I’ve been predicting that the United States would erupt into violence before the end of Trump’s second term. I couldn’t see how that could be avoided. His administration was systematically taking away every means of legal resistance, and normalising violent cruelty as an everyday political tool.

But now it seems the Republican party is going to get wiped out in the midterm elections, and whilst the deep deep tensions in US political life will carry on after that, I’m not sure the Trump administration will survive.

They will certainly try to rig the election any way they can. Perhaps they will be successful, in which case my previous prediction still stands.

But there has been a chain of events that I didn’t predict.

I didn’t predict the impact of the Epstein files, which probably prompted the Trump administration to invade Iran. I don’t think the administration considered invading Iran was a big deal – after all, invading Venezuela hadn’t been.

The Iran conflict is now arguably a bigger scandal than the Epstein files, because he has basically ended US military dominance. He has just publicly, and very embarrassingly, lost a war, and possibly crashed the Western economy.

One of the defining characteristics of the Trump administration and the supporting Republicans up to now has been that they have been bold. They have known that the Democrats don’t have the will to stop them, so they have taken outrageous step after outrageous step, and whilst they haven’t always succeeded they have never been punished in a meaningful way.

So it seemed pretty obvious that they were going to rig the midterm elections in whatever way they could, and if that didn’t work they would try to cancel them altogether. If they were successful then great, but if not then it’s not as if they were going to get punished for trying.

However, they have messed up the Iran war so badly, as a way of trying to distract from the Epstein files, which they have also messed up in a catastrophic way. And then there is the fact that Trump’s health is visibly deteriorating.

I think they’ve just lost the plot.

If so, what does the future of the United States look like?

Probably more of a managed decline. The world will probably be thrown into another financial crisis caused by the US, but this time I think it’s likely that nations will focus on forming and strengthening alliances outside of the US global order. Which will reduce American economic might, which will reduce American military might, which will American reduce political influence.

Domestically, I imagine Trump will be replaced with rogue’s gallery of imitators, who will probably be discarded fairly quickly, until eventually someone else can become build the public support that Trump did.

In the meantime, there might even be some kind of radical overhaul of the Democrat party. Maybe some kind of Keynesian New Deal, combined with aggressive taxation of billionaires, might stabilise the country.

If that doesn’t happen (and I personally don’t think it’s likely) then the US will be back where it started – and then there might be civil war.

But that could be a decade away. A lot can happen in that time.

When Barrack Obama first stood as a presidential candidate, I confidently predicted that the US would never elect a Black president in a billion years. I was very happy to be proved wrong.

If the US avoids civil war or revolutionary violence, and particularly if the MAGA movement collapses and it is able to transition to a more progressive political structure, I will be even happier.