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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
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Friedberg @ 00:15:11Ambiguous
politicsgovernment
If Republican leaders repudiate Trump and he responds by creating a new Patriot Party that draws roughly 20 million supporters away from the GOP, then over the subsequent 2–3 years (2021–2024) the Republican Party will be forced to move left to regain balance, and the Democratic Party will in turn move further left, leading to a significantly more polarized American political landscape.
if Trump does actually if they do actually kick Trump out of the party and he does set up a fringe party, you will likely see the Democrats move further left, creating a much more, um, kind of conflicting story for some of the centrists than what they're telling today of what's going to happen in the future. And that's a very different America in the next 2 to 3 years. That could be created if they took that risk.View on YouTube
Explanation

The prediction depended on a specific conditional scenario:

  1. Core condition did not occur

    • Trump was rumored to be considering a new “Patriot Party” in January 2021, but his team explicitly disavowed any such organization and said he had no plans to leave the GOP. (snopes.com)
    • On February 28, 2021, at CPAC, Trump publicly stated: “We’re not starting new parties. We have the Republican Party. It’s going to unite and be stronger than ever before” and pledged to remain within the GOP. (aljazeera.com)
    • No Trump-led “Patriot Party” attracting ~20 million defectors from the GOP was ever formed between 2021–2024, and Republicans instead largely re‑embraced Trump.

  2. The forecast was about what would happen if that split occurred
    Friedberg’s statement was explicitly hypothetical: if Republicans “kick Trump out” and he creates a fringe party, then Democrats would move further left and the U.S. would become “a very different America in the next 2 to 3 years.” Since the antecedent (formal expulsion plus a large Trumpist third party) never materialized, we cannot directly test his causal claim about how party ideologies would have shifted under that counterfactual.

  3. Why this is not just ‘wrong’
    Labeling it “wrong” would imply the described scenario happened and his downstream effects failed to appear. Instead, the scenario itself did not occur, so we learn little about the accuracy of the conditional claim about party movement and polarization; we only know the trigger conditions weren’t met.

Because enough time has passed (2021–2024) but the predicted conditional scenario never actually came to pass, the accuracy of the prediction cannot be determined from real‑world outcomes.

Conclusion: ambiguous — the key precondition (a Trump‑led Patriot Party splitting the GOP) never occurred, so the scenario he was forecasting about party shifts and polarization cannot be evaluated.