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Donald Trump is now the president again. What could possibly go wrong? [1]
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Date: 2025-01-20
Now that the Orange Menace has been elevated to Chief Autocrat once again, I thought this would be a good juncture to do some out-loud thinking about what could happen the next four years.
Essentially, I see three possible general paths:
Trump gets little, or almost none, of what he asks for. Trump gets most, or all, of what he asks for. Something in-between #1 and #2.
For his own and the country’s sake, he really should hope for #1. The best thing that could happen to him is that little of his legislative and administrative priorities get passed or enacted, and that the US goes into a sort of autopilot for the next four years. Congress — controlled by RINO Republicans in the Senate and with a razor-thin margin in the House for the first two years — would pass some very watered-down versions of his legislative agenda which do relatively little damage. This would be a muddle-through scenario. Trump would, of course, do mass quantities of his usual bloviating, but it turns out that is mostly dementia-addled hot air. All his ideas about tariffs and annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone turn out to be wildly impractical, and congress as well as some of his advisors somehow manage to persuade him to let those ideas fall by the wayside, or at worst, pass only minimalist versions of them. Also, his plans to deport millions of illegal immigrants also turn out to be wildly impractical. While some get deported, it turns out that little more than in a usual four years end up doing so.
This scenario would greatly disappoint his fans, but would be best for the country. If this happened, in 2026 Democrats would ride a blue wave, but it would probably be a modest one. It’s impossible to say what would happen in 2028 under this scenario.
Scenario #2 would be more interesting. MAGAs think that if he deports millions of immigrants, enacts steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China (and who knows who else), slashes government spending, lets any oil company drill anything they want anywhere they want, etc., that that will send the US into a wondrous new Golden Age. I suppose it’s possible that us anti-Trumpers are somehow overestimating the damage all that would do, and things would quickly adjust and not be that bad after all. But I consider that very unlikely. In all probability, eliminating millions of farm workers, meat packing plant workers, hotel maids, landscaping workers, construction workers, factory workers and so on from the workforce would severely hamper entire industries. Enacting steep tariffs on your top three trading partners is almost certain to raise prices on a lot of goods; and since those three countries will in-kind raise their own tariffs on US goods, US exports will suffer. I suppose that, maybe after five or ten years of this new tariff paradigm the economy could somehow adjust (though surely not always in a good way), but Donald Trump does not have five or ten years. The worst would be about one to three years after the tariffs are enacted, which is the only time Trump really has.
Essentially, if Trump gets most or all of what he wants, it would all have to happen in the first two years, since there will be mid-terms in 2026 and a likely Blue Wave. By then we can probably expect that inflation will have gone up, shortages of all sorts of goods will appear everywhere, factories will either have reduced output due to a lack of workers and maybe in some cases shut down entirely (and I’m particularly thinking of meat packing plants), which will further raise the price of goods, etc. Probably some non-immigrants will lose their jobs as a spillover effect from the deportation of undocumented immigrants and the tariffs. There would be a high probability of a recession, perhaps a steep one.
I note I’m also particularly anticipating this which I wrote a story about in November. In fact, that could be such a big deal that I’m seriously wondering if, in hindsight, Democrats might be glad it began under Trump’s watch rather than Harris’. If, by the 2028 elections, MAGAs are having to pay $5/gallon or more at the pump — in the cheapest states — to fill up their Ford F-250 Super Duty’s, then they cannot blame Harris or the Democrats for their problem. However, the particular outcome and timing of that is hard to predict; if we get a recession, that could kill demand for oil and gas enough to cancel out the price effects of declining oil production. Or maybe it won’t.
In this scenario Democrats would not only ride a significant Blue Wave in 2026, but the GOP, having essentially destroyed the US economy under Trump, would get crushed at the polls in 2028 as well.
Scenario #3 would simply be a compromise between #1 and #2. Trump would get a medium-sized amount of his agenda enacted.
Personally, I’m extremely undecided as to which of the scenarios I want. I know it may seem cruel to want some of the bad things in Scenario #2 to happen, but I also think that there is such a large portion of the US population that can only learn the consequences of their poor voting choices if something bad happens to them personally as a result of their vote, that it might be the only way to accomplish anything constructive. If people elect Trump, and nothing notable happens because Trump accomplished little, the 60% of the population who pay little or no attention to politics won’t notice anything and will be like, “Trump got elected and the world didn’t come to an end. So what was the big deal?” The problem with these people would be that they were oblivious to the fact that the world didn’t come to an end because Trump didn’t manage to accomplish much of his agenda. Since these people pay little attention to politics, they would be unaware of that.
On the other hand, if Trump gets most or all of his agenda accomplished, and because of that, scores of Trump voters lose their jobs, see soaring prices at the supermarket and at the gas pump, see lots of empty shelves in the stores, have problems procuring supplies for their business or hiring laborers, and others have their various government benefits cut off, that — and only that — will cause these low information Trump voters to reflect on the wisdom of their vote for Trump (and perhaps Republicans in general).
For this latter group of people I’m not referring to the 30% or so of the population who are really hard-core Trump voters — those people are largely beyond hope. Instead I’m referring to the ones who voted for Trump but don’t have strong ideologies and don’t pay much attention to the news, and only voted for Trump because he seemed more macho, or Harris gave them bad vibes, or something like that. This latter group is probably something like 30-40% of the population, I would guess.
And yet, there is the part of me that doesn’t want bad things to happen.
But if bad things don’t happen, people won’t learn and we could end up with another Trump sometime in the near future. Thus, I think the part of me that wants to force people to pay more attention to current events and who they are voting for has the edge over the other part of me that doesn’t want bad things to happen.
As for probabilities of each of the two scenarios happening, I’d say Scenario #1 has about a 40% chance of happening, Scenario #2 has about a 30% chance of happening, and Scenario #3 has about a 30% chance of happening. Whether Scenario #3 would be good or bad depends on its degree of in-between-ness, I suppose.
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