and mass mobilization of young men from that war are wreaking havoc on an economy that’s also suffering from now-falling oil prices. On top of all that, he’s losing that war to a country with less than a third of Russia’s population. All of these are conditions where coups start to become imaginable.
That said, it’s important to keep “base rates” in mind: How common are coups in dictatorships, generally? A 2021 paper from John Chin, David Carter, and Joseph Wright looked through a database of coup attempts and found that in autocratic countries, 6.3 percent of years featured a coup attempt. “Regime change coups,” their term for attempted coups that totally change a country’s governance structure (as opposed to, say, replacing one general with another), are much more common in personalist regimes like Putin’s, with attempts in 7 percent of years. But in general, only 48 percent of coup attempts they studied succeeded.
This paper might lead one to think there’s perhaps a 3.5 percent chance of a successful regime-change coup against Putin in a given year (and it’s hard to imagine a coup against him that doesn’t constitute a regime change). Given all the stressors listed above, I think that’s much too low an estimate. That said, the low overall rate of coups makes me think it’s more likely than not that Putin stays in power. —DM
China will not launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan (90 percent)
People I take seriously are genuinely concerned that China is gearing up for an invasion of Taiwan this decade. Ben Rhodes has a thorough, thoughtful take in the Atlantic, and Phil Davidson, the retired admiral formerly in charge of US military operations in the region, has argued China will be ready for an invasion by 2027. Not controlling Taiwan is clearly a major psychic injury to Communist Party leaders, and taking over a world leader in semiconductor production that’s strategically placed in the South China Sea would have geostrategic benefits, too.
But I have a hard time getting over the fact that an invasion would be outrageously costly for China in terms of blood and treasure and international esteem, and that these costs would almost surely outweigh any benefits. Mattathias Schwartz at Insider has a useful rundown of the challenges an invasion poses, not least of which is that Taiwan is an island and amphibious invasions are extraordinarily difficult. John Culver, a veteran CIA analyst on China, argues that there would be clear signs before an invasion, like “surging production of ballistic and cruise missiles; anti-air, air-to-air, and large rockets for long-range beach bombardment; and numerous other items, at least a year before D-Day.”
While China has stepped up its probes of Taiwan’s defenses, none of those warning signs are visible yet. We saw preparations for the Russian invasion of Ukraine months ahead of time; it wasn’t clear whether Putin was serious or feinting, but he was definitely up to something. The situation with China and Taiwan just isn’t the same, and the debacle that is the Russian invasion of Ukraine probably doesn’t make Xi Jinping more inclined to repeat Putin’s mistake. —DM
At least one new country will join NATO (90 percent)
Sweden and Finland formally applied to join NATO in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, in a massive reorientation of Nordic defense policy. While Sweden was secretly cooperating with NATO throughout the Cold War, it was publicly non-aligned during those decades and often vocally critical of the West. Meanwhile, Finland was so thoroughly under the Soviets’ thumb that the USSR once forced a Finnish prime minister they didn’t like to resign.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24323536/GettyImages_1245727290.jpg)
Gints Ivuskans/AFP via Getty Images
Turkey, a member since 1952, has reservations about the Swedes and Finns related to their support for Kurdish causes, which has been delaying their accession. This means that Sweden and Finland joining is not a totally sure thing, but I think it’s pretty close. The consensus among most observers is that Turkey is trying to extract a few concessions from its Western defense partners and understands that the massive benefits the new members bring to the alliance outweigh any downsides. —DM
Finland will remain the world’s happiest country, while America won’t crack the top dozen (75 percent)
Every year, the World Happiness Report ranks countries in terms of the happiness of their populations. It’s an attempt to pay more attention to indicators of subjective well-being as opposed to raw GDP.
Finland has been the happiest country for five years running, thanks to its well-run public services, high levels of trust in authority, and low levels of crime and inequality, among other things. And in 2022, researchers noted that its victory wasn’t even a close call: Its score was “significantly ahead” of every other country. So I think it’s likely to hold onto the top spot in 2023. As for America, its ranking did improve recently — from 19th place in 2021 to 16th place in 2022 — but it has never made it into the top dozen spots. —SS
Science and technology
A psychedelic-based mental health treatment will win US regulatory approval (60 percent)
Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs has been undergoing a renaissance over the past decade, and it’s now bearing fruit. A May 2022 letter from the Health and Human Services Department disclosed that President Biden’s administration anticipates regulators will approve MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for depression within the next two years.
MDMA will probably come first; some experts say that by the end of 2023, it’s very likely to become FDA-approved for PTSD. Meanwhile, psilocybin will probably get approved for depression the next year. But with such a delicate issue as this, it’s always possible that some late-stage questions will emerge around the clinical trials or plans for implementing an approval, and that could bog things down, so I’m only giving this prediction 60 percent odds. —SS
The US will not approve a nasal vaccine for Covid-19 (90 percent)
For a long time, we’ve been hearing about how Covid-19 vaccines delivered through the nose would likely prevent more infections than shots in arms. And China, India, Russia, and Iran have already greenlit vaccines taken through the nose or mouth. Alas, not the US. Nasal vaccines created by American researchers have been tested in animals, but human testing has been held back for a few reasons. A big one is the lack of funding: Biden has asked Congress for more money for next-generation vaccines, but Republicans have resisted. Current estimates put nasal vaccines years away for the US. That’s depressing, but the indications suggest it’s accurate. —SS
An AI company will knowingly release a text-to-image or text-to-video model that exhibits bias (90 percent)
AI that lets you turn a few words into an image or a video made stunning advances in 2022, from OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion to Meta’s Make-A-Video and Google’s Imagen Video. They were hailed for the delightful art they can make and criticized for exhibiting racial and gender bias.
They won’t be the last. I feel confident that this pattern will repeat itself in 2023, simply because there’s so much to incentivize more of the same and so little to disincentivize it. As the team at Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, put it in a paper, “The economic incentives to build such models, and the prestige incentives to announce them, are quite strong.” And there’s a lack of regulation compelling AI companies to adopt better practices.
In assessing whether this prediction comes true, I will judge an AI company to have “knowingly” released a biased model if the company acknowledges in a model card or similar that the product exhibits bias, or if the company builds the model using a dataset known to be rife with bias. And I’ll judge whether the product “exhibits bias” based on the assessments of experts or journalists who gain access to it. —SS
OpenAI will release GPT-4 (60 percent)
In its brief history, the research group OpenAI has released four large language models capable of producing intelligible text under the name “GPT,” or Generative Pre-trained Transformer. The first iteration came out in summer 2018. Then in early 2019, they unveiled GPT-2; in summer 2020 came GPT-3, and as part of the very high-profile ChatGPT product they revealed in late November 2022, they announced they had created GPT-3.5. The question then naturally arises: When is GPT-4 coming?
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24323539/GettyImages_1245565631.jpg)
Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Impressionistically, I find GPT-3.5 outputs much more convincing than GPT-3 ones, but OpenAI did not judge the advance significant enough for the name GPT-4. The release schedule also seems to be slowing down somewhat. But the rumor mill points in the opposite direction, with the New York Times’s Kevin Roose reporting murmurs that GPT-4 will come out in 2023, and TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers more evasively suggesting “perhaps as soon as 2023.”
I’m inclined to give the rumor mill some weight, which is why I think GPT-4 in 2023 is more likely than not, but I’m not confident at all. —DM
SpaceX’s Starship will reach orbit (70 percent)
Starship, the new reusable spacecraft being developed by SpaceX, has been in the works for roughly a decade now. While the company has signaled that the next step is an uncrewed test flight reaching Earth orbit, that project has recently seen some delays. On November 1, industry news sites were reporting that the craft’s first orbital launch would come in December, but by December it was clear the launch wouldn’t come until 2023 at the earliest.
But smart observers are still optimistic. “Based on a couple of conversations, I think SpaceX has a reasonable chance of making Starship’s orbital launch during the first quarter of 2023,” Ars Technica’s Eric Berger wrote on December 9. More to the point, delays, which are pretty common with SpaceX and spaceflight generally, sometimes are a sign of caution, which means the actual launch attempt has better odds.
Starship is a totally new system, but SpaceX has an enviable track record with its other rockets: a 99 percent success rate on nearly 200 launches. Most of the drama with Falcon launches these days has to do with whether SpaceX also successfully lands the reusable first-stage booster without damage. The odds of a failure are higher in an early-stage program like Starship — and crewed launches like the shuttle operate under even more stringent safety standards — but SpaceX’s track record gives me hope.
I put the odds that SpaceX will attempt a launch in 2023 at around 90 percent. If it attempts a launch, I put odds of success at some point in 2023 (if not necessarily in the first attempt) around 80 percent. That’s lower than its 99 percent success rate for the Falcon rockets, but fair given the newness and relative complexity of the system. 90 percent times 80 percent gets us around 70 percent odds that a launch succeeds in 2023. —DM
Animals
At least three lab-grown meat companies will begin selling their products in the US (50 percent)
In November, the nascent lab-grown or “cultivated” meat field reached a major milestone: The US Food and Drug Administration gave Upside Foods, an early player in the sector, the green light to sell its cultivated chicken. But you won’t find it for sale just yet — the startup still needs USDA approval, which I predict it’ll get by the end of 2023. Not only that: I predict similar approval for two other startups in the coming year.
If these moves happen, cell-cultured meat won’t be available for mass consumption immediately. Upside has plans to first partner with one Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco, and cultivated seafood startups Wildtype and BlueNalu will first work with high-end sushi restaurants. The first movers will have to be high-end — cultivated meat is still costly to produce, especially compared to $1.50-per-pound factory-farmed chicken.
Availability at just a few elite restaurants is far from the industry’s real ambition: stealing a sizable share of the conventional meat market. But it’s significant that the startups in a sector that began less than a decade ago are now slowly migrating from the R&D lab to the manufacturing plant. It’ll be the first real test for the $2 billion gamble on lab-made meat. —KT
The Supreme Court will rule in favor of the pork industry in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (70 percent)
In 2018, over 62 percent of California voters supported a ballot initiative called Proposition 12 to ensure that pork, eggs, and veal sold in the state come from uncaged animals, whether those animals were raised in California or not. The law inspired fierce backlash in the form of three lawsuits from meat trade groups, and the Supreme Court took up one of them intended to invalidate the part of the law that covers pork. (Disclosure: From 2012 to 2017, I worked at the Humane Society of the United States, which led efforts to pass Proposition 12.)
The industry’s core argument is that Prop 12 violates the “dormant commerce clause,” a legal doctrine meant to prevent protectionism, or states giving their own businesses preferential treatment over businesses in other states.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24323542/GettyImages_1248317253.jpg)
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
I think that argument is spurious — many producers have already begun to transition their operations to comply with Prop 12. But I’m not on the Supreme Court. My pessimistic instinct is to say that a majority of the justices will side with business interests, in keeping with the court’s increasingly business-friendly trends.
However, it’s not an open-and-shut case. There could be some swing votes, as Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch don’t like the dormant commerce clause, and Justice Samuel Alito dissented when the Court struck down a federal animal cruelty law. Hence, I’m pegging my confidence in this prediction at 70 percent. —KT
Over 50 million birds will be culled due to US bird flu outbreaks (40 percent)
In 2015, a catastrophic avian influenza outbreak in the US wiped out 50 million chickens and turkeys raised for food. Most of them didn’t die from the disease but instead were culled, or proactively killed (in disturbing ways) to prevent further spread. It seemed like a black swan event, but as of mid-December, over 53 million birds have been culled in this year’s outbreak. Europe set its own bird flu outbreak record this year, too.
Some experts say the highly pathogenic influenza may be here to stay, and there’s good reason to worry they’re right. Usually, avian flu viruses subside during the summer months, but this summer they continued to circulate. European officials say the disease may now be endemic among the continent’s wild bird populations, who spread it to farmed birds as they migrate. And the virus is spreading faster, and to more species — including more mammals — than past outbreaks.
Given the alarm among those who closely track bird flu, increasing calls for vaccination against bird flu (a long-taboo topic among governments and poultry producers), and the fact that this year’s virus hit 47 US states (compared to 21 states during the 2015 outbreak), I think the chance of another disastrous bird flu outbreak is fairly high. —KT
Beyond Meat’s stock price will break $30 at the end of the year (30 percent)
It’s been a hell of a few years for Beyond Meat. Six years ago, its flagship Beyond Burger made plant-based meat cool, and its stock market debut in 2019 was the strongest-performing IPO since 2008.
As of mid-December, its stock price is half of its $25 IPO, and just 6 percent of its $235 high in July 2019. Beyond Meat’s sales have fallen sharply — a 13 percent decline in pounds of plant-based meat sold in this year’s third quarter compared to last year’s. And it has accrued a mountain of debt, due in part to its big plant-based jerky launch, which underperformed expectations. It has also launched a range of other products in the last year, including steak tips, new kinds of chicken, and at least nine distinct products for restaurant partnerships.
Beyond Meat isn’t alone in its struggles; the whole plant-based meat sector is down. To course-correct, the company recently laid off 19 percent of its staff and told investors it plans to get back to basics, with a focus on growing its core offerings: sausages, burgers, and beef. It may also benefit from a recent contraction in competition and slowing inflation.
That could all help its stock price rise, but financial analysts are skeptical a short-term turnaround is possible. The mean price analysts predict for the end of 2023 ranges from $10 to $16, with the highest at $32. —KT
Antibiotics sales for farmed animals will increase in 2022 (65 percent)
Nearly two-thirds of medically important antibiotics in the US are fed to farmed animals, which worries public health experts as some bacteria are evolving to become resistant to the lifesaving drugs, ushering in a post-antibiotic area.
The FDA and the companies that produce and sell meat are under pressure to tackle the problem. But the FDA seems reluctant to wade into the issue, and advocacy groups say grocers and restaurant chains that pledged to reduce antibiotic use in their supply chains aren’t following through. Given governmental apathy and corporate laggards, and the fact that beef production — which uses far more antibiotics than pork and poultry — is projected to have grown 2 percent in 2022 (compared to 2021), I think antibiotic use will have slightly increased in 2022. —KT
Culture and sport
Top Gun: Maverick will not win Best Picture (75 percent)
After Dylan Matthews biffed it last year when he predicted that the 2022 Academy Award for Best Picture would go to Belfast, a movie that I’m still not 100 percent sure was real, I’m hesitant to wade into Carpetbagger territory. This is compounded by the fact that of the 10 films Variety projects have the best chance at taking home the gold statuette, I’ve seen precisely two: the honestly overrated Everything Everywhere All at Once and the 131 minutes of “America! Fuck yeah!” that is Top Gun: Maverick. You have that right: I am the reason that critically acclaimed films are bombing at the box office.
But even though I’m no cineaste, I’ve watched enough Oscar telecasts to have a pretty good idea of what the Academy is looking for. And it is not, apparently, movies that audiences go to see. While nearly every Best Picture winner between 1980 and 2003 was among the 20 top-grossing movies of the year, only three winners since have cracked that list.
Top Gun: Maverick isn’t just the highest-grossing film of the year, it has nearly doubled the performance of its closest competitor, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Add that to its summer release — recently, the Academy has mostly preferred films released near the end of the year — and the odds are bad for the fighter plane flick. If I had to choose a winner, it would be Tár, because why wouldn’t an industry facing an existential audience crisis choose a critically acclaimed film that no one has seen? But I do expect Top Gun: Maverick to take home the award for Best Visual Effects, both for the amazing, real-life dogfighting sequences and for whatever it is that keeps 60-year-old Tom Cruise looking ageless. —BW
The Philadelphia Eagles will win the 2023 Super Bowl (25 percent)
Let’s get this out of the way: I am part of that shadowy cabal of journalists, as described in a recent Ringer story, who are inexplicably devoted to the Philadelphia Eagles football team. And for most of my life, this has been a one-way relationship filled with disappointment and heartache. Sure, we’ll always have Nick Foles and the “Philly Special” at Super Bowl 52 (though my favorite memory from that game isn’t Foles catching a pass; it’s then-Patriots quarterback Tom Brady dropping one). But this is a franchise with an all-time loss record of .490 as of the end of 2021, one tick lower than the Cleveland Browns. The Browns!
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24323546/GettyImages_1450463531.jpg)
Michael Reaves/Getty Images
This year has been different, though. With a 13-2 record as of the last week of December, my Eagles sit at the top of the NFL. We have an exciting young quarterback in Jalen Hurts, a trio of elite wide receivers who all for some reason have Batman-related nicknames, and a left offensive tackle approximately the size of two Jason Momoas. At of December 27, the sportsbooks at Fanduel put the odds of an Eagles win in Super Bowl LVII at 16.9 percent. That’s just behind the Kansas City Chiefs at about 18.2 percent and the Buffalo Bills at 22.2 percent, but I’m going to give the Eagles a boost on the basis of my “nothing good happens to Buffalo” theory, which historically has been very accurate, and because Philadelphia fans are familiar with Chiefs coach Andy Reid’s inability to read a game clock. And should the Eagles fail, I can offer a prediction with 100 percent certainty: We will boo them. —BW
The January 6 committee is done. The investigations into Donald Trump are not done.
The January 6 committee is finished, but the investigations into Donald Trump are not.
Trump is currently in more danger of indictment than at any time since he entered politics. A newly appointed special counsel is overseeing not one, but two, cases against him that have been proceeding for many months. The first revolves around Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election win, and the second, Trump’s handling of classified information. Separately, state investigations into his election conduct and his business practices are proceeding, and Trump has lost the sitting president’s immunity from prosecution (per Justice Department policy). And a federal judge has opined that Trump’s effort to steal the election amounted to criminal lawbreaking.
Now, if an indictment does happen, it would not be the end of the story — far from it. A trial or trials would follow, as would many legal challenges from Trump’s team (some perhaps before sympathetic judges). Trump likely can’t be stopped from continuing his 2024 presidential run except by voters, but despite talk of his recent political woes, he continues to lead every poll of a multi-candidate GOP field. There could be many more twists and turns ahead.
For now, though, all eyes are on that new special counsel — Jack Smith.
Smith, a career DOJ prosecutor who stepped down to do a stint in the Hague prosecuting war crimes in Kosovo, has taken over two investigations that have been up and running for many months — two investigations that make for a bit of an odd contrast.
The investigation into Trump’s attempt to stay in power seems extremely substantively important, but the strength of the legal case, and the evidence against him personally, aren’t all that clear.
Meanwhile, the investigation into his handling of classified documents seems legally clear-cut with strong evidence behind it — but there are reportedly tensions among investigators about whether the crime is sufficiently serious to merit charges.
So, will the special counsel try to indict the president in the important but perhaps tougher case, or the easier but less monumental case? Or both?
The state of the investigation into Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election
The Justice Department’s larger investigation into the January 6 attacks has been going on since they happened, focusing first on the people who actually stormed the Capitol. Initially, there wasn’t really a consensus in the political world about whether Trump had actually committed crimes with his web of lies about the election. So an investigation into him does not appear to have begun immediately.
We now know that a team of prosecutors began more intensely scrutinizing Trump and his associates in the fall of 2021. About a year ago, this team was “given the green light by the Justice Department to take a case all the way up to Trump, if the evidence leads them there,” according to a recent CNN article.
The probe proceeded quietly at first. In January 2022, the Washington Post reported that “so far the department does not appear to be directly investigating” Trump. But just a week and a half after that article, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed an investigation into one aspect of Trump’s scheme: fake electors. This was Trump allies’ effort to name Trump supporters as electors in key swing states Biden won, and to have their purported electoral votes submitted to Congress and Vice President Mike Pence and effectively dispute the actual electors’ votes.
“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Monaco said.
By May, the investigation had subpoenaed many close Trump aides for documents and was asking specifically for info about lawyers who had tried to help him overturn the election. In June, the home of Jeffrey Clark — the official Trump tried to put in charge of DOJ, so he could enlist the Department in declaring the election results fraudulent — was searched by federal agents. DOJ’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is involved in the investigation of Clark, since he was a DOJ employee at the time. Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who put Trump in touch with Clark, is also a key subject of this investigation.
By late July, the Washington Post reported prosecutors were asking “hours of detailed questions” about Trump’s actions specifically, on topics such as the extent of his involvement with the fake elector push and his effort to pressure Pence to throw out state electoral votes. Then in September, investigators issued at least 40 subpoenas in a week, this time focusing more on Trump’s political and fundraising operations. More recently, new subpoenas have gone out to state officials Trump tried to pressure.
A growing number of Trump aides have gone in to testify before one of several active Washington, DC grand juries in recent months. The former president filed a secret suit to try and block testimony of aides like former White House counsel’s office lawyers Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, citing privilege concerns, but he lost that suit, and they testified last month.
The investigation certainly seems quite sprawling and serious at this point. But, importantly, we still lack visibility into a few important questions.
First, how strong is the evidence against Trump personally? Have they “flipped” members of his inner circle who can testify that he knowingly committed corrupt activity — or not? Will he be able to get out of charges by claiming (some of) his lawyers advised him everything he was doing was legally permissible?
Second, what is DOJ thinking about the legal issues at the heart of the case? The House January 6 committee argued that Trump broke four laws in his attempt to stay in power: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement, and assisting an insurrection. And a federal judge, David Carter, already ruled months ago that evidence suggests Trump committed some of these crimes.
Still, though DOJ investigators are clearly taking their investigation very seriously, we don’t actually know whether they agree with Judge Carter’s analysis of the law, or whether they are even entirely sure what they think about it yet. One of Trump’s arguments in defense will likely be that he was engaging in politicking and political speech, not plotting a criminal conspiracy. If he is indicted, that argument would surely reach the Supreme Court at some point.
This is all fairly novel territory and it’s hard to point to a case quite like it. The topic is enormously important, but because Trump’s actions were so unprecedented, there’s much less of a roadmap on what the special counsel’s path forward should be.
The state of the classified documents investigation
The classified documents case, by contrast, seems simpler from both a legal and evidentiary perspective — but it has its own potential problems.
When the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents in August, the political world was rife with speculation about what could have justified such an extraordinary action, and what Trump might have been up to. Was he selling classified material to the highest bidder? Was he trying to blackmail the deep state? These theories were never backed by evidence, but a Washington Post report that agents were looking for “nuclear documents” suggested this was monumental stuff indeed.
Yet more recent reports on the investigation suggest the DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents working on it are not in full agreement about the strength of the case.
According to a Washington Post report in December, the FBI initially wasn’t sure it wanted to take up the case at all. The National Archives had asked them to get involved because they had found classified material in boxes belatedly returned to them by Trump, and they thought more material was missing. Even after Trump appeared to defy a grand jury subpoena to return documents, some FBI agents working on the case “weren’t certain” they had enough probable cause for a search, per the Post.
The search took place in August, and prosecutors claim to have found dozens of classified documents, but exactly what they found remains mysterious. The Post reported some documents had “highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China,” including a description of Iran’s missile programs. The government has expressed concern that the information could jeopardize human intelligence sources. But it is difficult to evaluate those claims, because, well, the information is classified.
Meanwhile, the DOJ-FBI divide has reportedly persisted. Bloomberg News reported in October that though some DOJ prosecutors thought there was enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice because he defied the subpoena, some “internal critics,” including in the FBI, are questioning why Trump would be charged when Hillary Clinton wasn’t in her own classified information investigation. (Clinton had some classified information in email chains sent to her personal email account that she had used for work; Trump had paper documents in boxes at Mar-a-Lago.)
Furthermore, yet another Washington Post story suggests that the more ominous and speculative theories about Trump’s motives in keeping classified documents weren’t founded, in investigators’ eyes. They’ve come to believe, instead, that his motive was “largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos.” That would not get him off the hook for violating classified information law, but it’s certainly less of a clear-cut threat to national security than, say, the attempted selling of documents would be.
So there are clearly some tensions among reporters’ sources about whether Trump’s crime here is sufficiently serious to merit indictment (when Clinton had not been charged), with DOJ prosecutors preferring a more aggressive push and FBI agents more dubious.
Special counsel Smith will have to sort out his own views on all this, as well as on the 2020 investigation. And though any charging recommendation Smith makes will go up to Attorney General Merrick Garland for approval, his opinion will carry great weight in determining whether Trump ends up indicted in the next year.
China is opening up rapidly after three years of lockdown. The rest of the world is scrambling to respond.
China is rapidly opening up after years of its “zero-Covid” policy, with strict lockdowns, mandatory testing, and major travel restrictions. But the major policy shift could pose further complications in China as people resume international travel, and geopolitically as a patchwork of countries impose restrictions on Chinese air travelers.
The US, the UK, Italy, India, Israel, Spain, Canada, South Korea, and France are all implementing some form of restrictions on air travel from China; that typically means a passenger embarking in China and heading to one of these countries can’t board without a negative test, or, in Spain’s case, without being vaccinated. But policies surrounding infectious diseases are hard to make without accurate data about caseloads, hospitalizations, and deaths, which China has failed to collect and disseminate since rolling back zero-Covid in late December.
It’s much too early to tell exactly what effect the policy shift will have; though China appears to be experiencing a major wave of infections presently, that hasn’t translated into major infections outside the country. But because Chinese air travelers haven’t gone through multiple variant waves, they could be more vulnerable to infection.
What’s more, there’s not great scientific evidence to back up travel restrictions; “We have seen time and time again with this pandemic that a patchwork response, whether nationally or globally, does little to contain the disease,” Saskia Popescu, an assistant professor in the biodefense program within the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told Vox via email. “Moreover, travel bans and testing requirements are not as effective as they neglect the porous nature of borders, the realities of disease transmission, and are reactive rather than preventative.”
China is rolling back Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy, and cases are rising
Chinese President Xi Jinping rolled back restrictions to his signature policy after widespread protests against stringent lockdowns and mandatory testing began in November. Though Xi’s government had announced a 20-point plan to ease those restrictions earlier that month, the protests, some of which called for Xi to step down, seem to have expedited the unraveling of Xi’s policy.
Draconian lockdowns, notably in Shanghai, at the FoxConn iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, and in Urumqi, Xinjiang, reportedly left people without access to food, and many in Xinjiang believe that the zero-Covid measures there, which barred people from leaving their apartments, prevented emergency workers from aiding people locked in their homes when a fire broke out in an Urumqi apartment building.
In the month since, the set of policies Xi once said “prioritized the people and their lives above all else,” has swiftly crumbled, leaving in its wake a significant rise in cases and a strained healthcare system.
“I think we should be concerned about what’s happening in China — for the Chinese,” Andrew Pollard, the chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, told BBC News Hour on Saturday. “Within the country, there is a large amount of Covid spreading at the moment, the omicron variant is there, and it spreads extremely well between people. And they haven’t had Covid waves before … so we would expect an enormous number of infections to occur.”
Officially, China has recorded just over 5,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, which Pollard conceded is possible if that number counts only people who died from the disease without any other underlying conditions. But the numbers are likely much higher, he said, if those cases are included, and they are likely to rise as the disease spreads, particularly among older people who are less likely to be vaccinated.
Already, reports coming out of China indicate a hospital system in duress due to the increase in Covid-19 cases, as well as crematoriums and funeral homes straining under the death toll.
Shutting down zero-Covid was, as Victor Shih, an expert in Chinese politics at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, likely a complex decision motivated by economic and employment problems domestically as well as general dissatisfaction and protest. But Xi will have to contend with the fallout of his decisions — both the draconian lockdowns he employed and trumpeted for three years, and the likely wave of Covid-19 infections and deaths that will follow China’s re-opening. That fallout, Shih said, is likely to mean more protests of the kind seen in November, and quite possibly increased skepticism of China’s economic and governance models, both from inside and outside China.
“Some serious damage is being done to public trust,” John Delury, a China expert at Seoul’s Yonsei University, told the Financial Times. “We may not see the immediate effects of that. But it’s going into the public calculus about how competent their government is. This is the worst possible start to Xi’s third term.”
The world is better equipped to deal with Covid-19, but there are still many unknowns
The end of covid-Zero also means the end of disease surveillance on a national level. As Yang Zhang, a professor of sociology and Chinese politics at American University tweeted in December regarding the tracking of China’s Covid-19 cases, “I don’t think the Chinese state had the capacity to collect, model, and assess provincial/municipal infection data on a daily base [sic] over the last month. After the sudden opening, this is a daunting job (for any state). They simply gave up.”
This is a possible scenario, but I don’t think the Chinese state had the capacity to collect, model, and assess provincial/municipal infection data on a daily base over the last month. After the sudden opening, this is a daunting job (for any state). They simply gave up.
— Yang Zhang (@ProfYangZhang) December 26, 2022