What Awaits Us in 2024

Four scenarios (among many others) that could unfold over the next 12 months

U.S. President Joe Biden talks to the press before boarding Marine One on the south lawn of the White House on December 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

When not relaxing and celebrating holidays with my family over the past two weeks, I’ve spent the bulk of my time embroiled in rancorous arguments online about the 14th Amendment gambit to get Donald Trump disqualified from presidential ballots. I weighed in with an op-ed at CNN about the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling against Trump. I wrote a long follow-up here. And then Maine’s Secretary of State followed Colorado’s lead, which inspired me to tweet out an expression of frustration and anger on the subject. That tweet kicked up a lot of heat on social media in the days leading up to the end of the year.

Rather than rehearsing those arguments yet again (we’ll have plenty of opportunities for that over the coming weeks and months), I thought it might be useful for myself and my subscribers to step back a bit in this first post of 2024 and imagine various political scenarios for the next 12 months.

I don’t think most Americans grasp just how crazy this presidential-election year could be.

• We have a deeply and consistently unpopular incumbent who is viewed by most Americans as too old to be president, by most Republicans and many independents as too ideologically left-wing, and by the most leftward faction of his own party as a morally compromised accomplice to genocide (for giving aid and support to Israel since the terrorist invasion of the country on October 7, 2023).

• We have a Republican challenger who is a former president (first time that’s happened since 1892) polling more like an incumbent than an unproven candidate attempting to take on a sitting president. This challenger faces 91 felony counts in what will be four criminal trials over the next year. His lock on his party’s nomination and his standing in head-to-head polls with the sitting president have strengthened as his legal troubles have worsened. This would-be GOP nominee also denies he lost the 2020 election, more than half of Republican voters believe his claims about election fraud, and he will almost certainly claim victory eleven months from now, no matter the reality of the results.

• We have lawyers, legal scholars, and activists who are attempting to get this would-be nominee disqualified from appearing on presidential ballots and/or serving as president because of his role in inciting the insurrectionary violence of January 6, 2021.

• And finally, we have a number of potential third-party challengers who are considering jumping into the fray, including centrist Democrat Joe Manchin running on the No Labels ticket, anti-establishment conspiracist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., left-wing professor Cornel West, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.  

That’s a lot of potential chaos! How might it play out? I have some things to say about that, but I want to be clear that the scenarios sketched below aren’t predictions per se. They are conditionals: If X, Y, and Z happen, then A, B, and C could well take place. Making actual predictions (this will happen, but that won’t) in a situation so uncertain, with so many variables in the mix, is a fool’s game. Conditionals, on the other hand, can be useful intellectual exercises, helping us to think through what might send us down different paths of causality, and which series of events could follow from each option.

That’s what I try to offer below. The goal isn’t to scare anybody. It’s to increase our awareness of where we are, where we might be going over the next year, and how we might make choices that help us to avoid the worst of the possibilities.       

Scenario 1: Unintended Consequences of the 14^th Amendment Gambit