Thanks to tens of millions of Americans who just voted to turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare, we now have to deal with the consequences of a second Trump presidency.
Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is not only a fascist who is a threat to democracy in America, as two former generals — one his chief of staff, the other a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and others have said, he is also a thoroughly disgusting human being: racist, sexist, a convicted felon about to be sentenced, an adjudicated rapist, a convicted libeller, a compulsive liar, a fraudster, a bully — the list goes on and on.
As president, he will “endanger public health and safety and reject evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies” and will “ignore the climate crisis in favor of more pollution,” according to the editors of Scientific American, who for only the second time in their 179-year history endorsed a candidate for president – and it wasn’t Donald Trump.
Trump and his sinister oligarch backers have a plan — Project 2025 — to dismantle key elements of the state, which will be against the best interests of many of those who voted for him.
Of particular concern to me, as a public-health physician, is the Scientific American editors’ observation that Trump plans billion-dollar budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and has “talked about ending the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.”
To knowingly elect such a person as president beggars belief. That America has succeeded in raising a credulous population who cannot tell lies from truth, fiction from fact, distorted conspiracy theories from reality — or worse, who can differentiate but lack the moral compass to care about that, or about the massive moral failings of Trump — is surely the sign of a deeply flawed and failed state.
However, beyond those largely domestic concerns that Americans must now deal with, Trump is also a massive threat to the rest of the world, a clear and present danger we all must deal with, as a report from the Cascade Institute published a month before the presidential election made clear.
The institute, led by Thomas Homer-Dixon at Royal Roads University, “addresses the full range of humanity’s converging environmental, economic, political, technological, and health crises.”
Using complex systems science approaches, they seek to anticipate future crises and identify opportunities for intervention.
In their report Impact 2024, the authors consider the likely impact of a Trump presidency on “today’s highly perturbed global systems.” As a highly unpredictable systems disruptor, Trump as president would “make extreme outcomes more probable,” they concluded.
Specifically, they see a high likelihood of a trade war, a medium to high likelihood of triggering an arms race; a medium likelihood of “authoritarian contagion” — “enabling further corruption and authoritarianism within the United States,” an economic downturn and xenophobia, and a low to medium likelihood of a weakening of multi-lateralism if Trump were to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, and other UN agencies.
Moreover, they report, these and other changes triggered by Trump “could then interact to severely escalate the current global polycrisis,” including the possibility of a global economic downturn, a Great Power war, worsening global overheating, a global food crisis, global pandemics, failed states, mass violence and humanitarian disasters.
In an addendum a week before the election, the institute wrote, troublingly, that further developments since their original analysis indicated that “our initial analysis generally underestimated the inter-systemic risks of a second Trump presidency.”
The risks we face are already significant, the authors note: “In coming years, humanity’s collective predicament is likely to worsen regardless of the U.S. election’s outcome, because global stresses are rising relentlessly.” Trump’s election just makes things worse, makes things less stable, in a situation where “global systems … are already fragile and vulnerable.”
This is not to say all this will come about: “The worst,” the report states, “is far from inevitable.”
Much depends on whether, in the face of the polycrisis and the challenges posed by a Trump presidency, “we choose to come together or fall apart.”
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
