Being a pundit is a pretty choice job. That’s mostly because, right or wrong, pundits face practically no accountability for their work. It’s possible to be wrong — sometimes stunningly so — and still find yourself writing again next week. The media cycle moves faster than ever these days, and that speed ensures plenty of misfiring pundits never need to reconsider their own words.
Not so for this pundit, however — we’re a little over halfway through the year, so it’s time to take a look back at some of the good (and bad) predictions I made back in the frosty winter months of 2024.
This year began with a prediction: Having set Twitter ablaze in controversy after purchasing it in 2023, tech billionaire Elon Musk would soon find his entire business empire threatened by mounting lawsuits at home and abroad. Musk’s woes have only grown since January, with Business Insider documenting nearly a dozen active lawsuits amounting to tens of billions of dollars in potential damages for Musk’s businesses.
Most significant is Musk’s tussle with the National Labor Relations Board, which alleges that Musk illegally engaged in anti-labor behavior by tweeting that Tesla employees could lose stock options if they formed a union. Musk has since called on lawmakers to gut the National Labor Relations Act, which has made him an even bigger star in a Republican Party dominated by Donald Trump. Now Trump says he’d consider Musk for a job in a second Trump administration.
But all is not well in the Musk empire. Following newly public data showing Twitter’s incredible collapse in revenue, Musk has tasked CEO Linda Yaccarino with a companywide shake-up. Tesla is also facing a new lawsuit from vehicle owners that alleges the company exercises an illegal monopoly on vehicle repairs, and a rash of new lawsuits after threatening to sue any Cybertruck owners who try to sell their vehicles.
All those lawsuits cost money, and even Musk’s deep pockets aren’t limitless. Even so, Musk’s empire is — for now — chugging along through the courts. The second half of the year may bring some legal resolutions, but not enough to pose a material threat to Musk’s core businesses.
A second prediction pertained to immigration politics. In February, House Republicans’ sudden and unexpected reversal on border security policy raised another big question: Could Democrats seize the momentum and act boldly on immigration? As it turns out, the answer was yes — but not in the way many Democratic voters expected or wanted.
Last month, President Biden announced a sweeping series of border security reforms that included shutting down the southern border and tightening the process by which migrants seek asylum.
Biden’s move outraged progressives and immigration activists (including myself), who argued that Democrats were now implementing Trump-era policies they’d once derided as inhumane. A few weeks later, Biden softened his position with a new policy protecting undocumented migrants currently married to American citizens.
Biden’s aggressive moves sent Trump scrambling for a response, which turned out to be a Republican pledge to offer free green cards to any immigrant who graduates from an American college. The policy proved to be a massive misfire, inflaming the nativist far-right and leading to accusations that Trump had “betrayed” tough-on-immigration GOP values. Even Trump’s campaign seemed to acknowledge he’d walked into a bear trap, walking back the former president’s proposal after less than a week. What Trump actually believes is anyone’s guess.
As for Trump, here was my big miss. In May I predicted that Trump’s 34 felony convictions in New York would finally galvanize the roughly one-third of Republican voters who told pollsters they wouldn’t vote for a convicted criminal. It turns out I wildly overestimated the moral clarity of the GOP base, because now a majority of Republican voters say it’s just fine for a felon to be president.
And that 34 percent of GOP voters who said they wouldn’t vote for a criminal? That number has since fallen to just 19 percent.
Clearly Republicans are more concerned with winning this year’s presidential contest than they are in holding to their moral values. But those shifting poll numbers also tell a story of just how effective Trump and right-wing media outlets have been at convincing Republicans that every accusation made against Trump is a politicized lie. Even a jury of Trump’s peers has since been written off as another Biden-arranged scam. Trump’s word is now taken by most GOP voters as inerrant truth, and nothing will convince them otherwise.
With the 2024 presidential race heating up, Americans are about to be inundated with a tidal wave of punditry. Here’s to hoping at least a few of those august minds make an effort to hold themselves accountable to the reading public.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.