Realistically speaking: World War III.
Might sound a tad farfetched but Trump is an utter moron. The tariffs demonstrate that much, he's backed America into an economic corner where collapse of the economy seems almost locked in at this point (I say almost because he can and probably will eventually backflip on the China tariffs when it becomes a matter of his political survival).
China is now decoupling itself from the US hegemony. That means a active war is possible. Now I don't believe China will start a hot war personally, they're too intelligent for that and they want to take the world via soft power since America has shown that's the far superior way to expand an empire and control it.
But Trump, if the US ends up suffering an economic depression, might do something incredibly rash that spirals into world war 3. He has made no secret he wants to seize various sovereign territories through military conquest and wars are a well known way to distract a populace going through severe economic hardship (definitely wasn't the setup for a world war or anything >_>).
I'm not saying this
will
happen, but when asked what I believe is the single worst thing Trump might do, and keeping it realistic, world war 3 is top of my list.
ATfire567 posted...
Irreversible climate change is up there.
I know when you typed that you mean "climate apocalypse events" but all climate change is irreversible. At least as far as human timespans are concerned anyway. We've pretty much kicked the Earth out of an ice age already and set it on the path to "hothouse Earth," the question at this point will be how fast we accelerate to hothouse Earth (and the demise of our modern civilization with it).
But what I really wanted to point out is that the worst timeline is all but locked in. The reality is that the way our world order is structured means our civilization lives through the very actions that cause climate change. Modern way of living, if restructured, is in fact relatively sustainable, but the way we go about it is simply incompatible with our planet's life systems. We generate too many emissions creating too much waste because it creates the best short-term profits (planned obsolescence in tech for example).
Trump getting elected was simply the death of the delusion we were going to avoid what is coming down the pipeline in a decade or two (perhaps three or four decades if China geoengineers, won't fix the problem even slightly but will give a "dead cat bounce" of perhaps a decade or two).