Jason Sattler

Opinion columnist

“It is very hard to predict, especially the future,” Niels Bohr often said, paraphrasing a Danish proverb. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist died in 1962, 54 years before Donald Trump was elected president. So Bohr never learned how right he was.

But some predictions are too easy.

For instance, we can say with 100 percent certainty that in 2019, our president will be caught doing something else Republicans would have impeached Barack Obama or Bill Clinton for — twice, during breakfast. And we can be almost as sure that the only check elected Republicans will balance upon Trump is a mopey tweet from some “extremely troubled” GOP senator who will still vote with the president almost 100 percent of the time.

Trump's impulsiveness, enabled by a compromised, complicit and/or catatonic GOP, has been the one constant of the past two years. This perpetual state of emergency has the effect of making scandals that should end another presidency almost boring.

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Which scandal-infested Cabinet secretary will resign next? Which mildly conscience-ridden official will be forced out next? Which Trump associate will be indicted or make a plea deal or break a plea deal next?

The names change, but rot keeps on spreading. And it will for the foreseeable future.

So what else will 2019 bring us — besides the confirmation of every suspicion you’ve ever had about Donald Trump?

Here are some of the worst things you should expect in the next 12 months:

Someone will take Paul Ryan seriously

Within weeks or even days after the House speaker leaves Congress, having helped engineer the largest noncrisis deficit in American history, someone on TV will call Paul Ryan “a deficit hawk.”

Progressives have been on to Ryan’s wildly fraudulent claims of devotion to fiscal responsibility for years, but the news media still let him pretend it’s some sort of fluke that he has been a solid vote for exploding the debt since he joined Congress 20 years ago.

The biggest hoax of all was any hope that Ryan’s informed suspicion of Trump would mean he might be some check on the new president.

It turned out being a willing shill to a shady billionaire who hates paying taxes was the role Ryan was born to play. Verily, he has never played another. In between abetting constant obstruction, after he failed to uninsure 20 million Americans, he eagerly pushed through massive, deficit-funded tax cuts for people and businesses who already have more money than they can ever spend.

Yet still, you can expect Ryan to show up on a news show some Sunday morning soon and be treated as if he hadn't been a perpetrator of one the greatest frauds in history — his political career.

McConnell Senate will be as bad as Mar-a-Lago

When it comes to wretched hives of scum and villainy, only the Mitch McConnell-controlled Senate can compete with Mar-a-Lago.

Though there is no golf and the bribe collecting is generally banished to the sidelines, the Senate gave McConnell a perfect perch from which to wage his very successful war against democracy.

First, he stole a Supreme Court seat. Then he prevented a bipartisan response to the foreign attacks on our elections in 2016. Under Trump, somehow, McConnell got worse.

In addition to confirming a circus parade of Trump appointees bent on undermining the missions of the departments they were picked to head — including Betsy DeVos at Education, Ryan Zinke at Interior and Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency — the GOP Senate unhinged the flood gates Republicans used to block President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees.

The majority leader has engineered an unprecedented stuffing of the federal judiciary with “bigots, bloggers and liars” that included the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice without any proper investigation of his full political record or the credible sexual assault accusation against him.

As the Republican Senate majority grows in 2019, McConnell will no longer need the vote of Tim Scott, the one African-American Republican in the U.S. Senate, a good GOP soldier who could not bring himself to back two of Trump’s most racist appointees.

So McConnell’s plan to use the courts to roll back the past century will only intensify.

Republicans will be pro-life except in cases of life

Republicans keep adding new bureaucratic requirements to Medicaid despite — or because of — evidence that these rules are rapidly uninsuring poor workers in Arkansas.

This is all happening as life expectancy in the United States is down for the third straight year, largely due to suicides and overdoses. And the GOP is more determined than ever to roll back, or eliminate through a lawsuit, the best tool we have to combat these twin epidemics: Medicaid expansion.

And children aren’t being spared from Republican policies that are pro-life, except in cases of life. For the first time this decade, the percentage of American kids without health insurance increased in 2017.

How else are we going to teach children to pick richer parents?

But there is one thing to look forward to …

Come New Year's Day, though, half a branch of our government will begin to function the way the Founders intended.

Why did Zinke's resignation as Interior secretary come right after his lobbyist-packed Christmas party?

Subpoena power.

Zinke's former Republican colleagues in the House are almost as interested as he is in stonewalling the numerous investigations into his tenure at Interior. But Zinke and Trump know that as of Thursday, they will no longer control the committees that were supposed to be doing oversight for the past two years.

Given the abundance of corruption inside the Trump administration that we know about even though Republicans were doing their best to hide it, just imagine what we’ll find out next.

Ryan Zinke is far from the only administration figure who is imagining exactly that.

Jason Sattler, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and host of "The GOTMFV Show" podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP