Trump’s Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, Alex Brandon, AP, 2024
While I believe that Trump’s second term will likely be more chaos and infighting than effective policies that will permanently damage the United States—I do think it’s worth pointing out how things could go wrong if they do go wrong.
Effective governance relies on a sense of legitimacy. All governments, democracies or autocracies, are bound by this. The actions taken by the State must be seen (at some level) as being within the reasonable constraints of what is permissible by those they govern.
Policies must be calibrated against this. Politicians as a routine matter engage in a game of calculating what they can enact against the inevitable blowback against those policies from the constituencies they answer to. Policies that are seen as illegitimate will inevitably cause resentment, protests, riots, or worse.
Elections are our way of measuring this in concrete terms regularly. Instead of protests, or civil conflict, we simply vote as a way of resolving the problem of how legitimate a set of ideas is. The mandate that a President comes into power with is proportionate to the popular support they received from the broad electorate for the ideas they promulgated during their campaign.
Trump (by winning both the Electoral College and popular vote) has a fairly strong mandate for his second term—but in a country as polarized as ours that mandate is relative. It wasn’t Reagan winning his second term, and Trump’s mandate—based on all the available data we have—was primarily based on economic issues.
There’s little reason to think that he has broad popular support for mass deportations or violence against his political opponents. Polling has shown conclusively that mass deportations when broken down are deeply unpopular.
However, that doesn’t mean that Trump or his incoming administration understand that. They could also just not care and decide to go ahead with their most unpopular policies regardless of popular sentiment.
There are advisors in Trump’s orbit like Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, Chad Wolf, or Tom Homan among dozens of others who would push for the most hardline versions of his ideas. In the past, they’ve openly called for the forcible imposition of these policies with the Federal Government taking the National Guard from red states and deploying them to blue states.
They openly fantasize about setting up camps and going door to door in various cities to round up random immigrants. They’ve voiced their willingness to deport both legal and illegal immigrants.
Their plans would almost immediately result in widespread public backlash. There would be crowds of protestors in blue cities obstructing any attempted mass deportation. State law enforcement would almost certainly be instructed by governors to not assist federal officers—and would likely attempt to legally impede these efforts.
The legality of these efforts aside, it would almost absolutely be seen as illegitimate. It would be people’s friends, family, and neighbors shuffled off on a bus. I think at this point the calculus kicks in that these measures are so deeply unpopular that they would probably stop.
But what if they didn’t? What if they miscalculate?
What if someone like Stephen Miller tells the American public to go to hell?
The press and protestors would almost certainly not stop, and the adversarial relationship between the government and those in opposition would only deepen.
Miscalculating his mandate to enact these policies, Trump might turn to options to suppress the dissent. To counteract the growing discontent, and empowered by his worst impulses and most extreme advisors, Trump could begin to fulfill his darkest campaign promises—going after his political enemies and the press with federal law enforcement.
It would probably be legal harassment instead of physical violence, but the message would be unmistakable. It would be to say that these policies will be enacted and the time for debate has passed.
This would almost immediately cause a constitutional crisis, and with our current Supreme Court, he would probably get away with it. It would just lurch further towards creating an overwhelming sense of illegitimacy in the White House.
There would be an unmistakable atmosphere that our government has become unmoored from the populace that it governs. It would create an atmosphere not seen since the 1960s in America.
Protests would likely accelerate further into a widespread generalized movement against the Trump Administration. Congress would cease to function as Democratic lawmakers would use every available means to frustrate the Executive branch. Blue state governors would almost absolutely use their powers to exclude the federal government from their states wherever possible.
The violent images flashing across cellphone screens daily would probably radicalize thousands into violence akin to the Weather Underground.
Right and left-wing militants would again start clashing on the streets of American cities like in 2020, and in an atmosphere of permissibility, right-wing paramilitaries would be allowed to enact violence without any form of legal accountability.
Trump, increasingly isolated and angry, would miscalculate again. His other promise—using the National Guard or Military against perceived internal enemies—would be back on the table. This time, there’s nobody in the White House to tell Trump that he can’t just have those standing in his way shot. We’d be lucky to escape that moment without another Kent State. We probably wouldn't.
We would be left with the long hot summer of 1967 for the remainder of Trump’s term. On the local level, depending on how much the Trump administration wants to empower his paramilitaries, we would be reduced to militia politics. Violence—or the threat of violence—would solve our disputes.
Constant anxiety and violence would be the norm around much of our politics with no pathway out. Families, neighbors, and churches would be torn apart by the resulting strife.
The basic aspects of civic life would only further atrophy in an environment of hyperpoliticization.
The economy, especially if Trump’s administration goes forward with tariffs, would flatline, and the resulting hardships would only further inflame tensions. An unstable and politically toxic national life hardly makes for a conducive environment for business. Years of economic growth would be lost in pursuit of pushing unpopular policies on an unwilling populace.
In an atmosphere of this near-constant tension and violence, and depending on the advisors he has around him, there’s a possibility that Trump once again attempts to engineer electoral outcomes—using the nationwide unrest as a pretext.
If he succeeded, the legitimacy of democratic elections would probably be damaged for decades. Trust in government would be non-existent amongst wide swaths of our country. Our international image as a liberal democracy defending freedom would be shattered.
We would be left with a hangover of the Trump years with no clear path forward to repairing the damage.
Even in Trump’s absence, the wounds and instability of such a catastrophe would leave America isolated on the international stage, and our economy would be slow to recover. Who would want to invest or partner with a country as unstable as ours?
In the instability and partisanship from Trump’s four years, we’d be liable to lapse back into spasms of unrest and violence as the aftershocks settled. The Italian Years of Lead didn’t finally end until the late 1980s.
In the best case, historians would write of this period as the American Lost Decades—when we had every advantage at our disposal and we threw it all away for the host of a reality show.
It would take an FDR-like figure to finally repair our national sense of self.
Is this what I think would happen? No. But even if unlikely, I can build a pathway to how this would happen, and how the worst could come to pass. It’s the reason why you don’t elect men like Trump.
This isn't the worst case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that the things you describe happen and the public loves it. No reason why RW media can't radicalize the average citizen into supporting it, especially if Trump succeeds in quashing dissent from the press and elites via coercion.
And don't forget the war option. If anyone can start a war and turn it in his favor, it's Trump. We could get a polycrisis that Americans have no reference for. I agree that the bad scenarios aren't the most likely, but I'm not sure 30% is a bad bet for hell or worse.