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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
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Sacks @ 01:14:23Wrong
politicseconomyconflict
If the Ukraine war contributes to a significant U.S. recession before the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s main viable path to winning the presidency will be to blame that economic downturn on the war and the foreign‑policy establishment, using an anti–military‑industrial‑complex message as his central campaign argument.
If we get a recession that Trump can, I think, lay at the feet of this war. He's positioning himself to take advantage of this could be a silver bullet for him. I don't think he has any other way of winning.View on YouTube
Explanation

By November 5, 2024, enough time had passed to evaluate this prediction, and subsequent events contradict it on multiple key points.

  1. No U.S. recession tied to the Ukraine war before the 2024 election.
    The National Bureau of Economic Research’s business‑cycle chronology shows the last U.S. recession ended in April 2020, with the most recent peak in February 2020 and no later recessions dated as of 2024–2025. (nber.org) GDP growth remained positive in 2023 and 2024 (e.g., U.S. real GDP grew about 2.9% in 2023 and 2.8% in 2024, with Q4 2024 annualized growth at 2.3%), indicating a slowdown but not a significant recession. (barrons.com) While some European economies, such as Germany’s, experienced Ukraine‑war‑related recessions due to energy shocks, this did not translate into a U.S. recession. (en.wikipedia.org) So the antecedent of the conditional (“a significant U.S. recession attributable to the Ukraine war before 2024”) never occurred.

  2. Trump nevertheless won the 2024 election.
    Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, winning 312 electoral votes to 226 and carrying all major swing states. (en.wikipedia.org) This directly contradicts the speaker’s assertion that Trump had essentially no other way to win besides the hypothesized recession‑based strategy.

  3. Trump’s actual campaign message centered on immigration, crime, and “Bidenomics,” not primarily on blaming a war‑induced recession or the military‑industrial complex.
    Analyses of Trump’s 2024 campaign show he emphasized immigration, the southern border, crime, and inflation/Biden’s economic record as his dominant themes. (washingtonpost.com) Trump and his campaign communications repeatedly framed the election around a “broken border,” violent crime by undocumented immigrants, and the failures of “Bidenomics,” as illustrated by official campaign emails and rally transcripts. (donaldjtrump.com)

    Trump did criticize the cost of aid to Ukraine and claimed he could quickly end the war, but reporting on his rhetoric and his own post‑election interview with TIME depict this as part of a broader foreign‑policy posture, not as a central, economic blame‑the‑war campaign built around an explicit anti–military‑industrial‑complex frame. (politico.com)

  4. How this maps to the normalized prediction.
    The normalized claim is: if the Ukraine war drives a major U.S. recession, Trump’s main viable path to victory is to blame that downturn on the war and the foreign‑policy establishment, running an anti‑military‑industrial‑complex campaign—and that he has no other realistic route to win. In reality: (a) the war did not cause a U.S. recession before the election; (b) Trump did win; and (c) he did so with a message centered on immigration, crime, and inflation, not the posited recession‑and‑Ukraine narrative. This shows the forward‑looking judgment that he had “no other way of winning” besides that scenario was falsified by events.

Because both the key condition (a war‑induced U.S. recession) failed to materialize and Trump won via a different message than the one described as his only viable path, the prediction is best classified as wrong.