The most likely scenario is something similar to the post Soviet style collapse that followed USSR.

Gorbachev Introduced glasnost and perestroika to reform the Soviet system that inadvertently eroded the ideological and institutional foundations of the USSR, accelerating its collapse. Today, Trump is pursuing a similar, if ideologically inverted, disruption of the US institutions. Attacking the deep state, undermining trust in media and elections, and prioritizing loyalty over expertise. He’s enacting a purge of the permanent bureaucracy under the guise of draining the swamp, feeding off polarization and institutional distrust. These policies are eroding the foundation of the system paving the way to its collapse.

Soviet collapse followed as a result of a shock therapy with sudden price liberalization, fiscal austerity, and privatization that led to hyperinflation, economic instability, and the rise of an oligarchic class. Similarly, Trump is busy slashing regulations and cutting corporate taxes, fuelling short-term growth that deepens wealth inequality and corporate consolidation. Like Gorbachev, he’s ushering in a polarized economic landscape where faith in the system is rapidly dwindling among the public.

The decline in living standards is amplifying nationalism, in form of MAGA, and deepening cultural and regional divides in the US. Trump’s whole rhetoric is rooted in divisive politics. Just as Soviet republics turned inward post-glasnost, prioritizing local grievances over collective unity, so are states like Texas, Florida, and California are increasingly talking about breaking with the union. People like Musk are well positioned to target the remaining public services and industries for privatization.

The USSR collapsed abruptly, while the US might face a slower erosion of its institutional norms. The big difference here is that the Soviet Union was structurally more resilient to societal collapse compared to the United States.

USSR had a lot of redundancy in critical infrastructure such as public transit, people owned their homes, and food production was largely localized. This allowed communities to survive during systemic failures. Another big factor is that Soviet society emphasized collective welfare over individualism, fostering mutual aid networks and state-provided essentials like healthcare and education, which could buffer against collapse.

The US relies on fragile, privatized systems with just-in-time supply chains, and largely deregulated utilities. We already saw how this system buckled under the stress of the pandemic, and routinely fails to deal with natural disasters like the LA fires. America’s dependency on globalized trade coupled with hyper-individualism and lack of contingency planning, makes it prone to chaos in a collapse scenario. The profit efficiency driven model risks catastrophic failure under pressure.

Total Control. That’s really what it’s all about. They want to control the narrative, they want to control the markets, they want to control every little bit that there is left that hasn’t been touched. What they want is a dystopia and they’re gearing moreso into realizing that dystopia than they ever been.

Ever heard of Shadowrun? The TTRPG? That’s what things are gearing towards, just take away the interesting and cool aspects from Shadowrun and you basically have reality right now as we know it.

Oligarchs replace most government functions with private entities that they have equity in and funnel tax dollars into their own companies. It looks like they’re trying to cause a depression too, so they can buy everything up for cheap (farms, homes, etc). I think they’re stupid, but not stupid enough to not realize an economic depression coupled with gutting social safety nets will lead to massive crime waves and riots; so I’m guessing they’re planning on a police state and work camps for people they arrest (think that’s what they’re going to do with many of the immigrants too).

I’ve heard it postulated they are realigning with Russia and other dictators because we’d lose our normal allies if we became such a society. And they probably have very lucrative deals with Russia as well.

I sucks we don’t have a good, inspiring opposition party or something to lead or rally around. Without that, anger will just manifest as unorganized, unproductive riots and violence. “Conservatives” are still pretty brainwashed too; believing whatever they’re told by media. They will support the government gunning down and enslaving “criminals,” at this point in time. I’d hope that changes when things get hard, but media will work hard to redirect the blame.

President Muskrate is an accelerationist; who believes that societal collapse should come sooner rather than later. Some speculate that his plan is to capitalise on burgeoning AI along with the billionaire class to control people once the dust settles.

It’s a coalition of crazy. It isn’t entirely clear who is going to be in control of what or for how long. It could get very messy.

Paranoia can tell you anything you don’t control is a threat - whether it’s another country, a race, a personality type, lack of web privacy, whatever. The MAGA leaders are so drenched in that paranoia, there’s really no limit to what they might do to squash anyone and anything they see as a possible threat to them.

When an empire can’t expand, by means of territory, knowledge, or other means; it turns inwards on its own people and territories in a last ditch effort to survive, as it lunges towards its inevitable collapse.

There is no endgame, it’s just "how much bribery and corruption can I do before I have to leave the legal immunity bubble that the Supreme Court created.

They’re rich enough that they will be unaffected by the global consequences of their actions.

The rate of profit continues to decline because of overcapitalization. Factions are aligning to decapitalize rivals in order to increase their own rate of profit.

Also, they’re all manic and dissasociated.

All these US-centric answers. Learn Mandarin. The world will continue on after the US empire ends.

What they think they’re doing and what they’re actually doing are two different questions. What they’re aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody’s actually at the helm and it’s an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.

Where we are actually headed, regardless of who’s in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.

If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don’t start WWIII, and you’re lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you’ll be expected to work through. There isn’t going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You’re just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of “boring dystopia” is almost certainly where we’re headed.

The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren’t able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.

Orange juice

The end game is a cyberpunk-esque corporate controlled future. No government, only companies/the owning class deciding what’s happening. Yes, slavery essentially, because people have to work for them to survive, but that’s already done. No “less work” savings because of rising productivity, only more and more money/power centralized in them.

Simple. We are on the express to cyberpunk (the literary genre).

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of “low-life and high tech”. It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay.

Cyberpunk plots often involve conflict between artificial intelligence, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth…