Political unrest, riots, and possibly even a collapse into civil war are all real possibilities.

Like the secessionists of 1860, today’s rebels may react to a Biden win by picking up their guns in support of Trump’s efforts to contest the results. Out of the resulting chaos might emerge a series of armed confrontations between various rural (pro-Trump) and urban (pro-Biden) areas, as well as a larger clash between red states and blue states that could conceivably escalate into a Civil War Redux.

How the U.S. military (split between pro- and anti-Trump factions) and local and state police (mostly pro-Trump) would react remains to be seen.

But Trump supporters are not the only ones who might react violently to an election loss. If Trump wins or claims victory, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa protests from last summer will likely flare up into a series of regional brushfires, if not a nationwide inferno. The dominant liberal faction of the mainstream media (MSM) will echo Biden’s June 11 statement that the military should “escort Trump from the White House with dispatch.” Militias and Trump sympathizers in the military might mount an armed resistance against Trump’s forceful ejection from the White House. The violence could easily spiral out of control.

There is so much polarization in the U.S. political and security structure that it probably won’t be able to mount a unified response the way it did after previous crises including the JFK assassination coup of 1963 and the neocon-Zionist coup of September 11, 2001. In those cases, the vast majority of people in the political world and the security services believed, or in some cases pretended to believe, the official stories. 

But today, the pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions are not going to be reading from the same script. So the response to the unrest could be as chaotic as the unrest itself. In fact, the response might actually amplify the chaos. And once the chaos reaches a certain point, we might even get a Constitutional crisis and a declaration of martial law, curtailing Americans’ remaining freedoms, including the freedom to express our views.

However, if Biden becomes president, he will most likely try to re-enter the JCPOA. But the U.S. war against the Axis of Resistance won’t end, it will just become subtler. Biden and Harris, who may take over sooner rather than later, are both strongly pro-Zionist. Though they may scale back Trump’s all-out support for Netanyahu and Bin Salman, they are unlikely to reverse U.S. subservience to Zionism. I would expect them to return to policies roughly similar to those of the Obama Administration.

 Kevin Barrett is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006 Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin.