No Matter Who Wins, America Still Faces a Worst-Case Scenario This November
No Matter Who Wins, America Still Faces a Worst-Case Scenario This November
America desperately needs post-election scenario planning—the strategic approach to anticipating future challenges the U.S. military, intel community and administrative apparatus are already engaging.
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Introduction
In mid-October 2020, Proof: the Podcast published two lengthy episodes on the likely scheme Donald Trump would implement post-election to try to steal the presidency.
Almost everything unfolded just as predicted—from weeks of evidence-free litigation to the creation of fake slates of electors, from a push to invalidate sufficient Electoral College votes to throw the 2020 election to the Republican Party-led U.S. House of Representatives to lobbying MAGA-friendly state legislators and elections officials to ignore statewide election results.
Post-election, the Twitter feed associated with the Proof Project forecast that what Donald Trump and his allies were planning could lead to a disaster in January 2021, especially as the Trump-encouraged Stop the Steal “movement” lacked a coherent plan for January 6 besides trespassing illegally on Capitol grounds (as all involved—including Trump—were well aware, the Capitol grounds were closed to the public on the week of January 4, and therefore the Stop the Steal rally planned for the Capitol “steps” on January 6 was ex ante illicit; it’s for this reason Trump was told by the U.S. Secret Service days before the rally that he under no circumstances could travel to the Capitol that day).
In fairness, Proof was by no means the only one to see the coming disaster. After all, it was as early as Summer 2020 that Trump was urging his voters, from a presser at an airfield in North Carolina, to commit the serious federal felony of double-voting—an explicit attempt, as “Proof: the Podcast” made clear the following month, to produce the very widespread “voter fraud” Trump had pre-planned opining about post-election.
Yet as it turned out, for all the voices warning of disaster in early January 2021, almost no one who could actually do anything useful was listening.
Sure, many people listened to “Proof: The Podcast”—in fact, it reached the Top 10 in the Government category in 31 countries, per Apple Podcasts (see here for the full list)—but just as the third national-bestselling Trump biography in the Proof Series had been widely read by Americans (and Brits) when it was released the month prior, but had nevertheless had been ignored by major media and law enforcement, the public statements by Trump critics in the weeks prior to the 2020 U.S. presidential election to the effect that the post-election period could quickly become unprecedentedly dangerous either went unheard by state and federal law enforcement or, if heard at all, went unheeded. While we now know that the FBI and some other key federal agencies were monitoring far-right websites after President Joe Biden decimated Trump in the 2020 vote, we also know that they largely ignored what those who’ve long reported on Trump were jumping up and down about for weeks prior to the election and after it: that Trump himself would surely play the dispositive role in turning online chatter into bloody, infamous, indisputably criminal live-action.
And sadly, it became clear, post-January 6, that no lessons had been learned by anyone.
The FBI and DOJ scooped up low-hanging MAGA fruit—those peons stupid enough to believe Donald Trump would actually be “with them” (as he bombastically claimed he would be) at the Capitol on January 6—something that of course never happened and that, all his subsequent claims notwithstanding, Trump well knew would never happen (again, as fully sourced at the links above and in the 2022 book Proof of Coup, the U.S. Secret Service had told Trump days before January 6 that the Capitol would be unsafe that day; it issued this report to the White House because it knew that all of the rallies planned for the immediate Capitol grounds that day would be per se illegal).
What the FBI and DOJ didn’t do was hold to account anyone in the Trump campaign or Trump administration, though every independent journalist who became a January 6 specialist—a member of the January 6 “beat”—after that horrible day saw instantly that none of what had occurred at the Capitol would have occurred had the men and women the FBI and DOJ were leaving wholly unmolested not engaged in clandestine orchestrations that eyed violence and mayhem from Day 1. (See the entire “January 6” section of this publication for the equivalent of several books on this very subject.)
It was, after all, Donald Trump himself who had recruited Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, and Roger Stone to lead the march on the Capitol on January 6, at a time Trump well knew Stone had orchestrated violence in Florida during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, that Alexander had been using violent rhetoric to presage his January 2021 intentions at rallies in Georgia and elsewhere in late 2020, and that Jones had been framing for his massive audience the post-election period as the run-up to a war between Good and Evil (his Insurrection Eve speech at Freedom Plaza must be heard to be believed).
Trump knew exactly what he was getting when he recruited these ringleaders, just as Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle knew what they were doing when they spoke by phone to Alexander from Trump’s Washington townhouse on Insurrection Eve, and just as the fact that everyone in the Trump campaign knew the Capitol was closed on January 6 means Trump telling 100,000 people to march there anyway was indubitably Incitement of a Riot.
But consistent with the long history of the FBI and DOJ when their prospective federal investigative targets are white, straight, rich, powerful, and Republican—as opposed to nonwhite, LGBTQIA2S+, poor, politically isolated, and/or Democratic—both entities exhibited immediate recalcitrance on the topic of even investigating (let alone questioning or indicting) anyone who could be deemed a politically sensitive January 6 suspect.
The result: random (it must be said) schlubs and schmucks from around the country who had decided to play at war in December 2020 and January 2021 were rounded up as though they had a prayer of accomplishing anything without some very powerful allies in Washington. What these “useful idiots” didn’t know then—what they still don’t seem to realize now—is that historically Republican leadership has always had contempt for the working class and working poor, and has always used the working class and working poor as pawns in their eldritch political games. Neither Trump nor anyone around him is likely to have lost even a minute of sleep over leading hundreds of followers to acts that weren’t just criminal but foreseeably led them right to prison.
Now it is 2024, and all the same patterns are repeating.
As Donald Trump openly promises a “dictator[ship]”, openly promises a post-election “bloodbath”, implicitly admits he won’t accept the election results if he loses, and lionizes the armed insurrectionists of January 6 at a literal awards gala for them held in his home, FBI agents are dutifully scouring online fora to see what the considerably less-educated MAGA faithful there are saying and doing—as though they’ll be saying or doing anything without the explicit and implicit material guidance of Trump, his family, members of his inner circle, and the slightly larger ring of Trump aides, allies, associates, attorneys, advisers, agents, advocates and acolytes that still surround him.
Were the FBI or DOJ (or, for that matter, the CIA or NSA) capable of learning from their mistakes under circumstances in which doing so might admittedly be politically disadvantageous for them—remember, Trump has promised to destroy federal law enforcement and the U.S. intelligence community if reelected precisely so that these defenders of American democracy will be afraid to investigate him properly at a key moment in his war on democracy—it would be listening to the plain language Trump and his milieu are putting out right now and would have an agent assigned to surveil these in-the-open, would-be insurrectionist plotters from now until January 20, 2025.
Instead, it seems as though only regular, helpless Americans must listen to all these scofflaws promising future civil unrest daily and take it seriously.
All of which underscores the need for immediate and public “scenario planning.”
To be clear, Proof is aware that scenario planning, disaster preparedness, emergency management, futurism, and “horizons” discourse is the province of professionals in those areas. My wife happens to be an expert in these arenas, but I am not, so what Proof aims to do here is not to offer a jargon-filled-but-definably-expert approach to the next few months of American history, but rather to approach America’s current situation as seen through the lens of, well… history. As the author of one of the Top 25 History substacks in America; as a Ph.D. whose since-published dissertation was itself a “disciplinary history”; as author of three bestselling nonfiction political histories of Donald Trump’s presidency; and as someone whose obsession with U.S. history is so intense that in his free time (just for fun) he’s working on comprehensive histories of the Atari 2600 game library and the Nintendo Entertainment System game library from the 1980s to the present, I know that the informed forecasting I did on “Proof: The Podcast” came not from reading tea leaves but having an extremely well-educated understanding of the history of the only MAGA ringleader who finally matters: Trump.
If Trump had told his MAGAs to stand down in November 2020, they would have.
If Trump had told his MAGAs to stand down in December 2020, they would have.
When Trump finally told his MAGAs to stand down on January 6, they did—instantly.
Though I was a federal criminal investigator and then state-level criminal defense attorney for almost a decade in total, it doesn’t take investigative or litigation chops to know that when a single man is responsible for thousands of crimes either happening or not happening on his say-so, that is who you focus the vast bulk of your investigative resources upon. Put more simply, America will plunge into some sort of civil war this year or next if Donald Trump wills it, and it won’t do so if he doesn’t. Clear enough?
This being the case, the idea that America isn’t engaged in a complex course of public scenario planning that simply relies on the history of Donald Trump and a thorough review of the facts already on the ground is shocking. We’re sleepwalking to a disaster.
So what you’ll encounter in the massive report that follows isn’t the highly technical in-field consultant-speak that dominates what the business and tech worlds think of when they think of scenario planning, but something that—in this particular context—is more valuable: a history-based forecasting of the near future from a leading Trump biographer who engaged in this same academic practice in October 2020 and got it all horrifyingly right. In the sections that follow you’ll no doubt find, consistent with this media project’s publication history, countless descriptions of the situation we’re likely to find ourselves in this fall and early next year that will go from forecast to reality fast.