Were our 2025 predictions right?

17:22Anthony Zurcher:So maybe, you know, now that is more distant history. And when the Democrats decide who their nominee is going to be in 2028, they'll pick someone who wasn't as engaged in those kind of big cultural issues from the Black Lives Matter movement, from the 2020 campaign and someone who can't get hit quite as hard as Harris was during the 2024 campaign. So those were our predictions. Most of us quite right, if not wholly and entirely right. The other thing that we did talk about during the year were under the radar stories, as we described them, ones that maybe weren't making big headlines yet, but that we thought were going to have a big impact.

18:00And now we're going to revisit some of them to see where they've got to now.

18:04Marianna Spring:Okay, so one of the under the radar stories that I chose this year was about something that happened in June. It was about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of State for Health, and how he sacked all 17 members of this independent committee. And that committee's job was essentially to, or is essentially to, issue recommendations about vaccines and to assess risk to the public and all that kind of stuff. And the point I was making was that what RFK was doing was changing the makeup of that committee so that it was full of people with a much more sceptical view of vaccines. And that's not to say that scepticism about vaccines is a bad thing.

18:35Marianna Spring:In fact, it's a very good thing to scrutinise and hold, for example, the big pharmaceutical companies to account. But the problem is, is that some of the people who he has been putting into these positions are people who have grown their following on social media, spreading stuff that is actually not true about vaccinations. And that obviously does pose a risk to public health. that felt like this moment there was this moment over the summer with rfk in particular where he'd during those senate hearings earlier in the year said you know i'm not anti-vaccine i'm just worried about people who've been injured or harmed by vaccines but actually he then made a series of decisions this one in particular but then also around discontinuing um research into mrna vaccines and obviously those comments not about vaccines but about tylenol and pregnant women that that seemed to show what what he actually thinks about some of these issues and be a little bit against what he said during those hearings and ultimately do kind of have an impact on public health, right?

19:32Marianna Spring:I mean, certainly in like the research and investment in these areas or decisions that are made about vaccinations.

19:37Anthony Zurcher:I think that if you look at rising measles cases, if you look at concerns about other cases like whooping cough going up, I think that has had an impact. I think that RFK Jr. has definitely changed the debate, opened the debate on vaccines in this country. So you see places like Florida with conservative health officials there taking away vaccine mandates for schools, which would have been astounding to think about just a decade ago. He has made it easier for people to express concerns about vaccines. But I think we are seeing the public health consequences of that. And I think that, you know, your prediction, a lot of the fears that people had coming into this and putting rfk jr in a position of power in america's uh government health services are being realized because uh the united states is moving away from a bunch of different recommendations on vaccines uh and we're starting to see the results of that now is there a political cost to it because we talked much earlier and i think maybe the time that mariana brought it up we we sort of said well if you can see measles cases going up and And God forbid children are dying and they are.

20:52And all sorts of other aspects of vaccines not being properly administered and not being mandated and all the rest. If you could see the health of the nation, particularly among children, worsening. We were asking at the time, is there a political price to pay? And I don't know the answer.

21:13Marianna Spring:I think one of the really difficult things. And actually, I've spent quite a lot of time over the past few months in particular looking into kind of the impact of quite extreme anti-vaccination views that go beyond genuine concerns and questions. The issue is, and what lots of medics, nurses, people here in the UK as well as in the US have said to me, I think often there's not a connection drawn by members of the public between decisions RFK Jr. is making about vaccines. And then, for example, your community being, I mean, if your actual community is affected by an outbreak and, you know, a child, you know, loses their life, then you might, you know, that could be a really pivotal moment where you think, oh, hang on a second, vaccinations are important.

21:55Marianna Spring:What's hard is that quite a lot of these diseases that we're talking about are ones that kind of had essentially been eradicated and are now coming back. And one of the reasons why there's this hesitancy around vaccination is because unlike, say, all of, I don't know, our grandparents, your grandparents, people could see the consequences of the diseases and didn't want to get them. Whereas, obviously, now you don't see that in quite the same way. So I think there's probably still that disconnect. That would change, I guess, if there are significantly more outbreaks or more communities are affected over the next year.

22:24I mean, to exactly that point, there is a senator, isn't there, Anthony, who got involved in all this, a Republican senator who had had polio when he was young. I can't remember who it was, but I mean, for that generation. It was Mitch McConnell, wasn't it? Mitch McConnell, yeah. Of course, yeah, it was Mitch McConnell. And for that generation, exactly as Marianna says, they see these things very differently, even if they're Republicans. Anthony, you brought up a story in April about the beginnings of protests against Donald Trump when people started taking to the streets.

22:55Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, I mean, it was it was at the beginning of of the kind of protests against immigration and immigration enforcement in the United States. We had seen the first no kings rally, I believe, you know, dotting up around the country. And it felt to me at the time like there were starting to see more protests. But one of the big questions was why people weren't protesting in the streets when Donald Trump was implementing all these policies, kind of in the way they did in his first term, where there was a mass protest just the day after Donald Trump's inauguration. But it seemed like there was a growing kind of a movement, growing resistance among the left here in the country.

23:37Anthony Zurcher:And I suspected that maybe we were seeing a trend. And I think there's still evidence of that. The No Kings protests, I think it was in October, right? I mean, that was that was even bigger than the one earlier in the year. You still don't see mass regular street demonstrations. But what we're seeing in places like Chicago and Portland in protest to ICE enforcement, as well as National Guard being put on on the on the streets of these cities, I think that's real. And part of it is because now the left has something, as I said at the time, to unite around Donald Trump. It kind of papers over the divisions in the movement, in the left side of American politics that had grown during the Biden years.

24:23We did not foresee that these protesters would largely be wearing inflatable dinosaur costumes, did we? And going viral for it. Have they got, I mean, talk of going viral. Have they got their act together online as well, the left? I mean, I'm thinking of memes, you know, we've been talking about that. Memes. You know, the whole kind of idea.

24:41Marianna Spring:I love how you said memes so casually then. You were quite pleased with your speech. I was until the moment that you pricked my bubble. But have they found ways of teasing Trump, of upsetting his supporters in a way that can work just as he has done to them in the past? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the left's social media strategy has definitely evolved over the course of the past year, not least because it was kind of dead in the water, really, at the start of the year. And all the kind of Brat Summer, Kamala Harris stuff had very much, very much gone. I think there's two interesting points about what's done well on social media for the left.

25:19Marianna Spring:One is the kind of Gavin Newsom approach. So California governor who's done this kind of trolling of Donald Trump, like almost being like Donald Trump, posting on Twitter. And then a lot of that content, they'll then, you know, mock up on TikTok or be in other places. And the Democrats official social media accounts have actually been using quite a similar strategy. So really playing into like specific trends and memes and focusing on things like the Epstein files or particularly contentious issues that relate to Donald Trump, even though, again, he denies any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.

25:52Marianna Spring:So you've got that. And that's, I think, probably been fairly effective at galvanizing a base who are already supportive of the Democrats and don't like Donald Trump very much. but it does at least give them a little bit of energy. The most interesting social media strategy though for me has been Zoran Mandami's one in New York where he won mayor and it was actually really unexpected because he really, really got the being authentic and genuine in the way that Donald Trump does on social media and reaching the right spaces, the alternative sort of media spaces, the other places he needed to get to and activating, of course it's New York, it doesn't represent all of the US, fine, but the strategy that he used, like being normal basically and seeming normal and likeable and charismatic and genuine but in a way that wasn't cringe and trying too hard he he got that and i think that that probably is something for the democrats to build on in other places but the lesson learned is that you do have to have a very likeable or hateable but certainly carries a bit like donald trump at the center that is how social media works now it's so personality driven was back in june justin you were talking about Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that went through as part of Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill.

27:02One provision was going to be that they were going to cut subsidies that had been going to people who bought their health insurance through Obamacare health exchanges. And as a result of cutting these subsidies, their subscriptions were going to go up by 50, 100, 200 percent in some cases. Yeah. And this I felt that we weren't covering enough. I mean, it wasn't our fault exactly. There was so much else going on that one of these one of the fissures that was likely to to damage the Republican Party was over health. And that I think I honestly claim that's unquestionably turned out to be true. Hasn't actually happened yet, has it?

27:37Because it's not until what, January when these subsidies go. But, Anthony, we're talking about potentially millions of people, many of them Republican supporters, who are suddenly going to have much worse health care if they have health care at all than they get at the moment. And they'll be looking for someone to blame. Right.

27:57Anthony Zurcher:This is tens of millions, actually. I think 20 million, over 20 million Americans get some sort of subsidies on these health insurance exchanges that help people who don't have medical insurance through their employers, which is a lion's share of the American public, but or through Medicare, which is the government run health insurance program for the elderly and Medicare, Medicaid, which is the health insurance program for the poor. the people kind of caught in the middle who have to get insurance for themselves. There's been these subsidies that were started at the beginning of COVID in order to help them pay for their health insurance.

28:33Anthony Zurcher:And those subsidies are expiring at the end of the year. So you're going to see Americans who are buying their health insurance on these exchanges. Their premiums could go up by 100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent. They could be spending thousands of dollars a month in health insurance when they were only spending hundreds of dollars before. And that is very real pain. And it's very real pain that is hitting a lot of Americans who are the ones who are struggling the most right now, the people who aren't on the full social service, Medicaid, health insurance program, the ones who are working but not working jobs where they get health insurance.

29:07Anthony Zurcher:And that's why you're seeing these divisions, as you mentioned, within the Republican Party over how to help these people, because a lot of these people are Republican constituents. And they're ones who voted for Donald Trump. And here they are now being left out in the cold. And that's the point Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, who had been Donald Trump's, one of his very, very biggest supporters. It's the point she was making when she was criticising these cuts to the healthcare subsidies, which then blew up into a pretty big fight between her and Donald Trump, encompassed other issues, has led to her pretty much breaking with Donald Trump and then saying she's not even going to run for Congress again next year.

29:44So it was a sign of a MAGA on MAGA fight over this as well. who was representing the grassroots MAGA supporters versus Donald Trump, who up until then had pretty much thought he could define what MAGA was and how he was going to run things. But Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn't alone, was she, Anthony, in expressing some fear about what this was going to do to Republicans' votes?

30:09Anthony Zurcher:No, I think there is a kind of broad concern, particularly among Republicans in key battleground congressional districts in key swing states about how they're going to be able to go to the public next November during the midterm elections and address these concerns when they're the ones who have been pinned with blocking these subsidies from being extended. So I think there's very real concern among Republicans that this is going to be an electoral issue that costs them. And while Donald Trump didn't touch Social Security, he didn't touch Medicare, which is the health insurance program for the elderly I mentioned.

30:44Anthony Zurcher:There are some very real cuts to Medicaid as well, the health insurance program, the poor cuts that would increase work requirements for people that would limit the kind of benefits they would get. And those also have been criticized by particularly rural Republicans because it could lead to closing of hospitals that serve poor people, people in rural areas, their only source of healthcare. Those hospitals could close because they're not getting enough funding. So it isn't even just the subsidy issue. It's the entire health insurance program, the system for poor people and for people who live outside of the big cities.

31:23Sarah, you brought to our attention as well another thing that could have just gone under the radar. And that's not the issue just of illegal immigration and what to do about it, which we talked about plenty, but actually of individual deportations and the impact that they have. One of the early cases that caught my eye was this man who had been living in Maryland, who was from El Salvador, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He had been detained and deported back to El Salvador to a notorious prison there where the conditions are absolutely awful. Now, earlier, years before, a judge had ruled that even if he was to be deported from the United States, he could never be sent back to El Salvador because of the treatment he would receive there.

32:04So it was just an error, frankly, on the behalf of the Trump administration, an error that they admitted that they sent him to the wrong country. But it became a great cause celebrity. Eventually, he was returned from El Salvador to the United States, whereupon he was promptly charged with human trafficking because the administration by then seemed determined that he would be detained for something. And they couldn't allow him just to walk free because that would highlight the error that they had made. But just last week, in fact, he was finally released from detention and a judge ruled that he couldn't be re-detained either.

32:42So, oh, six months after we started talking about this, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a free man living in Maryland at the moment and has become rather emblematic of all of the deportations that were going on, of the way that ICE are grabbing people off the streets, going into people's workplaces, rounding up immigrants, rounding up people who have got a perfectly legal status to be allowed to stay in the United States, with others who are there illegally separating them from their families in order to deport them. The manner in which the administration has gone about enforcing its illegal immigration policies, which a lot of people think are very draconian and certainly very dramatic.

33:22And Gilmar Abrego Garcia was kind of the first intimation of how they were going to do that, I think.

33:28Anthony Zurcher:And as you mentioned, the way they targeted him because of this, bringing criminal charges against him, human trafficking charges, which the judge in the case seems somewhat skeptical of. It does. That also kind of shows the way this administration will occasionally be somewhat vindictive. even. They see this as more than just one case. They see this as symbolic of what they're trying to do. And if Kilmore Abrego Garcia is still in the United States and still a free man, I think they view that as an affront and undermining the effort, which is why I think this story is not going away. And I think in the coming weeks, we're going to see another effort by this administration to find a way to deport him once they resolve the legal block that's keeping them from doing it.

34:16OK, we should finish with Anthony because it's a subject about which only Anthony can properly predict. Declaim, predict. Yeah. So, Anthony, you predicted the results of all the main US sports competitions last year. Let us see how you did or indeed tell us how you did. Anthony, for the Super Bowl, you said the Philadelphia Eagles would win. Who did? They won. The Eagles won. So one right. March Madness. You said the Duke Blue Devils would win that.

34:48Anthony Zurcher:OK, they didn't. They made the final four, the semifinals, which is not bad. But Florida ended up winning that. So that's an X. Not too bad. The Stanley Cup, you said, would be won by the Washington Capitals. I know. I picked that one with my heart, not my head. The Florida Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers. So that was not one I got too close on. And then the World Series. You predicted the Los Angeles Dodgers. Hey, and I got that right. The Dodgers won. I mean, it was close. The Toronto Blue Jays were just a few outs away from winning the World Series, but the Dodgers pulled it off. So two out of four, you know, if you'd gone to Vegas with that, you probably could have made a little bit of money.

35:23That's it for now. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye-bye.

35:26Anthony Zurcher:Bye, all. Thank you for listening to another episode. It is you, the AmeriCaster, that makes AmeriCast the community that it now is. If you like what you've heard, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. We always want to hear your feedback as well. We look at every single bit of correspondence that we get. So you can send us an email, americast at bbc.co.uk. The WhatsApp is 44 330 123 9480. And you can get involved in the AmeriCast Discord server. The link to that is in the description. Till next time, bye-bye.

36:19Marianna Spring:The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary. And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it.

36:40Anthony Zurcher:I feel like the American dream is alive but not well.

36:42Marianna Spring:From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:54When you hear the phrase made in China, what do you think? I'm Tristan Redman.

36:59Anthony Zurcher:And I'm Asma Khalid. And together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC.

37:04Marianna Spring:And today on our show, we look at the origins and evolution of made in China because it actually wasn't inevitable. What we're talking about is the world's largest communist nation is at the beating heart of the capitalist system. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.