Welcome back to Throwback Thursday. This one was originally posted on October 19th, 2016, right after the last “debate” between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I made some predictions about what would happen if each of them win. I think my “If Hillary wins” predictions were a pretty accurate prediction of what we’re seeing now with Biden. And aside from the Mars missions, my predictions about the trump presidency proved to be mostly correct. I may have been wrong about the increase in hate crimes not being a full order of magnitude. It’s possible it was.
Everything after this paragraph is exactly as I wrote it then, with no editing. The original can still be found on my old blog, at https://plutherus.dreamwidth.org/685023.html
OK, so maybe I’ll talk a little bit more about it.
So, what’s going to happen? Let’s assume for a moment that Hillary wins. What happens? Trump claims the election was stolen. Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Franklin Graham, and the usual cast of characters chime in with their usual wacky conspiracy theories supporting him, desperately trying to get their voices heard and seem relevant. (Maybe Rush Limbaugh retires, finally realizing that the field he pioneered has been completely taken over by younger people who are better at it than he is. But that’s not important right now.) For the most part, they don’t do much damage. Maybe there’s another Ruby Ridge or Waco type incident. Or more likely another Columbine, or Oklahoma City. Regardless, a few hundred people are killed in the name of Protecting America Against Tyranny and the comment sections of youtube and breitbart fill up with angry incoherent rants.
Donald finds his brand is not worth as much as he had hoped – his entire run for president I think was a desperate effort to save his failing name, and it backfired rather spectacularly. So, he slowly fades into irrelevance as well, occasionally doing radio talk shows and youtube videos. All the pending lawsuits are settled out of court, and criminal charges quietly dropped.
What’s a Hillary presidency look like? Much like Bill’s did. Economy improves somewhat. Expansion of Obamacare, but we don’t get single payer. Violence in the middle east continues, ebbs and flows, but doesn’t escalate dramatically. She’ll have some big program, hopefully an infrastructure improvement, that creates a lot of jobs. Housing crisis gets worse. A few international corporations get even richer by buying up more and more American real estate and charging people outlandish rent for them. By and large, things keep going the way they are. Some things get a little bit, but not dramatically, better. A few things get a little bit, but not dramatically worse.
What if Donald wins? Well, we probably won’t actually launch immediately into World War 3. Some people will feel emboldened to commit more violence against women and minorities. Some few will act on the threats they’ve already been making “If Trump wins, then we’ll show them!” Donald won’t openly encourage such things, but will do nothing to discourage it either. So, more violence across America, but not an order of magnitude more. The FBI will be nearly overwhelmed monitoring right-wing hate groups and trying to prevent massacres. They’ll prevent several and miss a few.
For the most part, Donald will talk about how great he is, but not be actively involved in his own presidency. Much like Bush, power will be held, with high turnover, by the sycophants around him, each trying to carve out their own little fiefdom. A bunch of billionaires will continue to loot the nation the way Cheney and Kissinger and their friends have done. A few trillion dollars will go missing and our infrastructure will continue to collapse. America will slide further into third world status, airports will close and the Interstate system will start to shut down as more and more of it gets unpaved. But there’ll be no big economic collapse and we won’t end up in a Mad Max movie. People who have money already will do OK, those who don’t will be hit even harder. More homeless and Americans’ average life span will go down even more. The national debt will continue to rise and social services will be cut even more.
It won’t be the end of the world, but it’ll suck. A lot of people who could have had brilliant careers in the arts or sciences or technology will end up working menial jobs to stay afloat.
China and Europe will both send manned missions to Mars and a bunch of Americans will think to themselves “Didn’t we used to do stuff like that?”