America in 2045 (Worldbuild With Me - Part 3)
If I'm writing a novel set in 2045, then what does the post-Trump world look like? There's no single answer--but that's a feature of worldbuilding, not a bug
One of my first posts in Unapocalyptic was “Who Paints the Dew on the Daisy?” It was about the (often unconscious) theories of change we use when we think about current and future events: Why does stuff happen? What ultimately causes the kind of seismic shift we’re seeing in the world today? Is it just one man? Or are impersonal historical forces at work? In the post, I presented six theories people use, in order of increasing sophistication. It’s still one of my favourites because it takes a playful approach to imagining the future.
If you’ve been following along you’ll know I’m currently writing a novel set in 2045/50, and recently had to tear up my backstory (and much of the story itself) because it was conceived pre-Trump. We’re all worried about where the world is going what with tariffs, immigration policies, unchecked executive power and threats to annex Canada. I’ve got the additional worry of trying to look back at how it all sorted itself out, from the year 2045. I’m starting to come to some conclusions about the shape of that world. The hardest piece of the puzzle is the fate of the United States. I thought we could team up to use my six theories of change to windtunnel different outcomes, each based on a particular theory of change. For instance:
Theory 1: He Did It
This is the view that everything happens because somebody makes it happen.
Origins: "Great Man Theory" - Thomas Carlyle (1840)
Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s your past life pushing you karmically. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, it’s the feared Kwisatz Haderach, the prophet who can see the future. In each case, the idea is that history (including your personal one) is driven by the actions of individual powerful figures who bend reality to their will. Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle famously articulated this view in his 1840 work "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History," arguing that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men."
It’s safe to assume that this is the view held by Trump, Putin, Xi, and likely Elon Musk. Let’s say they’re right—ultimately, American political power responds to the will of powerful individuals. And where America goes, the world follows. If that’s the case, then Trump's legacy isn't primarily about policy but personality. His followers see him as the one who "made America great again," while his detractors blame him personally for democratic erosion.
If we project this forward, then post-Trump America will be defined by whoever emerges as the next dominant personality. The system itself matters less than who controls it. Americans are being trained to accept individual powerlessness; when Trump leaves, the question becomes who, not what, comes next. The world will watch succession battles in the US the way we used to watch the maneuverings in the Kremlin. Since we’re accepting this theory of change for the sake of argument, what happens to American institutions and its legal and executive balances is irrelevant.
For our 2045 scenario, we have several candidates for such a post-Trump personality. Which do you like best?
An anointed successor to the MAGA movement who continues it.
A firebrand preacher who either unifies the Christian right or (like King) the servant-leadership of traditional Christianity.
A military leader who defends the nation against some foe (real or imagined).
A Democrat who owns the House and leads a fight to rebuilt the former checks and balances that made America a great democracy. (But the system is still only as good as the leaders it elects.)
A Xi-style technocrat who smuggles the idea of five-year plans into American economics with the help of a powerful cartel of billionaires.
An AI of some sort, which however turns out to be a sock-puppet for the wealthy industrialist who built it or for the billionaire class.
As worldbuilding methods go, this one sucks. I can basically roll up characters like I was planning a D&D campaign and shuffle six presidents of various kinds, who tug the country to and fro over the next quarter century. This is Roman America, specifically the Rome of the Third Century. With the focus squarely on personality and dynasty, other factors like international relationships and global economic trends get lost. Not to mention the impact of new technologies on power. It tells us nothing about how people will be living in that period, but looked at this way, a constitutional crisis, authoritarian theocracy, civil war, or independence movements are all on the table.
Theory 2: Natural Cycles
This is the belief that societies, like natural systems, follow predictable cycles of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth.
Origins: Cyclical History - popularized in the West by Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" (1918), but taken as an assumption in much Indian philosophy
This theory of change views societies as organic entities following natural life cycles. Spengler argued that all civilizations follow predictable patterns of rise and fall, while Arnold Toynbee developed a comprehensive model of how civilizations respond to challenges throughout their life cycle.
This cyclical view sees Trump's presidency not as a cause but as a symptom of America's position in its imperial cycle. What comes after Trump isn't about Trump at all—it's about America's place in a natural progression that all great powers experience. Maybe we're witnessing the beginning of American Autumn—not necessarily collapse, but a season of harvest and preparing for winter.
This perspective suggests that America's global influence will continue to wane regardless of leadership changes, following the natural rhythms that have affected all previous world powers. The question isn't whether this decline happens, but how gracefully Americans adapt to their changing role in a multi-polar world.
In story terms, this is a theory that rocks. We can play a game of Retreat, imagining the US pulling out of its previous commitments as its ideology changes or it loses the ability to pay for them. For example:
2027: Trump takes the US out of NATO, “because those guys have been taking a free ride on America and have never paid us back!” American forces retreat from Europe.
2030: US bases in the Far East and Middle East close even as a region-wide war breaks out, because oil is no longer valuable enough to keep investing military resources.
Due to the disastrous failure of the tariff initiative, the US’s share of world trade drastically shrinks.
The dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency; instead, a WTO-backed stablecoin cryptocurrency replaces it.
Corruption becomes the norm as decades of misinformation intended to sow doubt in government lead to a cynical generation that takes bribes for granted.
America creates its own version of the “Great Firewall of China,” using advanced AI to censor all data entering or leaving the country. Only information that matches the reigning ideology in Washington reaches the American public.
American manufacturing comes home, but it’s vastly reduced and more expensive than the previously outsourced globalist version. The country’s GDP starts to shrink.
Finally, the United States becomes the world’s new “Hermit Kingdom,” fully turned inward and fiercely holding onto atavistic industries such as fossil fuels and automobiles, while the rest of us move on.
It’s possible to envision this America pretty easily, as a polluted vista of abandoned strip-malls fought over by ideologically opposed militias, while the Great Wall ensures that few people know that things are better elsewhere. Abandoned oil wells leak poison gas while working peoples’ frustration with their creeping poverty grows ever more intense. It’s a functional but dangerous country similar to Putin’s Russia, so we can use Russian scandals and news as the template for describing it—with the difference that Americans are not fatalistic people, so there’s lots of resistance, underground economies, and creativity in the cracks of the deteriorating system.
Theory 3: It's All Clockwork
We all know this one—it’s the view that everything follows predictable cause-and-effect relationships that can be modeled and predicted.
Origins: Newtonian Determinism & Laplace's Demon (18th-19th Century)
This theory of change emerged from the Enlightenment's mechanistic worldview, epitomized by Pierre-Simon Laplace's famous declaration that a sufficiently powerful intellect could predict everything if it knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. In social sciences, this manifested as the belief that societies operate according to discoverable laws as precise as physics. In science fiction, the apex of this vision is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
Trump's presidency reveals structural weaknesses in American institutions that were already present. These institutional mechanics—the Electoral College, two-party system, campaign finance laws—will continue determining outcomes regardless of individual leaders.
This analytical framework sees post-Trump America as following predictable patterns based on institutional dynamics. Polarization in American society isn't random but mathematically predictable given the media ecosystem, economic inequality, and electoral structures. Without fundamental institutional reform, these forces will keep driving the downward spiral towards complete governmental paralysis.
The next quarter century can be seen as a period of struggle and succession, not of emperors as in Rome, but rather of institutions. Ultimately, the de-institutionalization of society that AGI brings makes it all moot as a fully post-bureaucratic society emerges. The question for us as storytellers is, who do the AIs that run everything work for? Depending on the answer—or maybe depending on who you are or where you live—our 2045 America could be Utopia, or an Orwellian nightmare. I suspect it’ll be both.
Here’s the problem, though: as a novelist writing a story set primarily in Alaska, do I want what happens in the Lower 49 to be that interesting? Maybe not; maybe the AI future is just drab and utilitarian, and the Arctic is where the real action is.
This is actually an interesting possibility: make the Lower 49 a colourless blob, in story terms, compared to the dynamism of the new Arctic. This may happen anyway if all the Northern initiatives take off.
These three theories of change give us three very different takes on the country. The author’s job is to integrate such multiple perspectives in scenes that show them all at once. Via character, setting, or events, we clue the reader in to which reality dominates in this particular story.
But these are just the old ways of thinking about change. What happens when we model America in 2045 using three more modern approaches?
This is where things get interesting.
Theory 4: We Can Manage The System
The systems theory approach that recognizes complexity but believes in our capacity to understand and manage society’s many feedback loops.
Origins: Systems Theory - Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (1948) & Jay Forrester's System Dynamics (1950s-60s)
There’s now a good eighty year’s worth of systems management studies of American politics, economics, and culture. Looking back from 2045, it’s clear that Trump and his team were not systems thinkers—not even AI-admiring Elon Musk. Their administration revealed America's failure to manage the complex interdependencies between economic, social, information, and governance systems. But taking easy shots at the administration isn’t the point here; the question isn't whether Trump was good or bad, but how his presidency affected the resilience of the country’s systems.
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