On this day five years ago, Scott made a list of graded predictions for how the next five years would pan out. How did he do?
He correctly predicted that Democrats would win the presidency in 2020. He correctly predicted that the UK would leave the EU and that no other country would vote to leave. He seemed under the impression that Ted Cruz would rise up to take Trump's mantle, but to my mind the only person in the Republican party who has a meaningful chance of opposing Trump is DeSantis. I think a lot of the technological predictions were too optimistic (specifically the bits about space travel and self-driving vehicles) but I don't work in tech and amn't really qualified to comment.
Near the end of the article, in a self-deprecating moment, he predicts with 80% confidence that "Whatever the most important trend of the next five years is, I totally miss it". To my mind, the most significant "trend" (or "event") of the last five years was Covid, and I think he actually did okay on this front: the second-last section of the article is a section on global existential risks:
Global existential risks will hopefully not be a big part of the 2018-2023 period. If they are, it will be because somebody did something incredibly stupid or awful with infectious diseases. Even a small scare with this will provoke a massive response, which will be implemented in a panic and with all the finesse of post-9/11 America determining airport security.
- Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
- …at least five thousand people: 5%
Whether you think those two predictions cames to pass naturally depends where you sit on the lab leak hypothesis.
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Notes -
Overall, yes, Trump's vetting was at best a mixed bag--though I'll note that failures in this area tend to be more spectacular than successes. But in the case of judicial nominations in particular, there's more to the story.
When Trump entered the 2016 primaries, it was plainly obvious that he was--on paper--a very bad fit with the sizable chunk of the Republican base that was some combination of Southern, Evangelical, and Conservative. In a way, the obviousness of this problem was an advantage, in that it could not be ignored and required a strategy. This cohort was extremely sensitive to betrayal on judicial matters, as noted above. So Trump did two things--he publicly announced a short list for candidates to the Supreme Court, so that they could be vetted in advance, and he appointed Leonard Leo, the executive VP of the Federalist Society, to oversee the selection of nominees. While Trump made the final calls, Leo was the one preparing the short list.
Two of the three appointments to SCOTUS that Trump made were due to the death in office of Justices Scalia and Ginsberg. The third was the carefully negotiated retirement of Justice Kennedy. Prior to Kennedy's retirement, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch--a former Kennedy clerk--to replace Scalia, and then appointed Brett Kavanaugh--another former Kennedy clerk--to replace Kennedy himself. Both were considered more conservative than Kennedy, who was often the deciding vote, though Gorsuch more than Kavanaugh.
None of Trump's Supreme Court nominees were close to Trump himself--all three were previously-established, well-respected members of the federal judiciary, with resumes to match. While all three would generally be considered somewhat more conservative than the combination of Kennedy, O'Connor, Souter, and Roberts, they are also on average more centrist than Thomas and Alito. (This is something of an oversimplification--all of the justices mentioned have independent streaks. Indeed, prior to Ginsberg's death, every single one of the conservative justices had formed a five-justice majority with the four liberals in separate cases. The liberal justices vote together more often on average, but it's not uncommon to see splits in any of the "voting blocs" that analysts might describe.)
It's true (though not very often discussed) that SCOTUS judges not always vote in partisan blocks, but as I understood where it happens is mostly technical cases (which usually constitute the bulk of the work and are sparsely covered because they are incomprehensible to a regular person and can bore one to death). For high-stakes politicized cases, unless it's something obvious, usually one can predict the split by partisan lines.
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