There is a Dutch proverb that says “een ezel stoot zich geen twee keer aan dezelfde steen”. Its literal translation is “a donkey doesn’t bump against the same stone twice”, but is usually translated as “once bitten, twice shy” or “a fox is not caught twice in the same snare”.
The proverb means that people don’t (or shouldn’t) make the same mistake twice. Even a dumb animal like the donkey is smarter than that.
Apparently, the political pundits are dumber than donkeys when it comes to Trump. For over a year, they have underestimated his chances. Here is a list of Trump predictions, in which the ‘You are now here’ marker has continuously moved down:
Not having learned from their embarrassing experience, the pundits cannot help but continue their failed predictions.
For example, before the election several people predicted that stock markets would crash if Trump won. These clairvoyants included billionaire Marc Cuban and economics professors Paul Krugman and Justin Wolfers.
How did that turn out? I’ll let The Donald answer:
The pundit class has convinced itself of the hallucination that Trump is incompetent. For example, Vox founder Ezra Klein wrote that Trump’s campaign “has been amateurish and poorly managed“. And yet he won!
Ironically, Klein’s own publication Vox had written earlier about how smug liberals underestimated the last Republican president, George W. Bush: “Smug liberals said George was too stupid to get elected, too stupid to get reelected, too stupid to pass laws or appoint judges or weather a political fight. Liberals misunderestimated George W. Bush all eight years of his presidency. George W. Bush is not a dumbass hick. In eight years, all the sick Daily Show burns in the world did not appreciably undermine his agenda.”
Do these people even read their own articles?
Flemish economics professor Koen Schoors checks all the basic bitch cliches against Trump. And he predicts the Trump presidency will result in more migration and worse economic conditions for Trump’s angry white male (another cliche) voters.
Pundits are so invested in their echo chamber, that they are surprised when Trump sounds pragmatic.
The pundit donkeys are not done predicting the desasters president Trump will bring to the US and the world. Here are some more examples:
Economic analyst Dan Davies predicts a Berlusconi style USA:
Italy under Berlusconi is probably the model. Economic stagnation but the place is still there.
— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) November 9, 2016
In a deleted tweet, columnist Noah Smith worried about Trump starting a nuclear war:
Some people are still convinced that Trump will not build a wall at the Mexican border. If Trump wants to be reelected in four years, the wall would be his most visible realization. The chance that Trump will not build a wall is very small. And nobody will care if it part of the ‘wall’ is merely a fence.
Isn’t it time for the pundit class to reflect on its mistakes, before fading into complete irrelevance?
If you have read other predictions about what president Trump will do, feel free to post them in the comments!