But that it getting a little ahead of ourselves. It offered six alternate scenarios of the first 100 days.
Certain communalities present themselves in these alternate scenarios. In nearly all, Trump:
- Pardons himself and the other January 6 defendants (true)
- Either closes the border (true) or reallocates funds to build the border wall (false, he seems to have lost interest in this), which is challenged in court but not halted (false)
- Withdraws from the Paris Climate Accords, halts all government research on climate, and/or deletes it from government websites (true)
- Appoints loyalists to key positions (true), possibly bypassing the Senate (false)
- Classifies 50,000 to 100,000 federal workers as Schedule F so he can replace them, temporarily blocked by courts (not quite but happened, but really!)
Clearly, these were the things the authors were most confident Trump would do and, for the most part, they were correct. They did underestimate Trump's effectiveness in closing the border and failed to foresee DOGE, but no one foresaw DOGE.
There were also differences.
Scenario 1: Trump installs loyalists and opens IRS investigations into protest groups
This one is only presented if there are widespread protests against Trump that degenerate into violence. It has Trump institute a 16-week abortion ban and has the IRS freeze the assets of the groups that organized the protests. The IRS freezes assets of organizations involved in protests, opens investigations of Planned Parenthood, MoveOn, and a dozen others.
Certainly this was something I was very much afraid of. But in fact widespread pre-inauguration protests and violence did not materialize, and neither did IRS attacks on organizations opposed to Trump -- at least not yet. One reason may be that there are currently institutional safeguards that make such a thing extremely difficult. The bad news is that Trump's "big beautiful bill" contains a provision that would largely eliminate those barriers. Stay tuned.
Scenario 2, Trump issues 150 radical executive orders
Aside from the usual measures (see above), Trump issues a "Back the Blue" order giving legal protection to police and encourages them to join forces with ICE. He orders ICE to prepare for mass deportations, which ICE begins, joined by right wing militias. Trump also orders the investigation of Liz Cheney, the rest of the January 6 Select Committee, and 27 others involved in the 2020 election.
The mass deportation part is true, clearly, although it took longer than this scenario supposed, presumably as a result of the logistical difficulty in ramping up deportations so quickly. Neither local police nor rightwing militias appear to have joined the effort. And there have been no investigations of Liz Cheney and the rest. So basically thus far the Trump Administration has been focusing on deporting immigrants -- including ones with a plausible claim to legal status -- but not on his political opponents.
Scenario 3: Trump talks big, but his chaotic office only completes 10 major executive orders:
The executive orders are basically the ones outlined above. Further actions are stymied by infighting within the Administration. Unable to gain traction on real-world actions, Trump turns to online incitement. In this scenario, the Georgia case against him for election subversion continues and the Proud Boys firebomb Fani Willis's house and shoot at her father.
The authors did not anticipate that Fani Willis would be disqualified for having an affair with the special prosecutor she hired. What would have happened if the parties had curbed their impulses is anyone's guess.
Scenario 4: Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and orders the military into major Democratic cities
In this scenario, besides the usual actions above, Trump pledges to end the "lawlessness of major Democratic cities," invokes the Insurrection Act, and sends in the National Guard. Military leaders are alarmed and take this to military courts, which limit the activity. National Guard limits itself to walking around, but everyone is on edge, fearing a violent explosion.
Well, first of all, the authors get this wrong. Trump would have said, "lawlessness of major Democrat cities," a small difference, but one with big resonance. Obviously, this hasn't happened. Trump has focused on deportations instead. And I must say that I, at least, was not all that worried about this one. I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his threat to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the National Guard were limited to violent riots. And, in fact, it was proposed as an alternative mostly (not exclusively) if there were widespread protests that broke out into violence.
Scenario 5: Trump talks big but governs like a normal President
This one is very similar to Scenario 3, above, including the hypothetical firebombing and shooting at Fani Willis's house. The main difference is that the governors of Texas and Arizona send the National Guard to the border, backed by rightwing militias.
This one did not happen, either. Trump has proved much more aggressive and successful on the border than anyone anticipated.
Scenario 6: Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and orders the military to the US Mexico border
This is probably the closest to what actually happened. Trump issues the usual orders, invokes the Insurrection Act, sends the military to the border, and proclaims "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history." For the first 100 days, the National Guard limits itself to patrolling the border and does not engage in military operations. Border crossings are reduced. The authors do not say anything about domestic deportations.
After the first 100 days, before the midterms
Regardless of what Trump does, the basic options on how to respond are about the same. I will address that later. Also notable are that the options on how to respond all assume certain things are happening above and beyond what is proposed in the six scenarios. Maybe the authors think of these as things that happen after the first 100 days, or maybe they expect these things to happen within the first 100 days but saw them as background noise. Most of these presumed events assume that the midterm elections have not yet happened, although the midterms play a fairly minimal role in the book.
Obviously awe are just a little out of the first 100 days and well short of the midterms. A lot can happen in the next year and a half. Still, it is worth considering what the authors expect to happen over the first year or so of the Trump term and what has happened so far:
- Large scale immigration raids and mass deportations, with little or no process
- Loss of funding for health departments
- Increase is hate crime or workplace violence, which the FBI declines to investigate
- Somewhat vague conflict with the military, which slow-walks some of Trump's orders
- Department of Education takes funding from public schools and sends it to private schools
- Trump appoints young, rightwing judges who gerrymander districts to ensure Republicans will win
- Large scale firing of executive branch officials, to the point of making most regulation impossible
- Right wing violence against protesters
- Calls for political arrests
At this early stage, much of this has come about, but not all. Obviously, the mass deportations, loss of funding, and widespread firing of executive branch officials have come about. The cancellation of funding and firings have been much worse than anyone could have foreseen, and are being at least somewhat reversed. Trump will undoubtedly appoint rightwing judges, many of whom do not have the same devotion to the rule of law as his first-term appointees, but that will take time. Calls to prosecute opponents have happened but so far it has mostly been empty talk, with the notable exception of public officials who stand in the way of the Administration's worst deportation policies.
What the authors most seem to overestimate is the power of rightwing militias and terrorists.** I do not mean to deny the existence of such things. There is some evidences, for instance, that some Senate votes to confirm have been the result of threats of physical violence and not merely threats of a primary challenge. And there have been vague but alarming threats against federal judges. But judges continue ruling against the Trump Administration, and plenty of Republicans in Congress, like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, freely speak out against Trump's economic policies. And there has been no widespread outbreak of rightwing violence.
I was afraid of this sort of thing, too. Looking back on it, that may have been a misunderstanding of how these things work. In general, rightwing militias tend to tick upward when a Democrat is in the White House because they feel threatened and downward under a Republican because they consider mission accomplished. The upsurge in 2020 was a exception, largely in response to COVID lockdowns and riots, that militia members saw as threatening.
I assured many friends ahead of the election that while I greatly feared Trump winning, I did not think he was Hitler -- more like Orban. One challenged me. Did I mean that Trump was not as evil as Hitler, or not as competent. I thought it over and and said that the US was not facing the sort of social breakdown that Germany was.
While I stand by this opinion, there is more to add to it. When Hitler was named Chancellor, he had a private army of 2 million Brown Shirts out of a population of about 66 million. Do the math. That means about one in 33 Germans was a Brown Shirt, or about 3% of the population. Rounding the US population today to 330 million, that would be equivalent to about 10 million Proud Boys. (Or 10 million combined Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters). If Donald Trump had a private army of that size, the calculus of power would undoubtedly be very different from what it is today.
Maybe the Three Percenters are onto something.
NEXT UP: What Choose Democracy recommends we do.
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*I personally considered the former much more likely than that latter, but that is just applying Rule Number One of Smart Authoritarians. It should be obvious by now that Trump is not very smart.
**Also significant -- the authors do not say anything about economic damage from tariffs or budget-busting tax cuts, even though these were major campaign promises that Trump made. Presumably the authors deemphasize these issue because they do not see them as serious threats to democracy. But Trump's incredibly arbitrary tariff policies are a vivid illustration of the danger of Congress ceding the power of the purse strings. And economic issues of this kind are what is most likely to sink the Trump Administration.
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