Potential Impacts from a Second Trump Presidency
This report from the Cascade Institute takes a look at possible global inter-systemic impacts from a second Donald Trump presidency, including:
- A trade war, triggered by American tariffs, and accelerated by retaliatory tariffs from China, leading to increased inflation and diminished economic growth.
- Authoritarian contagion, whereby a second Trump administration expands its powers over institutions like the military and the Department of Justice, emboldening other leaders in America and abroad to implement authoritarian practices.
- An economic downturn caused by mass deportations and subsequent labour shortages.
- An exodus from multilateral agreements and organizations like the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, triggered by a U.S. withdrawal and subsequent delegitimization of these bodies, leading to reduced capabilities in pandemic response, conflict management, and climate action.
Intended for policymakers, the investment community, public commentators, and risk analysts, the report applies three analytical tools to identify likely critical junctures, causal pathways, “N -order” impacts, and feedback loops arising from the 2024 U.S. presidential election that could operate across multiple global system boundaries.
This report is a first assessment of the inter-systemic consequences of a second Trump presidency. It integrates evidence and opinion gathered from informed commentary on possible election impacts and from confidential interviews with a diverse group of field experts, both in the U.S. and abroad, some of whom identify as ideologically conservative. The authors recognize that their our own values and beliefs influence their analysis, but have aimed to ensure that those assumptions are visible and open to critique.
For more in-depth analysis on the 2024 U.S. election, see The U.S. Election and Economic Policy – Implications for Financial Institutions.
For further reading on interconnected risks and the threat of a global polycrisis, see William White’s 2023 report for GRI.