If the election does not go his way, the economy will tank, Christmas will be canceled, and America as we know it will be “finished,” Donald Trump promised in the run-up to the 2020 election.
That race did not go his way, of course, and none of Trump’s prophesied cataclysms materialized under Joe Biden’s presidency. But that has not stopped Trump from recycling some of the same dark portents about a Kamala Harris presidency.
“If he’s elected, the stock market will crash,” Trump said in October 2020 during his only debate with Biden. “If he gets in, you will have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen.”
The depression never happened. Stocks rose during Biden’s presidency. But Trump recently predicted that a Harris victory would lead to “a massive [stock] market downturn” and “a 1929-style depression.”
In 2020, he said in a tweet: “This election is a choice between a TRUMP RECOVERY or a BIDEN DEPRESSION.”
In 2024, he said on Truth Social: “VOTERS HAVE A CHOICE — TRUMP PROSPERITY, OR THE KAMALA CRASH & GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024.”
Predicting the future is inherently difficult. And bluster about the danger of the other side winning is the norm for politicians of all stripes. But Trump’s penchant for hyperbole, overconfidence and black-and-white claims has made him a particularly inaccurate Nostradamus.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
“[I]f Joe Biden ever became President,” Trump tweeted in 2020, “Our Country would COLLAPSE!”
“If we don’t win,” he told New Hampshire voters in 2024, “I think our country is finished.”
Four years ago, he warned Michigan voters that “a vote for Biden is a vote to completely eradicate … your auto industry”
On Wednesday, he warned Michigan voters, “If I don’t win, you will have no auto industry within two to three years. It will all be gone.”
Trump’s prognostications about life under a Biden presidency grew more and more apocalyptic as Election Day drew nigh in 2020.
With the Covid-19 pandemic raging, Trump told supporters that Biden had plans to “impose a blanket shutdown” across the country and keep the country locked down to fulfill his “plan to kill the American Dream.”
“If you vote for Biden, it means no kids in school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas and no Fourth of July together,” he said at a rally in Goodyear, Arizona.
“If he comes in,” he said at a Nevada rally, “the Christmas season will be canceled.”
Of course, Biden imposed no such lockdowns, and holiday season shopping rose every year of Biden’s presidency to a record high last year, according to the National Retail Federation.
In his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2020, Trump called Biden “a Trojan horse for socialism” who would “give free rein to violent anarchists” to “completely dismantle and destroy … the American way of life.”
“Make no mistake, if you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will defund police departments all across America,” Trump warned, predicting Biden had plans for “immediately releasing 400,000 criminals onto your streets and into your neighborhoods.”
In fact, crime has fallen, and Biden signed legislation increasing police funding.
“If the left gains power, they will demolish the suburbs, confiscate your guns and appoint justices who will wipe away your Second Amendment and other constitutional freedoms,” Trump said in his convention speech.
The suburbs still stand, as does the Second Amendment, backed by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Speaking at The Villages, a massive retirement community in Florida, Trump prophesied that Biden would “dismantle your police departments, dissolve our borders, confiscate your guns, terminate religious liberty.”
Almost four years into Biden’s term, the U.S.-Mexico border remains a problem, but it also remains.
Even God was not safe from a Biden presidency, Trump warned.
“If Joe Biden got in,” he said on Fox News, “religion will be gone, OK?” In another interview with the network, he said Biden would “take away your guns, your oil and your God.” In Ohio, Trump said that Biden is “against God” and that his election would “hurt the Bible, hurt God.”
Domestic oil production and gun sales both reached record highs under Biden, a practicing Catholic who has attended church regularly while in the White House.
But Trump’s auguring went on, with troubling visions of an America completely cowed by its rivals.
“If I don’t win the election, China will own the United States. You’re going to have to learn to speak Chinese,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in August 2020.
The number of American college students studying Chinese actually declined under Biden after having peaked in 2016.
Trump even predicted that if he lost the election, he might have to leave the country or retire from public life.
“If I lose to him, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I will never speak to you again,” he told North Carolina rallygoers four years ago. “You’ll never see me again.”
In Georgia, days before the election, Trump said he would be so embarrassed to lose to Biden that “maybe I’ll have to leave the country — I don’t know.”
But there was no chance of that, Trump confidently predicted, telling supporters in Wisconsin his election was basically a sure thing: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”
Trump did, in fact, lose and did not flee the country.
This year, as Trump faces off against Biden’s vice president, he has reprised some of the same grim predictions for the future if he does not win.
While Biden was a “Trojan horse for socialism,” Trump’s campaign said in a news release last month that “Kamala Harris is a Trojan horse for nation-destroying spending, communist price controls and open borders.”
In a fundraising video, Trump claimed that Harris, too, wants to ban Christmas. “She wants no Merry Christmas,” Trump said. “No, we’re going to have Merry Christmas just like we got for everybody seven years ago. We brought it back. It was in deep trouble, but we brought it back.”
The suburbs are also doomed if Harris wins, Trump told rallygoers last week in Tucson, Arizona, warning that Harris’ team “wants to abolish the suburbs.”
“I will save America’s suburbs,” he said.
He insists that Harris, if elected, will “defund the police from Day One,” confiscate guns and halt all fossil fuel production. “If she won the election, the day after that election,” he said in the debate, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.”
Throughout his 2024 campaign, he has portrayed the election as an existential clash for the future of the country, using his first campaign rally last year to call the election “the final battle,” invoking the Book of Revelation’s portrayal of Armageddon and saying Harris would “destroy” America, “just like she destroyed San Francisco, just like she destroyed California.”
And reprising his false prophecy from 2020, Trump has been telling supporters that this election, too, is a sure thing and that the only way he can lose is if it is rigged.
“The only way they can beat us is to cheat,” he said in Las Vegas over the summer.
“We have all the votes we’ll need,” he promised his supporters last month in North Carolina.
Whether that prediction comes true or not remains to be seen.
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