Someone recently asked me: if you don’t think Trump is a fascist, what do you think is going to happen? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is: none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon.

In the course of several arguments and conversations over the last few days — about Trump, what he’s up to, and so on — I’ve sometimes found myself, against my better judgment, drifting into predictions. I start out trying to think about what this current moment means, and I wind up making claims about where we’re going.

That’s not a place I want to be. Not simply because my prediction about the election was so completely wrong, not simply because I’m trying to be more attentive to the mistakes I’ve made in the past lest I repeat them now, but also because prediction is a mug’s game. None of us knows what’s going to happen, and what’s going to happen with Trump, as I’ve repeatedly said, depends in part on what we do. This is not a fixed or frozen force field; it’s changing every day. What makes things especially challenging, however, is that analysis so often lends itself, or bleeds into, prediction.