By Ctrl-Freak — May 3, 2025
Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in office have been many things: vindictive, theatrical, incoherent, and always lucrative — for someone.
But the next 100? That’s where the real horse race begins.
And with the Derby on this evening — update: sadly, Sovereignty won the 2025 Derby. Let’s hope that’s not a sign of things to come — we figured there’s no better moment to launch our own Banana Republic Stakes. what we propose is a prediction derby — AIs vs. pundits vs. me — complete with a 1-to-10 “How Fucked Are We?” scorecard for each forecast.
I’m Ctrl-Freak, if you’re new here. I’m the one who haunts the tape. I drink gin when the markets blink and take notes when the media flinches.
I’ll be keeping score — not just for fun, but because these predictions matter. If we can’t map what comes next, we’re just passengers on a burning bus.
I’m no West Indian Archie — I don’t trust memory. Not yours, not mine. Especially not after a rail of cable news and a contact high off the American bloodstream. Archie never wrote anything down. I write everything down. The bets, the bullshit, the hallucinations I mistake for headlines. Especially those.
Because this isn’t just a game. This is the next 100 days of Donald J. Trump’s comeback presidency — and come August 11, 2025, we’ll meet back here and parse who was right-er?!
I’m sure David Brooks will weigh in — from whatever think-tank canoe retreat he’s holed up in — with a calm, reasoned reminder that conservatism once had principles. And that whatever this is? It ain’t that.
And with Bob Baffert back in the running as trainer for Citizen Bull in tomorrow’s Derby — yes, Citizen Bull — we figured there’s no better moment to launch our own Banana Republic Stakes.
Our pick? The number 8 horse: Journalism. Ridden by jockey Umberto Rispoli, trained by Michael W. McCarthy, and — yes, for once — Journalism is actually favored to win.
Speaking of the writers…
The machines are first to the gate. Not actual robots — just the slurry of YouTube seers in Missouri feeding prompts into ChatGPT and naming their coins things like Unicorn Fart Dust. They wear trucker hats and speak with confidence, but it’s the bots doing the dreaming. Here’s one of the videos that started the mess.
The themes are consistent: a storm of executive orders, immigration crackdowns, “emergency powers” issued in all caps, and one EO titled “No More Woke Lunches” that polls better than Biden’s student debt forgiveness. Trump live-tweets tariffs, markets tank, and somehow Bitcoin climbs toward $125K by late summer. TRUMPBUX moons, Doge flirts with a dollar, and one model has Biden selling the strategic oil reserve to buy some Pepe — so 2024.
Foreign policy gets weird. Taiwan tension. NATO tremors. A karaoke summit in Branson with Kim Jong-un and a cameo from Dolly Parton. The courts are flooded with lawsuits from governors and ghost PACs. One judge writes “this is not how government works” in the margin of an order.
39% is the bedrock, the diehards who’ve stuck with him through indictments, impeachments, and bleach. Almost every AI model shows Trump dipping under 40% by Day 177. That’s the AI consensus. Independents bail. MAGA tightens its grip and becomes something closer to a cosplay militia with merch codes. TikTok bans emojis. 🐀 and 🧠 now come with a trigger warning.
Red state standoffs, blue state defiance, a National Guard truck parked outside Bass Pro. Not a prediction — a probability. But the bots smell smoke.
They’re not forecasting policy. They’re forecasting entropy. And they might be the only ones being honest.
International observers are more polite. News24 says the easy part is over. Now comes the governance, or lack thereof. Let’s be honest, governing was never part of the OrangeMan’s plans. Legal systems start wheezing. Diplomats hedge. Institutions creak like bones. Their concern isn’t Trump. It’s what survives him. Call it a 7 — cautious, perceptive, but maybe still assuming someone, somewhere, has a plan.
Rachel Maddow is sharper. Trump is losing, she says — numerically, culturally, slowly. That doesn’t make him safer. It makes him louder. She spotted PBS in the crosshairs early, and GOP lawyers scrambled into damage control mode. We’re now one executive order away from Cookie Monster being the face of the resistance. And possibly a microphone. Her forecast reads like a legal briefing scribbled in the margins of a survival manual. She doesn’t say we’re doomed — but she doesn’t sound like she’s betting the mortgage on normal. That’s a clean 8.
The Guardian sounds the global alarm. They see the Trump tornado from across the Atlantic, with Brexit hangover eyes and a suspicion of all things Florida. They frame it as a test of whether America can still pretend to be a functioning democracy. That’s an 8.5, with emphasis on the word “pretend.”
The mainstream press sees it, too — but each with their own flavor of dread.
WaPo goes in with “accelerating constitutional crisis,” which is media code for “the brakes are gone.” Their sources are frantic, their ledes get darker by the day, and the op-eds are already three drinks into the collapse. Call it a 9.
The AP takes a flatter tone. Wire copy from the void. They describe “government dysfunction” with the same cadence as a weather report. But between the lines, there’s panic in the punctuation. It’s a 7.5.
The Guardian we already mentioned. Still — worth repeating. That’s an 8.5.
And then there’s me.
Ctrl-Freak. No predictive model. No research assistants. Just a gin buzz and a working theory that the next great constitutional showdown won’t come with fanfare — just silence. Somewhere around Day 143, a federal agency will ignore an order. And that will be the beginning of the split.
Not secession. Not civil war. Just slippage. Mayors that don’t answer the phone. Judges that don’t reply. Press briefings that dissolve into weeping. PDFs from Biden. Game show firings. Cabinet roulette. A closing jingle. Maybe even Cookie Monster with a sidearm.
How Fucked Are We? Call it a 9.
But the scariest part? We’ll start to get used to it. Not because we’re fooled, but because there’s nothing else on. And if the Democrats don’t wake the FUCK up, they’ll be reruns by next August.
Filed from the betting window at the Banana Republic Stakes, where the frontrunners are hallucinating, the track is on fire, and the jockeys are wearing rhinestone MAGA helmets and Red Bull drip IVs.
