A couple of days ago, The American Mind published a scary tale in which I pondered the question: what would America be like in the (admittedly unlikely) event that Kamala Harris should win the 2024 presidential election?

The brief answer: it wouldn’t be pretty.

Although Harris has recently been pretending that she is in favor of border security (just as Donald Trump is), fracking (just as Donald Trump is), and law and order (ditto), she would quickly revert to form. The border would remain open and America’s oil, gas, and coal would remain in the ground. Who knows what would happen to Trump’s idea, also adopted by Harris, of exempting tips from federal income tax? We do know, however, that Harris would continue the Biden-Harris assault on free speech, weaponizing the DOJ against critics of her administration.

Assuming the Dems got control of the Senate, Harris would pack the Supreme Court, reinstituting the left-wing bias that had prevailed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Donald Trump and his close supporters would finally be neutralized, bankrupted, and jailed for life. The federal debt would continue to skyrocket, as would taxes and anything like economic innovation would be stamped out by regulatory zeal masquerading as environmental sensitivity. The left-wing sacrament of unrestricted abortion would be nationalized, nominally by the readoption of Roe v. Wade but in fact by the sanctification of infanticide. The discriminatory culture of ESG and DEI would be further institutionalized, thus undermining any support for meritocracy or such traditional values as colorblind justice.

In short, though there would still be a place called the United States of America, the polity and the political values that existed under that name for nearly 250 years would have vanished, absorbed by the statist, freedom-tarnishing energies of an unaccountable administrative state. The masks would be dropped, the euphemisms retired. The basic hatred of what the United States has been would come to the fore. Harris gave us a little taste of what to expect in her remarks on Columbus Day (a holiday she wants to rebaptize as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”): “European explorers,” she said, “ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.” Were she elected, the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” into a one-party socialist redoubt would be complete.

As I say, I regaled readers with that horror story in my essay for The American Mind. Here I would like to offer a few thoughts on the alternative story: What if Donald Trump wins the election? What then?

It is important to understand that Trump’s election, supposing it happens, would be a process, not a single event. As I write, scarcely two weeks out from election day, pollsters are screaming that the race is “a dead heat,” “too close to call.” They warn that we may well see a reprise of Bush v. Gore in 2000, when the world was introduced to the phenomenon of the “hanging chad” and the election came down to a handful of votes in Broward County, Florida, and, then, the Supreme Court. If that is the case, the already-long election season, which starts well before November with early voting, absentee voting, and other expedients, is likely to dribble towards Thanksgiving or even later.

As I have said on many occasions, I do not believe that will happen. Yes, I expect that the Democrats will cheat. There will, I predict, be a certain quote of posthumous voting, double, triple, or quadruple voting, and boxes of dubious votes from nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, and other institutions of the higher subterfuge. There may also be various “anomalies” introduced by the Dominion Vote Rigging Machines.

Still, there is no COVID this time, and Republicans, though they are being outspent by a factor of at least 2 to 1, have a much stronger ground game than in the past. They also have at the top of the ticket the most charismatic politician since Ronald Reagan. Moreover, they have as their VP candidate the brilliant, articulate, and laser-focused J.D. Vance. They also have Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tulsi Gabbard.

Then there is the GOP’s secret weapon, the elephant in the room, the Empress With No Clothes. I mean, of course, Queen Kamala and her errant page Tampon-Tim Walz. The ambient static from the media is designed to distract us from the simple truth that they are fantastically bad candidates, deeply, irredeemably out of touch with most voters. Last week, I wrote about the campaign’s horrible, no good, really bad week. Nothing in the following week, including Bret Baier’s quiet but annihilating interview and her non-appearance at the Al Smith dinner, did anything to undo the damage.

All of which means that the election will not be close. Trump will win in something close to a landslide. We will know the results late November 5 or sometime November 6. But that doesn’t mean that he will simply coast into the Oval Office on January 20, 2025. Get ready for some serious insanity. The loser females in the pink hats at the mall at Trump’s 2017 inauguration will seem like a garden club outing compared to what will happen this time. Expect the NeverTrumpers to reprise gambits like appealing to electors to betray their oaths and refuse to vote for Trump. Rep. Jeremy Raskin (D-MD) has already suggested that should Trump win, Congress should deploy Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to declare him ineligible to be seated.

No, absent a successful assassination attempt, Trump will win comfortably. Here are just a few of the major achievements you can expect within the first 18 months:

1. The United States will once again have a southern border. The tsunami of illegals invading our country will collapse. Anyone with a criminal record discovered to have come here illegally will be deported.
2. The Ukraine war will be brought to an end. Trump will broker a deal that leaves Russia with Crimea, a corridor into Crimea, and the Russian-speaking bits of the Donbas. The slaughter will stop.
3. Fracking and other methods of extracting fossil fuels will resume in earnest. In short order, America will resume its place as an energy-independent nation. The price of gas will fall. Nuclear power will be aggressively pursued.
4. Huge brakes will be applied to the regulatory Leviathan strangling American business and hobbling entrepreneurs.
5. Trump will extend his original tax cuts, introduce new tax cuts for the middle and working class, and probably lower the corporate tax rates to 15 percent from 21 percent. Investment in the U.S. will soar.
6. Trump will expel the poison of wokeness from the military and the government. ESG, CRT, and DEI initiatives will be canceled in all government agencies. The cancer of Title IX insanity will be excised from academia. Legal efforts to abolish public sector unions, beginning with the teacher’s union, will be undertaken almost immediately.
7. Elon Musk will help eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the government. He was able to fire approximately 80 percent of Twitter employees directly when he acquired the company and the platform has become much more robust, secure, and user-friendly in the process.