After last week’s review of how some of my prior predictions had fared, I thought it was time to take another look over the horizon and stake out some ideas you might consider for their implications in your world. Again, it’s not important that you be 100 percent right; it’s just that you stretch your imagination and apply different thinking to what you’re observing. 

• Assuming good health, President Trump will be our 47th President. 

• Jared and Ivanka will not return to the next Trump presidency.

• Frustrated with our system of candidate selection that again produced two flawed presidential candidates, too many voters will sit out the presidential election. Don’t be that person.

• President Biden will not enjoy the fruits of a lucrative post-presidency as so many of his predecessors have. His lack of transparency regarding his health, along with his age, will conspire against what might otherwise have been.

• FY25 defense bills will be completed during the lame-duck Congress, and before the end of this year. Much talk of a year-long CR will emerge, and will be squelched. A year-long CR would surrender control to the executive branch agencies a Trump presidency and the Supreme Court (see recent Chevron ruling) is hoping to de-claw.

• The 2026 defense bills (that move through Congress in 2025) will be completed before Thanksgiving 2025.

• The war in Ukraine will be brought to a negotiated end by June of 2025. Ukraine will lose territory in the end.

• President Trump will meet with President Xi before the end of the year and promise US citizens we have additional time to prepare for what has long been our military pacing threat. China will not slow its military growth; the United States already has.

• I continue to believe LinkedIn will become bifurcated into two distinct offerings, one focused on business, the other displacing Facebook completely. Primary users of Facebook today will begin to disappear at a rate similar to the loss of World War II veterans.

• Interest rates will tick down slightly in the new year. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (Trump, 2017) will be extended, leaving corporate tax rates below 25% at least until the 2026 mid-term elections. This will allow stock market conditions to produce a DOW above 55,000 by the end of 2025. [Notice how drastically different the DOW makeup is from just five years ago.]

• China will continue its creation of island structures and bases in the Western Pacific through 2025. The United States will watch.

• President Trump will meet with new leaders of Iran at a neutral site before the end of 2025.

• Virtual assistance through your phone, the use of bots and the integration of apps will free up 25% of the time you presently spend on mundane tasks: email, calendaring, planning, and researching. How will you use that newly available time? Apple’s move to bring AI into your phone in useful ways is the vanguard. Siri will be replaced with something far superior.

• Subsidizing the electric vehicle industry in the US will slow dramatically. Toyota appears to have made the right bet not going all-in on electric. The supply chain for electrification is incongruent with our renewed emphasis on buy-America.

There you have it, my July 2024 predictions. Let me know what you’re thinking.

For a copy of my book, Pitching the Big Top: How to Master the 3-Ring^® Circus of Federal Sales, and more information on federal sales, visit Capitol Integration.