26 Predictions for 2026
Stone-cold locks about Donald Trump, Sam Altman and OpenAI, Kalshi and Polymarket, and America’s tenuous labor movement.
Donald Trump’s inauguration guaranteed a year of chaos. Though his popular vote victory was slim—and the GOP’s congressional victory was even slimmer—Trump took office for the second time acting as if he’d been re-elected by FDR-era margins. He stacked his administration with far-right ideologues, and they committed to a new, guiding principle: if you never explain yourself and never give the appearance of backtracking, then you can avoid facing the consequences of your actions.
That guiding principle provides decent job security if you work for the president. Trump 2.0 began with high-level officials accidentally adding The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to a Signal group chat slash gossip session about airstrikes in Yemen; no one was held accountable for their recklessness and stupidity. The year is ending with the Department of Justice trying to pin damning reveals from the Epstein Files on Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, Clinton, and dozens of other powerful figures.
But the year is also ending with more and more cracks in Trump’s facade. He’s extremely unpopular; he’s visibly and mentally deteriorating, and lashing out even more than he did during his first term. To carry out his authoritarianism, he’s relying on outlandish executive orders that even the far-right Supreme Court is occasionally batting down. Whether they’d like to admit it or not, the justices are political actors, and they know they’re vulnerable to political backlash if they exceed the public’s tolerance for Trump’s near-constant decrees. Trump’s Big Tech friends are in a precarious spot as well. Oligarchs like Marc Andreessen have been granted an unfettered, unregulated AI industry at the exact same time that the general public is starting to get antsy about AI’s societal effects and reliance on expensive, environmentally unfriendly data centers.
Trump and his allies are on their back foot. In a game of tug-of-war, they’ve yanked the rope closer to their side, but they’re noticeably sweating. Put another way: Ol’ Donny Trump is still wriggling his way out of jams, but it’s no longer a certainty the meme will hold true indefinitely.
I am not arguing the Trump administration’s woes point to a complete reversal of fortunes for everyone else; things are going very, very badly, and will continue to go badly in 2026. I am saying the chaos purposely wrought by Trump 2.0 figures will no longer be free of political consequences and personal accountability in 2026.
In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I’ve come up with 26 predictions for 2026. Most of the predictions are depressing, and I’m sorry about that. I’ve divided the predictions by category so they’re easier to read.
Without further ado, here are Hard Reset’s 26 Locks for 2026, Presented by FanDuel and DraftKings and Kalshi and Polymarket and Robinhood.
Internet Culture and Media
A massive scandal will rock Kalshi or Polymarket and finally compel members of Congress to pay attention to how Americans are currently able to wager on literally everything in all 50 states. I would bet on a comical insider trading scheme exposed by leaked screenshots emanating from gambling Discords. Companies like Google and CNN, which have begun buddying up to Kalshi and Polymarket, will put out statements about how they’re reviewing their partnership with the platforms. They will then quietly end their partnerships.
Every single thing CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss says and does will get leaked to the media. There will eventually be a 60 Minutes exodus after more meddling and idiocy from Weiss. She will restaff the show, and its viewership will fall off a cliff. This will be of no concern to the Ellison family, who own Paramount and CBS. They did not bring Weiss on board to boost ratings or oversee ambitious journalism.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will regularly draw unsavory comparisons to other failed moguls, and he will mostly stop posting on social media.
Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire will temporarily stop posting on social media. He will not be successful at this self-control exercise.
X, the everything app, will hemorrhage its user base in a much more noticeable way than prior, rumored exoduses.
Taxing billionaires will once again become a hot topic. The billionaires will whine and complain on X, but they will not comprehend that they’re speaking to a smaller and smaller audience.
TikTok’s U.S. joint venture—a deal that closed a few weeks ago—will make the platform worse in all ways for Americans. NPR recently reported that “content moderation rules around what is permitted and what is not will be set by the new investor-controlled entity.” Right-wingers who spent half of a decade complaining about getting shadow-banned on Twitter and Facebook will be noticeably silent when TikTokers’ critiques of Israel and Trump are throttled. TikTok’s UX will also noticeably decline.
Tech and AI
OpenAI will look quite bloated by year’s end. The warning signs about its impending demise will become a mainstream topic. OpenAI’s consumer products will not dazzle, revenues will still be dwarfed by spending, and investors will openly express skittishness. Outlets will frame their AI coverage around how other tech companies, especially Anthropic and Google, are angling to fill the void OpenAI will leave behind.
Microsoft’s “best bromance in tech” with OpenAI will begin to look like a colossal error.
Chinese AI models will surpass American models in day-to-day usage. I enjoyed a recent bite-sized explainer from Wired about Qwen, an open-weight LLM developed by the Chinese company Alibaba. Qwen is no-frills and “very easy to tinker with,” Wired’s Will Knight wrote. He added, “The rising prominence of Qwen and similar models does seem to suggest that a key measure for any AI model, beyond how clever it is, should be how widely it is used to build other stuff. By that benchmark, Qwen and other open Chinese models are ascendant.”
Palantir CEO Alex Karp will take a mysterious leave of absence.
Sports
The Oklahoma City Thunder will repeat as NBA champions, though they will once again slog through the postseason in somewhat unconvincing fashion. Giannis Antetokounmpo will mercifully get traded—but it’ll be in the offseason, not the February trade deadline. My favorite team, the destitute Washington Wizards, will settle for the third pick in the 2026 NBA Draft.
Bill Belichick will “retire” after the Tar Heels have another awful season.
Mayors of cities that are hosting World Cup matches will negotiate a truce with the Trump administration to stave off ICE agent incursions in June and July. But tourists will have a miserable, frightening time traveling into, and out of, the United States. The stories that emerge will permanently harm America’s tourism industry, which will make Stephen Miller very happy.
Labor
Assuming Affordable Care Act subsidies are not extended, tens of millions of Americans will be subjected to unfathomable healthcare costs. Many will simply decline healthcare coverage. This, in turn, will put a renewed focus on America’s fissured workforce, which is increasingly made up of gig workers and contractors who do not have access to decent, employer-sponsored health insurance.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be released in November come hell or high water. Its release will coincide with a fresh round of stories about terrible working conditions at Rockstar Games.
The Supreme Court will turn the National Labor Relations Board into a pumpkin. The NLRB is already not functioning because the Trump administration purposely neutered it, and because the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Elon Musk in an ongoing lawsuit questioning the NLRB’s authority. But the highest court in the land will formally splinter any semblance of federal labor protections, and leave it up to purportedly pro-labor “blue states” to look out for their workers.
“Wildcat strike” is a term you’ll be hearing more and more, folks.
Politics
Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem will get shoved out of Trump’s cabinet, though their dismissals will be characterized as something else (never back down, never admit fault, etc).
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will remain gainfully employed, but his behavior on the job—especially his interactions with the propagandized Pentagon press corps—will become a tabloid-y topic.
Donald Trump’s approval rating will dip into the mid-30s, and stay there. His figures among independents will fall to record lows. He will lose a small but meaningful portion of MAGA supporters as more revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein trickle out.
JD Vance, Steve Bannon, and other GOP kingmakers will cease their half-serious, half-trolling commentary about Trump running for a third term. They’re going to shut up because of the president’s diminishing control over his party, and because Turning Point USA has anointed Vance as Trump’s successor. Trump will grow angry at this perceived disloyalty, and post incessantly on Truth Social about how he’s seriously considering another run in 2028.
Donald Trump will antagonize Erika Kirk, either during a speech or on Truth Social.
The biggest upset of the 2026 midterms will come from Ohio’s governor race: Democrat Amy Acton will beat Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. Acton’s win will be owed to the GOP’s ascendent faction of groypers—they are too racist to vote for a brown, Hindu man, even if he largely shares their politics.
Kamala Harris will fall out of the top five of most 2028 polls about Democratic Party presidential candidates.
Many, many politicians will spend the lead-up to the 2026 elections telling their constituents to read their lips: no new data centers in their own districts and communities. I would not take them at their word.
Disclaimer: Some of these predictions are half-serious. Anything I get wrong was a joke, obviously.