The possibility of a Donald Trump presidency, as disturbing and disorienting as that is, is seeming more and more like a real possibility every day. Trump is blatantly advocating for an authoritarian regime and voters seem to be responding positively in kind.

A great deal of radical progressives and libertarians would say that the United States already is authoritarian and has been since 9/11, if not before then. From Patriot Act to Ferguson, the federal government in the United States certainly has taken levels of force that are unprecedented in our country.

They may be right, in a sense, but this country with its complexities and differing bodies has kept from becoming the sort of real authoritarian regime that we saw in Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan in the World War II era or in what is now Russia. This tendency may be in all cultures and was simply put off in our own because of the unprecedented prosperity we enjoyed for much of the twentieth century. That prosperity is gone, however, and all bets are off in the new world that a humiliated America provides.

As mental as it really does seem, there are modern day precedents for people like Trump. They largely are divergent amongst many different regimes and leaders but they are there. We truly are in a dark place that we are applying them to a possible president of the United States but here we are.

Putin's Buddy - Vladimir Putin, love him or hate him, has demonstrated himself in recent years to be the most daring of world leaders. He has taken the lead in situations in which many other countries abstained or diverged. It is Russia that is fighting ISIS in Syria and providing the sort of soft power that the United States always prided itself over - such as holding a classical music concert in a town where ISIS murdered dozens of people.

The bromance between Donald Trump and Putin seems to be mutual and, together, Putin would provide enough sustainment to deflect the isolation Trump would naturally inspire with just about every other current world leader. This could mean alot of things that could disturb the sense of the world many of us have developed. Putin flirts with neo-nationalist groups every bit as much as Trump does and the visibility of them together could lead to the rise of similar figures in Europe, especially if the fracture with the Muslim world continues.

Trump personally seems to have a thing for that part of the world, with a daughter with a Slavic name and a wife from Slovenia. I would not be surprised to see the sort of blitz that you have seen with Trump and Fox News channel over to Russia Today, Russia's propaganda outlet which has a fairly successful American branch. Once ISIS is destroyed, some sort of arrangement between the US and Russia as main actors in what is left behind could occur as well.

Imagine a mixture of the relationship between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini on the personal level and, on the policy level, elements of the post-war maneuvering of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, with the Middle East in place of Europe. You could also possibly see a dramatic revision of the missile defense shield which has been part of American and European policy for decades. Putin is a tough and manipulative dude who has maneuvered past some of the world's most adept leaders - he would be the top dog in that relationship. Unlike many nationalist leaders in history, Putin is pragmatic and only goes so far - he could have a lasting impact on geopolitics whereas others like him flamed out. That would be the future.

The Race War - As discomforting as it is for people to accept, there is a race war in this country. Dyllan Roof and Vester Lee Flanagan were not simply mentally ill people but people who targetted others to kill based on race. The same is true with the police and vigilantes who have shot black people. Neither group will ever admit it but both African Americans and white Europeans in the United States perpetuate race hate. People in both groups have rejected the progress we have made in exchange for this.

Trump has escalated this racial conflict and rode on it all the way to success. It's not going to filter out though I have no idea what that will end up looking like. The sort of leaders that Trump seems to model himself after do not have a good record with minorities and I don't see him being an exception. He has talked about rounding up whole groups of people and the militarized police this country has certainly don't make that seem impossible. He has legitimized and helped grow the visibility of white nationalists and their toxic ideas like no one has before.

In the Middle East, we have seen what it looks like when ideas that once were in the closet grew and grew until they cast a shadow on the entire region. The ragtag mujahideen that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan eventually led to Al Qaeda and now to ISIS. White nationalism is very similar (Hitler was even friendly to jihadists in his time) to Islamic radicalism - it can go from hiding in caves (or rural Idaho or Texas, as is the case with them) to actually being an empowered and emboldened movement. It will be on the American people if that happens.

As disturbing as it may be for Americans who have the "night watchman" view of their country, genocide can happen here. It happened, over a long time, to Native Americans. I see no real reason why something like what happened in Germany in the 1930s or Turkey decades before or Yugoslavia in the 1990s cannot happen here, especially when the drums for it have been played so steadily. There has been some sort of confrontation between the government and the African American community during every presidency of my lifetime. If such a confrontation could be problematic during the presidency of an African American president, God only knows what such a confrontation would be like during the presidency of Donald Trump.

If that were to happen, an implosion would occur. If Trump really builds that wall he talks about, that wall would be symbolic of the country that made such an event occur. That sense of shame that Americans often counseled or lectured other countries over suddenly would be on itself. There already are a great number of phrases once said by Americans about themselves that I haven't heard for a while - like "the indispensable nation," "shining city on a hill" and "a free country." I think there are some other phrases you would lose after an event like that.

Economic Isolation - Whatever your sociopolitical/economic persuasion, one thing that has to be agreed on is that free market capitalism does bring in a diversity of investment. The United States has investment from all over the world and countries that don't invest historically have been ones that were blocked out. That would change for the first time thanks to a President Trump. Countries would start blocking us.

Even if Trump shreds a great deal of his super protectionist economic policies, one thing I would certainly not be surprised to see as a result of his presidency would be economic isolation. TransCanada, which oversees the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, promptly rejected Trump's socialist claim that the US would have to share some of the profits of that project with American taxpayers, proclaiming, "The role of the U.S. government in such transactions is that of a regulator — ensuring various laws and regulations are followed — and granting appropriate permits. We would expect to continue to follow this model that has been in place for decades."

Expect more of that, as it seems to be in The Donald's nature. There are videos from back in the 1980s of him talking about some of the policies he talks about now, including charging countries for providing American security. The real result of policies like that would just be the US military being kicked out of those countries. Heading his wealthy father's real estate business with extreme government help, starring on reality TV shows and gaming people with a fraudulent university taught him absolutely nothing about how things work in high stakes situations like foreign policy. He would be rejected again and again by many of this country's reliable trade partners, falling back instead on Russia, the only country that would see anything to gain from him.

Conclusion

I do not want to see Donald Trump as president and, yes, there is still a significant chance it may never happen. The chance is there, however, and thus why I have written this - I have become disgusted as I have seen this mess of a country as it really is over the years and a Trump presidency would prove crystal clear my absolute worst suspicions about American culture - that the electorate is brain dead and really believes in nothing at all, is unable to discern when they are getting scammed and just buys in to whatever is propelled at them via media the most. I think that tendency is deep within the culture and that I myself was like that for some time. A Trump victory would solidify this notion in most of the rest of the world as well, causing many sensible investors to turn to other countries while all but the most ruthless pirates would see America as a market. The dawning reality of the world that Americans now are so disturbed by would only become more disturbing as the countries that produce everything they own and use cease or reduce investment and exporting. Their lives would become worse, worse than ever before, until they accept and re-evalutate their culture as post-war Germany did.

As gloomy as that all seems, it can happen and I think it will. My predictions about the Alternative Right and white nationalists which I wrote when I first started here (before taking a detour in to the weird) turned out correct - why won't these predictions?