For the past three decades I have written scenarios of the future for a living. I aim to make them detailed and plausible. That is all I can promise, because the more detailed each scenario gets, the less likely that scenario is to “come true.” Still, detailed scenarios, despite being inevitably “wrong,” allow people to think about issues and possibilities they would never otherwise consider, because what passes for “serious planning” in our society is a detailed, single-point forecast of the “most likely future.” If one is not staking one’s reputation on one’s perfect forecasting accuracy, one is not being “rigorous.”
At present we are embroiled in the closing stages of an election the outcome of which is in complete doubt. This does not stop people from absolutely obsessing about the latest polls, which don’t seem like they are going to offer any certainty to anyone. But there seems to be almost no real, in-depth examination of what one candidate or the other winning would actually mean for the country.
What would really happen if Trump won? What would really happen if Harris won? We can’t know for certain. But we, and/or our journalists and pundits, OUGHT to be talking a lot more about those things, and a lot less about polls.
To this end, here is the first of two (inevitably skewed and “wrong,” but plausible and possibly even useful) scenarios of what could happen.
SCENARIO ONE: 2026 After a Trump Victory
The polls were wrong again, and in the same direction as in 2016 and 2020. The “dead heat” of the last few weeks resolved itself, as late-breaking voters went largely to Trump in most of the swing states. Ballot counting went late into the night in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but the result appeared to be clear before the wee hours. Seeking to avoid an Al Gore-style premature concession, Harris waited until later in the week to congratulate Donald Trump on returning to office. Trump supporters loudly protested her short delay, threatening poll workers and ballot-counters in key states, but once the outcome was announced, they turned to celebration and to bloodthirsty rhetoric about mass deportation and using the military to arrest political opponents.
Trump himself, as in 2016, backed away from the most inflammatory promises he had made; all he had ever cared about was remaining out of jail and having the world’s attention on him 24/7/365. In 2016, he had almost straightforwardly told a crowd chanting “Lock Her Up” that he had no intention of doing that, and had just said it to get elected. He did mention that he had spoken with Vladimir Putin, who had called to congratulate him on his victory. He told a cheering crowd that the Ukraine war would soon be over, though he refrained from openly negotiating with Putin prior to January 20.
January 6, 2025 was very different from four years earlier. A massive (and almost completely unnecessary) security presence surrounded the Capitol building as Vice President Harris certified the Electoral College victory of Donald J. Trump. The Inauguration of January 20, 2025 was similarly well-guarded, though this time, the outgoing president and vice president were present to witness the handover of power.
The streets of Washington, DC were awash in far-right groups openly celebrating Trump’s victory. Richard Spencer repeated his fascist-salute “Hail Trump” speech of 2017, to an even bigger crowd. The far right had been almost completely normalized, even though right-wing violence was a constant background theme of the second Trump term. Trump’s new spokesperson proclaimed the Inauguration crowd to be the largest in history. Mainstream news outlets called this “inaccurate;” there still was a general resistance to calling anything Trump or the Trump administration said a “lie.” Fox News now claimed to be the center of American media, and many of the corporate overlords of the mainstream outlets pressured their news departments to shift their coverage to the right in response.
One of Trump’s first actions as president was to revive Schedule F, which revoked protections for civil servants. He announced, “We will now truly begin the draining of the swamp. The Deep State will be destroyed forever.” A number of key firings of formerly protected civil servants were announced in the first few days; more followed, along with appointments of Trump loyalists to those key positions as replacements.
Republicans, as in 2017, controlled the presidency and the Senate; but not the House. They lost no time in taking advantage of their advantages. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito quickly announced their retirements after the end of the 2025 term; Trump quickly appointed two very young, hard-core Trump loyalists to their seats. Trump, a convicted felon, now had appointed a majority of the entire Supreme Court, five out of nine, with even more possible. Democrats closely monitored the health of “their” three justices, now aged 65, 71 and 55.
Trump had distanced himself from Project 2025, but now that he was in office, and on the hook to organize things (not among his core competencies), he had no option but to rely on it (and its authors and participants) to staff up and set policy. Convicted (and Trump-pardoned) criminals Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and others were quickly brought back on board to lead his executive team. Stephen Miller, of course, was named to be Border Czar, a title Kamala Harris never actually had, but which Miller promised to pursue with savage efficiency.
New, Trump-loyal leadership (and lower-level staffing after the re-promulgation of Schedule F) transformed the agendas of every executive department, including the Justice Department, FBI, Intelligence Community, EPA, SEC, ICC, USDA, and even the military, making every one of them into tools to increase his personal power and, some said, his family’s wealth. Investigations and indictments of prominent Democrats and Trump opponents followed quickly. All federal charges against Trump himself were dropped by the Department of Justice immediately after January 20. Protests against his actions, beginning with another “Women’s March” in Washington on January 21, 2025, were brutally suppressed.
Elon Musk was made head of a “Government Efficiency Commission” early on. He showed up to the White House announcement with a kitchen sink similar to the one he had brought to Twitter headquarters in 2022. His actual engagement with the “commission” was erratic and evanescent, but he did cause a high degree of chaos among the departments he did visit, with numerous upper-level employees either fired or leaving of their own accord. Some were replaced with consultants affiliated with Trump’s political campaigns; others were simply not replaced, leaving their departments in disarray. The Big Four consulting firms, top officials of each of which had taken more or less public stands against Trump over the years, found themselves shut out of new business with the government, and had many existing contracts revoked, often to be handed to Trump Organization-affiliated vendors. Much of the government bureaucracy has been reeling and unable to do more than try to survive from day to day. Many of the effects of this, as always, have been delayed, and Musk and others are crowing about his “genius” in once again slashing “fat” with “no negative result.”
The Democratic House did their best to forestall the massive changes Trump was bringing to the executive branch. They tried to stop funding to various departments, but found that Trump was impounding their funds and transferring them to his priorities. But with an increasing number of Trump-appointed judges in place, their court appeals fell on deaf ears.
Trump also quickly called for extension of his previous tax cuts, expiring in 2025, and another massive tax cut for the wealthy, and slapping heavy tariffs on Chinese goods. Democrats in Congress extracted a few concessions from Trump in return for allowing the tax cut bill to pass. Economists warned that these actions would inevitably rekindle inflation, but as with the personnel cuts, there have yet to be highly visible public consequences. After a year, as the midterms approach, inflation and price rises on imported goods had not made the headlines, leading experts to conclude that the “inevitable” effects of economic policy had an unfortunately long lag time. (Some Democrats wonder if the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so often accused by an out-of-office Trump to be politically skewing their numbers, now were actually doing so under new, Trump-friendly leadership.)
The economy seemed to be booming, by standard measures; economists said this was due to Trump’s manhandling of the Fed, replacing certain Fed officials with Trump loyalists who were instructed to open the spigot and prioritize growth. His massive tax cuts and resulting deficits were also raising growth in the short term, though not quite as high as he had promised. The national debt and deficits increased substantially.
Trump also began raids to deport undocumented non-citizens residing in the U.S. The promises to deport “16 million aliens” have largely been abandoned , but the more targeted raids, aimed at “blue” cities, especially “sanctuary cities,” were highly orchestrated and publicized for maximum effect. Border crossings were at a recent low, thanks in part to reinstatement of family separation policies by Miller, as well as due to several incidents of shootings of migrants attempting to cross the border. The officers involved were quickly either exonerated or pardoned by Trump.
Trump no longer traveled overseas; usually he sent his son-in-law or his vice president in his place. Opponents protested that American foreign policy was being monetized to maximize Trump-Kushner family wealth. Legal appeals against this type of activity, as well as almost all aspects of Trump administration policy, crashed on the shoals of Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court majority. Trump’s only real allies overseas were Benyamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and other similar “strongmen.” The entire post-WWII alliance structure was just a shell of itself. Trump allowed Netanyahu maximum latitude in his war on Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, though he said openly that in any war against Iran, Israel would go it alone.
Two “media bubbles” in the country were hardening into separate realities. Liberals argued that they occupied reality, with vetted facts and figures. Right-wing media, on the other hand, insisted that Democrats were scheming to subvert Christianity, turn kids into trans drag queens, put white people into concentration camps, and prioritize foreigners over Americans. Right-wing channels increasingly identified openly with Russian interests, demanding that funding for the war in Ukraine be abandoned. This had results with the GOP Senate, which blocked any further funding for Ukraine arms.
NATO and the EU took note of the new U.S. isolationism and self-aggrandizing corruption, resigning themselves to go it alone and rearm against the Russian threat without U.S. help. Ukraine suffered battlefield losses, but fought on; the alternative, they felt, was surrender to Russia and mass murder of civilians. The EU hugely increased its support of Kyiv, but the war for the moment was at a stalemate.
The Senate, aside from tax cuts and rubber-stamping Trump policies and appointments, was almost entirely devoted to hearings about alleged misdeeds of Democrats. Several were jailed for contempt, as Steve Bannon had been in 2024. The House attempted oversight of administration departments and officials, but most of their subpoenas went unanswered.
Democrats were left to ponder how they had gone so wrong. The circular firing squad began blasting away as soon as the initial stunning effects of their loss had passed. One lesson many took was that inflation was a sure incumbent-killer: it had killed Carter, and it had killed the Democrats in 2024. Others said that nominating a largely unvetted, untested woman of color in a still-racist and misogynist nation, one with lots of ultra-liberal positions recorded on videotape in 2019, had doomed their efforts from the start. Others said that if only she had chosen Josh Shapiro as her vice-presidential candidate, she might have won Pennsylvania. Others thought that accusations of “wokism,” especially on trans issues, had proven to be political dynamite, even for an exceptionally divisive and weak candidate such as Trump. The liberal wing of the Democratic party countered by saying that voters did not trust the Democrats because they did not seem to stand for anything; a more progressive platform would reverse the party’s fortunes, they said. But all were left to wonder how a convicted criminal had won the unstinting allegiance of almost half the country, many of whom had previously been reliable Democratic voters.
But by 2026, the mood of the public had shifted. An electorate that simply thought it was voting to “shake things up” and go back to 2019 found that the basic services of government were crumbling, and chaos was the (dis)order of the day. Disaster relief was not forthcoming in many cases, and definitely not in places that voted blue. Obamacare was mismanaged; the VA, Medicare and Social Security were subject to endless SNAFUs. Water and air pollution rose, along with wealth disparities. Trump appeared increasingly unhinged and more and more rarely ventured into public. J.D. Vance was not a palatable substitute. Trump’s approval rating declined even below the low levels of 2017-2020. Worse, the economy was proving volatile, even with high growth. With a far more favorable electoral map in 2026, Democrats looked likely to retake the Senate.
But for Democrats, much of the damage was done. They had been unable to defeat a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist in 2024, despite once again winning the popular vote, and they were struggling to come up with the type of simple message that might appeal to a still angry and distrustful electorate that was not in a mood to hear about how much better they had performed when they were in charge. Their control of the House availed them little.
Meanwhile, continued massive spending by right-wing institutions ensured that, in fifty states and every territory, more and more people were being inculcated in a MAGA-type point of view, and being encouraged to run for school boards, local town councils, state offices, and other things still largely overlooked by the top-down “liberal establishment.” In addition, the “Joe Rogan,” “Barstool Sports,” MAGA-friendly, Democrat-unfriendly young male cohort, of all ethnicities and races, alienated by its difficulty in finding employment and life satisfaction, was a newly acknowledged fact of the political scene.
So when the next big shoe dropped… you know the one… the country was singularly disunited and unprepared.
