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This is a repeat of the 2016 election. It will highlight the
ongoing weaknesses of the Electoral College, having put Republicans who lost
the popular vote in office again for the third time in three out of the last seven
elections, and three out of the four total times that a Republican has won in
that span. But it is a win without cheating or deliberately breaking the
system. This will blunt the resistance to Trump, along with the belief that the
government is illegitimate. There will be protests, to be sure, but so long as
Trump doesn’t choose to have protesters massacred, they will fizzle out as they did
in 2017.

This outcome is the hardest to predict. Trump will absolutely
let his team attempt to implement Christian nationalism across the U.S. and use
every means available to achieve its vision of an America with no immigrants,
no trans people, no Muslims, no abortion, no birth control, Russian-style
“Don’t Say Gay laws,” license to discriminate based on religion, and all government education funding going to religious schools. Blue states will try
to resist this and invoke the same states’ rights and “dual sovereignty”
arguments as red staters in scenario one, but it’s unlikely they will succeed
due to conservative bias on the Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s
willingness to blow off court rulings it doesn’t like.

If Trump goes straight to a massacre via the Insurrection
Act, civil war is on the table. It’s highly unlikely that Trump and his
Christian nationalist allies will allow a “soft secession,” but it’s possible
that the U.S. balkanizes along many of the same lines that happen in scenario
one, if blue state resistance is sufficiently strong and the federal government
is unwilling to take steps that lead to the civil war outcome. If Trump manages
to bring blue states to heel via legal means, and resistance is insufficient to
compel blue state governors to refuse to comply, then we end up with option four:
fascist, theocratic, hereditary dictatorship.