Given that there is some possibility that Trump will be re-elected, my guess is that many of the current Trump supporters will come to regret their decision to vote for this man. Some his supporters embrace the idea of a government that is non- democratic, but more of an authoritarian theocracy with a focus on nationalism and less on international leadership and diplomacy. I’m sure that all sounds good to some.
However, its easy to talk in generalities but, if and when a Trump authoritarian theocracy emerges, I suspect problems will emerge from the outset when the various different camps of Trump supporters try to iron out the details. There are, of course, the Christian nationalists but even that group is an amalgam of different evangelical beliefs. Who will get to define what a ‘biblical world view’ means for everyone else? And what happens in Utah, a nice red checkmark soundly in Trump’s camp, when the evangelicals decide that the LDS church is a non-legitimate group of heretics? Where does the Catholic church fit into this ‘biblical world view’?
In virtually every country in the world where religion is a major factor in government, it leads to strife and often to violence. In the Middle East, you have different belief systems under the umbrella of Islam. There are the Shia, the Sunni, and the even more conservative branch of Sunni Islam, Wahabism, which is practiced widely in Saudi Arabia. These are just the major branches of Islam, and they have all been fighting, often violently, for decades.
In heavily Hindu India, Muslims are a minority, and there have been huge problems of religious-based violence against this minority population which have been stoked in recent times by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi’s push for Hindu nationalism. There’s that word ‘nationalism’ again!
There are also the Trump supporters who support his push to leave NATO, stop providing billions of dollars of aid to other countries and even bring most American soldiers home in keeping with their ‘America First’ philosophy. And who do people think will fill that power vacuum? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand China and Russia will rush right in. Such a move will make them much stronger, make America much weaker and have devastating adverse impacts on the American economy.
I predict that if Trump is re-elected there are going to be millions of current Trump supporters who will ultimately be left saying, “I didn’t think that would happen?” as the Law of Unintended Consequences takes hold with devastating effect.
