With most polls indicating a very close presidential race -pretty much within their margins of error- I doubt anyone can confidently make a prediction about the outcome of the presidential election (please see How Reliable Are Election Polls for a more sinister view on the predictions made solely based on such polls in general). However, most everybody will probably agree that the following sequence of events are very likely, or even almost certain:

• Soon after polls close, and before a reliable set of vote counts are in, Trump will claim victory, no matter what the numbers show. This is the recipe that his think-tank advisors like Steve Bannan and Steven Miller gave Trump. They did the same in 2020. So, he will follow the same playbook of 2020, expecting a different result this time. Talk about the definition of insanity.
• His echo chambers at Fox, Newsmax, OAN, and far-right podcasts including Steve Bannon’s War Room will repeat those claims as a fact, spreading the falsehood that the results are already in, and Trump is the victor.
• The MAGA audience of these outlets will believe what they hear, and will start celebrating.
• The outcome-determining results will finally come in, either later that night, or maybe a day or two later. There can be two different scenarios:
  • Trump wins: everybody will accept the results. The claims of widespread voter fraud that had already started by Trump and his cronies even before the election, will disappear. There will be a peaceful transfer of power. And we will all suffer through another four years of promoted and encouraged bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, and isolationism. However, thanks to the brilliance of the system laid down by the Founding Fathers, I still believe that the government structures are resilient; no matter how much king-like power and “immunity” the MAGA conservative super-majority of the Supreme Court has granted Trump, and no matter how many Trump loyalists they will try to plant in various governmental agencies, following the recipe of Project 2025 to prevent career officials from blocking unlawful requests from the head of the executive branch, as they did during his first term. So, yes, I think
    • there will be substantial damage to the economy and livelihoods of the middle class and lower, due to the increased pressure of the tariffs on the inflation (Trump seems to have a backwards understanding of the impact of tariffs, and believes it will be the foreign exporters who will be paying for the tariffs; whereas tariffs are meant to discourage imports and support domestic producers by enabling them to compete with the prices of the imported products, but that requires enough domestic producers that can produce enough products to replace all the imports from other countries. Good luck with that, considering the amount of imports from China). The tariffs will end up being passed on to the consumers by the American importers, who are the ones who will actually pay for the tariffs. The only beneficiaries of such tariffs will be the American importers, who will likely add a markup when passing on the tariffs to the consumers, and the billionaires who will benefit from the tax cuts seemingly justified by those tariffs.
    • massive tax cuts to the billionaires will be enacted (Musk has already gone all-in in support of Trump, possibly in anticipation of the benefits from such tax cuts and other government benefits and/or contracts for his companies, but more likely with some even more sinister motives as I laid out in Questions for Elon Musk). These tax cuts will increase the pressure on funding of social services such as Medicare and Social Security, as well as other services provided to veterans. They will no double add to the deficit as well (as they did during his first term, with an increase of nearly eight trillion dollars to the deficit, or four trillion dollars if we exclude the expenditure during Covid). So much for the party of fiscal responsibility and reducing deficit.
    • foreign relationships will be severely damaged, especially with the European allies and NATO. The only foreign countries that will be in good terms with the second Trump administration will be Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf nations who supported and funded Jared Kushner’s investment company to the tune of nearly 3 billion dollars, and Egypt, whose government’s 10-million-dollar bribe in 2016 to Trump campaign was investigated by Trump’s own DoJ and FBI, but was finally shut down by his crony DoJ Bill Barr when the investigators got too close and tried to obtain the records of financial transactions of Trump and his campaign (see the last paragraph of Statutes of Limitation for an explanation and references). Trump might even approach or be approached by the Iranian government and make deals with them, as they fit the general profile of dictators that Trump adore and admire. I won’t be surprised if Trump visits Tehran, shakes hands with the Ayatollah, and returns, claiming the Ayatollah being a very smart man who knows how to hold strong grip on his country and control its people (the same way he claims Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jung Un to be smart men with iron fists).
    • women’s and minority’s rights will become more and more limited, thanks to the conservative judges appointed by Trump all across the country, the MAGA congress people, and the MAGA super-majority of the Supreme Court.
  • In the second scenario, Harris wins. The news agencies and corporate media, and even Fox News will announce the results. But it’s already too late. All the MAGA supporters of Trump have already been infected with the conspiracies that Trump and his campaign has propagated during the past several months, and are already under the impression that since Trump has claimed victory, he is the true winner, and whatever results that come after that is due to election fraud. They will be angry, and will ask for their missing votes. Some will even appear in courts as witnesses for the numerous lawsuits that Trump will file (and have already been filing and losing even before the election), claiming that they voted for Trump but their votes were not counted, because if they were, Trump would have been the winner (like those witnesses that Rudy Juliani brought along with him to the congressional hearings he requested in various states in 2020 and 2021). Some MAGA supporters of Trump will try to take the matters in their own hands, and based on a twisted understanding of the Second Amendment propagated by the far right that it is to enable Americans to declare war against a tyrannic government, they will resort to using their firearms for intimidation and sowing chaos throughout the nation. They won’t think about who has the authority to claim the government to be tyrannic, and whether losing an election is reason enough for such a claim. They will also ignore the fact that the only occurrence of the word “regulated” in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights is in the Second Amendment, where it talks about “a well regulated militia.” They don’t believe in regulations, especially when it comes to the gun rights! The only thing that they will think about is to intimidate innocent unarmed people, to destroy government property, and to try to force their preferred candidate on the rest the country. After all, the new right-hand man of their deity, Elon Musk, has amplified their twisted understandings of the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, when he claimed that the First Amendment is the foundation of the democracy (he says that’s why it is the first amendment; one wonders that, by the same token, why it is not the very first sentence in the Constitution then?), and that the Second Amendment is to protect the First Amendment. For the cult, who believes the First Amendment is a permit to spread lies and misinformation, the Second Amendment gives the right to protect those lies and misinformation by resorting to firearms and assault weapons. Their idea of protecting the First Amendment is to defend the free speech only for them, not everyone. (As John Stewart put it brilliantly, guns protect the free speech of the one who is holding the gun!)
  • During the certification of the electoral college, the MAGA congress people will object to the certification, citing the anger and frustration and distrust of their constituents; the same anger and distrust that was implanted and amplified by their own lies and misinformation that were later spread through their mouthpieces in Fox, Newsmax, OAN, and far right podcasts, etc. They will try to use this twisted argument which is merely their own personal or political preference amplified through the feedback loop of dishonest and unprofessional media outlets such as Fox News and ultimately believed and expressed by the well-meaning but misguided and angry Americans, to justify decertification of the votes in the swing states, and invocation of the 12th Amendment.
  • The plan for sowing chaos in the congress will fail due to being obviously and blatantly unlawful. The unrest throughout the country will certainly last for a few days, even maybe a few weeks. But the country will not bow down to the bullies in Trump and his MAGA supporters. Peace will eventually return and we will likely have a normal presidency and may be, if the left is able to flip the house and keep or strengthen its majority in the senate, some good measures will pass through the congress and signed into the law by the new president. Even if we are lucky enough, the Trump phenomenon will gradually fade away, and some sanity will return to the Republican party. But the anger among MAGA will not go away. Although that anger was fed by the lies and misinformation spread by the far right media and propagated all over the internet, there is an undeniable root cause. There are disenfranchised people in the country who feel left behind, and out of desperation (and with the encouragement of people like Trump, his cronies, and the far right wing of the Republican party) blame others including immigrant for their suffering. A true patriotic government should prioritize the needs of this group of hardworking Americans who have suddenly found themselves caught off-guard by the rapid advancements in the technology and loss of jobs in the more traditional professions. Harris administration should take this priority more seriously than the previous administrations, Democratic or Republican. Only then, we might be able to find true piece and sanity in the country. One hopes.