One thing I find ironic in all of this is that when countries turn to fascist governments, it usually happens during some economic desperation, but the US economy is doing OK on the whole. This has to be some kind of precedent. I haven't read any aftermath analysis, but I do think simple sexism has a role to play here: a lot of Americans simply didn't want a woman as president or at least deemed her less 'strong' (even though Trump is an addle-brained narcassist who is easily manipulated with flattery).
Another factor is that Harris' campaign was mainly pushing idealogy- that Trump was a fascist- but that is too heady for a lot of people who only care about what affects them directly. Most people are not students of history and are not well read in the consequences of competing 20th century political idealogies. They don't know what a fascist is exactly, and the word has been abused a lot in recent years and so has lost meaning in popular vocabulary.
Another partial explanation is that supposedly in the last few days, there was a flood in social media of misinformation like Harris was going to outlaw christianity, Harris was going to confiscate everyone's pickup trucks and guns, Harris was going to put a 200% increase on gasoline, etc. To educated people, those types of claims are absurd, but look at the reading comprehension of the average American. Many people are getting their news from Tictok and Twitter these days rather than credible news sources. I am guessing that had an impact.
Needless to say, everything is about to get worse. The Republican's didn't run on any serious policies but rather a nebulous anti-establishment caompaign. Some of the policies that Trump proposed would almost certainly results in a recession. The economic consequences of his proposed tarrifs would be able to do that on their own, even if he only did a quarter what he promised to do in that regard. But there is also the promise of firing a million civil servants; these aren't like firing minimum wage workers, they are much more highly compensated and thus have a greater economic impact as lost wages, and furthermore, some of the agencies that Trump's team is proposing to axe will have real economic fallout since they do serious work that keeps society afloat. And imagine what the economic fallout of withdrawing from NATO will do. That will also empower the BRICs group, which will come at the expense of the west and mainly from the USA. The USA has more to lose here than western Europe.
Should Trump keep any of these promises, we are in for a recession, and if he tried to keep all of them, that will be a very severe recession, and what's more, a recession where he has promised to cut out many of the social safety nets that can soften the blow for those who has lost income (wanna guess what that will do to the crime rate?) This all depends on how seriously he takes his campaign promises. The only good news is that his brain is so scrambled at this point he may not remember or care what he said he was going to do.
