Comedian Akilah Hughes has a bleak forecast for where America is headed under Donald Trump.
The 80-year-old president has embraced the nation’s upcoming 250th birthday with gusto, kicking off the celebrations with a UFC cage fight spectacle at the White House last week.
But Hughes, host of the How Is This Better? podcast, predicted Sunday that the United States won’t last to celebrate its 500th birthday during an appearance on the new MS NOW show Connect with Jacob Soboroff.
“I don’t think America is making it to 500, if we’re on the same trajectory,” she said. “You know, 250 was a stretch.”
“Oh,” Soboroff let out before he chuckled.
“I don’t see it happening,” Hughes continued. “We have a concerted effort from the current administration to forget about history, to you know, sort of destroy public education, to destroy public works, to privatize everything.”
She added, “And if we know one thing about corporations, you know, in the long term, they are not giving back to the people.”
Hughes, who formerly co-hosted the Crooked Media podcast What a Day, noted that America is a “very young democracy.”
“There are so many other countries that have come and gone, and I don’t know why we believe we are immune to that,” she said.
Her gloomy outlook is shared by a sizable chunk of the country.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found that 38 percent of Americans, nearly two-fifths of the population, don’t believe the U.S. will exist by its 500th anniversary.
Broken down by party affiliation, 26 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats don’t think that the U.S. will be a united country in the year 2276. Independents were the most pessimistic, with 46 percent believing that the U.S. won’t exist in 250 years.
Americans expressed even greater anxiety about whether democracy can survive the coming years. Two-thirds of respondents—including 85 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans—said American democracy was at risk of failing, up from 57 percent in a poll conducted in August of last year.
Hughes said that young Americans in particular have “just no hope for the future.” She recalled attending a party for a friend’s 3-month-old baby where guests struggled to imagine the child’s future beyond working at a data center or becoming a plumber.
“It’s just a real pessimistic time in this country,” adding, “At least we can all laugh about it.”
