The U.S. is about to be thrown into chaos. The only real question is for how long

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Chaos theory enjoyed a brief spell at the top of the intellectual charts a generation ago, then largely passed from public consciousness. It may be about to undergo something of a revival.

No matter who wins the U.S. presidential election, that is, the United States seems destined to enter a period of chaos and upheaval. If Donald Trump wins, it may be changed irrevocably, no longer the greatest of the democracies and their champion against the dictatorships, but at best an illiberal, inward-looking semi-democracy, and at worst the dictators’ enthusiastic ally.

But even if Mr. Trump loses, the chances are good that the U.S. will descend into political, social and economic chaos: a short-run crisis of great intensity, followed by a long period of uncertainty, or simply a spiral into greater and greater instability. Mr. Trump himself, he has made quite clear, will not accept any result that does not put him in the White House and out of reach of the multiple criminal prosecutions in which he is embroiled.

And even if the United States should survive the immediate assault on its democracy, and Mr. Trump should eventually pass from the scene, there will remain the problem that half its population, and one of its two main political parties, have been so thoroughly radicalized, so profoundly alienated from their fellow citizens and so disillusioned with the institutions of American government and society as to be willing to embrace what it is no longer controversial to call fascism.

The loss of Mr. Trump would surely be a setback for the MAGA movement, but short of a catastrophe – either massive electoral defeat or a social and economic collapse of Great Depression proportions – it is difficult to see how they can soon be brought back to reality, or democracy. And so long as one party in a two-party system rejects the basic premises of American democracy, the whole structure must be considered vulnerable.

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Enjoy these last few days before the election, then. We may look back on them as the final moments of that extraordinary 80-year period of relative peace and prosperity, for America and the democratic world, known as the Pax Americana.

This may all seem far-fetched. Even today, after four years of Mr. Trump in power and four more years as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, the mind yearns always for normalcy. Something in us makes us want to believe that everything will work out, somehow: if not for the best, then at least not for the worst.

Mr. Trump doesn’t really mean what he says, we tell ourselves. Or if he does, he will fail. The “guardrails” will hold. He is a disruptive force, to be sure, of a kind rarely seen in world history. But America’s democracy is too big and too strong to be taken down by one man, or even one party. Somehow it will carry on.

This is where chaos theory comes in. Its key insight is the concept of non-linear or exponential risk. As humans, we tend to think in linear terms: A 5-per-cent shock to a given system knocks it 5 per cent off-course. A brief period of course-correction, a few repairs, and you’re back on your way.

But some risks are non-linear. A small initial disturbance can, in certain circumstances, set off a self-reinforcing feedback loop of reactions and counter-reactions leading to very large and sudden changes. We saw that during the financial crisis. We saw it again during the pandemic. And we may be about to see it again.

At this point the election remains impossible to call. The polls seem to indicate an excruciatingly tight race, but the polls have been wrong before, and the pollsters’ well-known difficulties, especially when it comes to modelling turnout, have only grown worse.

Apply a modest polling error, in either direction, to the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections in each state that decide, by way of the Electoral College, who becomes president, and it is possible to imagine either Mr. Trump or Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, winning quite handily. Had fewer than 39,000 votes in three Rust Belt states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, gone the other way in 2016 – out of more than 136 million cast – Hillary Clinton and not Mr. Trump would have been elected president.

Still, the odds favour a narrow victory, one way or the other. Suppose it is for Ms. Harris. We do not have to guess how Mr. Trump and his Republican allies would respond to this. They have been quite clear. Mr. Trump will declare victory on election night, come what may, rejecting the official results as illegitimate on fabricated charges of election fraud. He and his officials will follow up with formal legal challenges.

Initially this will take place in court. Indeed this process is already under way: Dozens of cases have been filed in states across the country, even before the election. But while it is every candidate’s right to seek the courts’ protection in a close race, it seems evident this is only the opening salvo in the Republican plan. The game, rather, is to tie up elections in certain states in procedural knots, long enough to prevent the certification of the results, and the awarding of Electoral College delegates in those states, within the statutorily required time frame.

Lately Republicans have shifted their focus from the courts to empowering state and local election administrators to refuse to certify results on their own. Or, should that fail, appealing to Republican-controlled state legislatures – as in four of the seven swing states – to set aside the results, or even to certify their own slates of electors, in a reprise of the plot attempted after the 2020 election.

The idea is in every case the same: to prevent the election from being decided in the usual way, by a simple counting of the Electoral College votes, in favour of some other method, more likely to deliver victory to Mr. Trump.

Two versions of the plan have been floated. One is to prevent any candidate from winning a majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College, and so, under the terms of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, throw the election to the newly elected House of Representatives to decide. Aren’t the Democrats favoured to win a majority in the House? Yes, but under the 12th Amendment the winner is decided not by a vote of the House’s members, but by a vote of its state delegations: one vote per state. The Republicans hold a majority of the states, and are expected to retain it.

The other version of the plan: toss out only enough electors, in the right states, to push Mr. Trump ahead of Ms. Harris, then argue that the constitutional requirement is for a majority of the electors validly “appointed” at the time of the vote, not a majority of those originally elected.

Either way, it is hard to imagine this settling anything. The tens of millions of Americans who voted for Ms. Harris – almost certainly a plurality of the vote, possibly a majority – are hardly likely just to shrug and accept Mr. Trump as their president on the basis of such flim-flammery. The Electoral College is controversial enough as it is – Ms. Clinton beat Mr. Trump by nearly three million votes in the popular vote – but this would bring people into the streets.

But Mr. Trump’s supporters will have equally been primed by months of warnings from Mr. Trump and others that the Democrats would somehow try to “steal” the election from them, by means ranging from allowing illegal immigrants to vote to monkeying around with ballot boxes to elaborate tricks with voting machines. Polls showing Mr. Trump ahead or level with Ms. Harris before the election will be offered as evidence that some sort of skulduggery must have been at work – Mr. Trump has often said the only way he could lose is if the Democrats cheat – and that therefore the Republicans were justified in contesting the results.

In normal times this sort of controversy might end up being decided in the Supreme Court, as it was in the infamous “hanging chads” case that awarded the election to George W. Bush in 2000. After that episode, however, and even more after the outrageous series of pro-Trump decisions in the past year at the court, notably the decision granting him, and future presidents, immunity from criminal prosecution for acts taken in their official capacities, there is little likelihood of this offering any resolution to the crisis.

This way, then, lies madness: months and months of uncertainty and division, and the ever-present possibility that someone – possibly egged on by Russian intelligence – might decide to make their point with violence.

But now suppose Mr. Trump wins the election: I mean the old-fashioned way. Is it to be imagined this will lead to any greater stability? It is by now taken as a given – hardly worth mentioning – that Mr. Trump’s first act would be to abort the two federal criminal proceedings against him, the one for keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the other for the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

This is, of course, obstruction of justice on a massive scale – far worse than what drove Richard Nixon from office. There would almost certainly be mass resignations at senior levels of the Justice department, but Mr. Trump’s team has already recruited legions of ideologues and fanatics to replace them. He would almost certainly also be impeached by the House for it, but the Republicans in the Senate would acquit, his supporters would shrug and the media would move on.

And the pattern would be set. Fresh from absolving Mr. Trump of criminal liability – and his friends, and his supporters, and anyone who paid him enough for a pardon – the new-look Trump DoJ would be set to work prosecuting his enemies. Mr. Trump has been explicit about this: The prosecutors on his cases, former staffers who criticized him, journalists, Democratic donors, all have been put on notice. Just the threat – just the possibility of a threat – would be enough to silence most.

Criminal prosecution would be only one of the weapons in Mr. Trump’s arsenal. Harassing civil suits, inclement regulatory decisions, investigations, audits: There are a world of possibilities for a president who observes no limits. It’s all illegal, even criminal, but Mr. Trump has received his benediction in advance by the Trump-appointed and Trump-friendly members of the Supreme Court.

And if the justices should not prove so obliging? Mr. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has already provided the answer: defy the court. How many divisions, after all, does the Supreme Court have?

Meanwhile the great work of arresting, detaining and deporting “millions and millions” – the Trump camp seems uncertain of the number, but call it at least 12 million – of undocumented immigrants would have begun. Quite apart from the profound despotism of uprooting millions of people from their jobs, schools and communities and imprisoning them in enormous camps while they wait to be deported, there are the disturbing practical considerations: the impact on the economy of such a sudden and massive drain of labour and purchasing power; the sheer cost of the operation, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually; and of course, the little matter of enforcement.

How exactly would officials divide the illegal immigrants from the legal? Suppose they were members of the same families? Would they all be deported together? How would officials even find them, after they had gone underground? What if they resisted? What if their neighbours resisted with them?

Well, we know what Mr. Trump would do. He’s been quite explicit about this, too, as have his officials. He’d invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, last used to intern Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, to round up undocumented immigrants. And he’d use the Insurrection Act – call in the military, in other words – to put down any protests, as he would other protests he disliked.

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And we have not even started on the rest of the Trump agenda. Abroad, he would abandon Ukraine, or parts of it, to Russia, a clear enough signal to Vladimir Putin and other expansionist dictators even without its follow-on: gutting NATO. Whether this would take the shape of the United States actually withdrawing from the organization, or merely refusing to uphold its commitments, it would be extraordinarily destabilizing.

At home, the economy would have to contend with a series of shocks: not only from the mass deportations, but from the 20-per-cent tariffs he would impose on all imports, the politicization of the Federal Reserve he would initiate (Mr. Trump has claimed the right to having “a say” in interest-rate decisions), the massive deficits he would run, at least without the US$2-trillion cuts in spending he claims he could make, at Elon Musk’s behest.

He can’t, of course: Congress controls the purse strings. But Mr. Trump’s advisers have a plan for that, too – a plan where Mr. Trump simply goes ahead and does it, and dares Congress, or the courts, to object. Will they? Many will fear to, given Mr. Trump’s taste for repression. But supposing they do. Who will resolve any resulting conflict? On what basis?

It’s no use objecting that any of this is illegal, or impossible, or insane. Those are the sorts of objections that reasonable people would find reasonable. But Mr. Trump is not reasonable. He is a nihilist.

At some point it becomes clear that the endless, unbroken string of situations in which Mr. Trump says and does the exact opposite of what logic, morals, the law or even rational self-interest would suggest is no accident. It is not because he merely neglects to do the right thing, or finds it inconvenient. He does the wrong thing, affirmatively, with the same principled consistency that a good man does the right thing. His malignant narcissism permits him no other course. To build himself up, he must tear down everything and everyone else.

So: Think of the worst, most unreasonable thing to do in any given situation. That is what he will do. And if he were not so inclined, he has surrounded himself with people who will urge him on to it: The Mattises and the Kellys and the Tillersons who attempted to restrain him in his first term are all gone, replaced by the Bannons and the Millers and the Flynns and the Loomers.

By some strange accident of history this is whom America is poised to elect. Or if it does not elect him, must try to keep from taking power regardless. Either way, brace for chaos.

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