The US election could turn the country into chaos
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Trump already tried to overturn one election he lost. On November 3, he’s likely to lose another one, badly. At this point it is obvious to almost everybody that the Republican Party, and thus Trump, is going to get smashed in the midterms. Chances are that both the House and the Senate will be flipped. A year ago, it was mostly unthinkable that the Democrats could flip the Senate. Although it would be a massive loss, even for a midterm, in this post I want to make the point that this is not just another election.
Trump doesn’t like to lose
I don’t think Trump would take this loss lightly, especially after a potential landslide. I think Trump will challenge, litigate and threaten to get the result of the election overturned, at least in key states. Some of the litigation has already started.
When I mention this to folks, so far everyone replies with skepticism: they don’t think that could happen, or that it’s even possible. To me this is a clear example of normalcy bias, and it’s quite easy to show why: Trump has already tried to overturn an election that he lost, in 2020. To this day, he doesn’t admit that he lost that election, and neither do key members of his cabinet. That alone should have been a massive red flag against voting for him in 2024, but here we are anyway and it’s about to happen again1.
There is speculation that the administration will try to influence the elections by using force, but as this excellent piece from Nate Silver’s newsletter describes, it may not even be possible to do at scale, although they might pull it off in a specific key race. Even if it doesn’t happen, the fact that we’re talking about it at all says a lot about how unstable things could get.
Republican Party internal mess
If they lose the whole Congress, everyone in the GOP will jump ship and turn against Trump. Trump was useful because he helped everyone get elected; if he has no public support, there’s no incentive to support him any longer, other than to keep grifting. But if they don’t even have enough votes to grift, then there’s no incentive to defend him, and they’d rather regain their reputation by helping kick Trump out. One could argue that the MAGA cult will still live on, but gas prices above $4/gal were already enough to start cracking it.
You can already see this happening with billionaires who funded Trump, like Peter Thiel, starting to jump ship.
And of course, if the election is a true landslide, many heads are expected to roll inside the administration, even if they don’t admit defeat. I think Pete Hegseth’s days are numbered unless the Republicans get a miracle at the ballot box after the disastrous Iran war.
Chaos
The Democrats are showing their teeth: some are even campaigning on the basis that Trump will get impeached if they win, and that many of his cabinet members will be investigated. I think this strategy is a mistake: regardless of what they actually do, it would be better to project calm so Trump isn’t forced to act defensively or incentivized to take bigger risks to avoid losing power.
This is serious: we’re risking branches of the armed forces not knowing who to take orders from, and some may decide differently than others. Imagine a scenario where Trump doesn’t recognize the new Congress, gets impeached and removed from office2, but refuses to leave because he insists the election was rigged to begin with. This could lead to a very bizarre situation where the National Guard and the military have to use their own judgment to figure out who their boss even is3. In this worst-case scenario, whatever happens, either side can call it a coup.
This looks very dystopian, but again, Trump doesn’t know how to lose and may take it to absurd levels, even by his own standards.
Other problems
Trump is famous for saying weird stuff. That is his superpower: he knows how to get attention, and he may be the best person in the world at it4. It’s said that he doesn’t really believe what he says, but I don’t think that has been proven true. When he threatened to annex Canada, Canada started turning its back on the US and even talked about becoming the EU’s first associate member; when he threatened to take Greenland, Europe reconsidered buying American weapons. And with Iran, he actually went ahead, causing absolute chaos in a region where the US had incredible influence.
It is again Europe as one big platform of power projection for the United States.
— NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, on the up to 5,000 US sorties flown from European bases during the Iran war
This makes more sense when you consider that Trump and his circle have been caught up in insider trading scandals almost weekly in the stock market5, as well as with the tariffs from the still-ongoing trade war.
Imagine if, even in a random sentence in one of his increasingly erratic public addresses, he says that the US won’t pay its debt as interest rates rise. I think that’s more likely to happen than most people would think, and it would cause chaos in world markets beyond anything we have ever seen before.
Tying it all up
Even if what I describe in this article doesn’t play out, I think we’re heading into a highly volatile near future. I tweeted that as he sees his chances of winning slip away, he may do something very stupid to try to recover at the last minute. So far that could have been the diesel trade deal with Russia, but something else could still come before Election Day6. This post has a lot of ifs, and whether any of this happens is highly uncertain, but all the ingredients are there for a rough year ahead.
Many people think that he doesn’t admit he lost because he genuinely believes he won. The case for unfitness is the same either way: either he ignored the popular vote to stay in power unlawfully, or he was delusional (or dumb) enough to reject a clear reality. ↩
The House can impeach with a simple majority, but removal takes two-thirds of the Senate, 67 senators. Even with a flipped Senate, that means over a dozen Republicans voting against him, which is exactly the scenario in the previous section. ↩
And it’s even possible that one takes one side and the other takes the other. Imagine just that for a moment. ↩
I read somewhere that if you look at his presidency from the perspective of a reality show, it starts making sense, and I agree. ↩
The result of the election will surely impact the stock market, but I have absolutely no idea in what way; there are just too many variables. In case of a flip, the US could regain a working government and the Democrats would come in with their anti-capitalist agenda, but we’d also likely say goodbye to ever-changing tariffs, and the AI buildout would probably finally face scrutiny, taxes and legal challenges. It’s important to remember that the top 7 companies (the so-called Mag 7) in the S&P 500 represent about a third of the index, and they are very AI-focused. It’s a mixed bag. ↩
It doesn’t depend on him, but Iran has every incentive to cause the US as much damage as possible before or even during Election Day. Its strategy is simple: hurt the US administration badly enough to show that if they mess with Iran, they could be kicked out of government. ↩
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