The Trump mess will probably be worse than you think. We have to prepare

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Months before his return to office, President-elect Donald Trump is already sowing chaos with a series of bizarre appointments to key government positions. In addition to his stated political agenda, these appointments are causing major concern for viewers.

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Most of the analysis of what to expect from this second Trump presidency has focused on the direct impact of his plans. That’s understandable: any of these actions could have dire consequences even in the best of times.

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But these are anything but the best of times.

Trump returns to power in a world reeling from a series of interconnected crises: fallout from a pandemic; major wars in Ukraine, Gaza and now Lebanon; the threat of a global recession; climate-related disasters; the rise of authoritarian regimes – and many more.

Each of these crises often reinforces the others. For example, wars disrupt supply chains, weaken the economy, and reduce the public’s trust in their government’s ability to improve their lives. The term for this network of interlocking, interacting crises is a polycrisis.

Polycrisis is a key focus of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, where we have identified trigger events – rapidly evolving events that can plunge entire economic or social systems into crisis by releasing pent-up stress.

This happens in the same way that the stress of years of drought can make a forest increasingly vulnerable, until a single lightning strike triggers a devastating forest fire – except our forest fire could well be a global one.

The Cascade Institute used this stress-trigger-crisis lens to examine how a second Trump presidency might impact the polycrisis. Our analysis was sobering.

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Many of Trump’s promised measures would both increase these stresses and create a flood of new triggering events at a time when the world’s systems are more vulnerable than they have been in a long time. The drought was severe; The forest is tinder dry.

Possible triggering events include authoritarian measures such as mass deportations; politicization of the military; targeting political opponents through the justice system; or economically disastrous tariffs that could easily lead to retaliation from American trading partners and lead to a global trade war.

The impact of these measures on the United States would be severe. But they also risk spiraling out of control and having global repercussions, including emboldening authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping and deepening conflict in the Middle East. The U.S. withdrawal from international cooperation and the weakening of institutions could undermine our collective ability to address global challenges like climate change, while triggering an arms race and increasing the risk of war.

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Consider a single example: the potential impact of naming anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy has proposed ending funding for infectious disease research, prosecuting publishers of medical journals for what they see as “false science” and promoting raw, unpasteurized milk, a known vector of bird flu. This one designation has the potential to both greatly increase the risk of a new pandemic and harm the U.S.’s ability to deal with it.

The impact of Trump 2.0 on Canada could be even more significant. Any weakening of the rule of law in the United States will dramatically undermine trust in the institutions that govern the relationship between our two countries, including the standards of diplomacy and trade and transparency rules on which we rely as neighbors. The impact could affect issues as diverse as shared management of waterways to disputes over softwood timber, transboundary pollution and intellectual property rights. Furthermore, given the interconnectedness of our societies, Trump’s vicious version of populist authoritarianism is likely to inspire copycat behavior from some politicians on this side of the border. And the Trump administration’s certain withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the global climate regime more generally will seriously undermine Canada’s own climate policy.

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The second Trump presidency will, in effect, be a second polycrisis on top of the current one. The risks are enormous on all fronts: disease, democratic collapse, a drastic economic downturn, accelerating climate change and even outright war.

Is the answer desperation? No. Our analysis shows that there are still paths to positive outcomes.

Trigger events can also produce positive changes. Trump’s authoritarian actions could well trigger a pro-democracy countermovement both in the United States and abroad. Furthermore, its very volatility could deter aggression from other world powers – admittedly more of a ray of hope than a glimmer of hope. And it may well be that Trump is inadvertently undoing some things that have long needed to be undone: agriculture’s reliance on the exploitation of undocumented workers, for example.

But these potential positive outcomes will not happen on their own. They require concerted collective action, persistence and, frankly, luck.

We are entering a time that is more dangerous and far less predictable than most of us imagine. How we fare depends on our untested collective ability to navigate this unknown and frightening terrain.

Philip Steenkamp is President of Royal Roads University.; Thomas Homer-Dixon is founder and executive director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University.

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