1936 is almost the worst possible insertion point<\/strong>. Trump would inherit the United States just as the international system was beginning its terminal collapse, but before the consequences of appeasement had become undeniable.\u00a0I can almost hear the press conferences:<\/p>\n 1936 gives him years in which his instincts could actually alter the trajectory<\/strong>.\u00a0The first disaster might be domestic. Roosevelt’s second term was when the United States continued the enormous, imperfect process of building federal administrative capacity and recovering from the Depression. Trump would arrive despising much of the professional state apparatus he needed to govern. He would also inherit a Congress overwhelmingly Democratic after the real 1936 landslide, so unless your \u201csteals\u201d includes congressional results as well, he’d face ferocious institutional resistance. That matters: President Trump could not simply turn 1936 America into Trumpistan by decree.<\/p>\n Foreign policy is where things become frightening.\u00a0The United States was strongly isolationist already. Congress had enacted Neutrality Acts precisely to prevent another slide into a European war. Roosevelt, despite those constraints, gradually recognized what Hitler represented and painstakingly moved American opinion and policy toward supporting Britain and the other states resisting the Axis. A Trump presidency wouldn’t need to invent isolationism. He could amplify an enormous existing political constituency for it.<\/strong>\u00a0And his characteristic conception of alliances would fit catastrophically well with the mood:<\/p>\n Then comes 1938.\u00a0Munich is tailor-made for Trumpian personal diplomacy. I can imagine him inserting himself between Chamberlain and Hitler, emerging from some spectacular summit proclaiming that only he could make the deal<\/strong>, waving a document, and announcing that Hitler had personally promised him there would be no war.\u00a0When Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939:<\/p>\n \u201cThat’s not what he told me. I’m very disappointed in Adolf. But Czechoslovakia wasn’t exactly paying us anything either.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The really consequential divergence comes after September 1939. Roosevelt couldn’t bring America directly into the European war, but his administration systematically shifted the material balance: cash-and-carry, destroyers-for-bases, Lend-Lease, Atlantic convoy activity, the arsenal-of-democracy mobilization. Those policies were extraordinarily important before Pearl Harbor ever happened<\/strong>.\u00a0Trump could plausibly have opposed much of that.\u00a0And therefore Britain might face 1940\u201341 without anything resembling Roosevelt’s escalating material commitment. Whether Britain actually capitulates is another matter\u2014I would not assume it; British resources, the Empire, the Royal Navy, and Germany’s inability to conduct Sea Lion remain real. But the strategic situation becomes vastly worse.<\/p>\n Then there’s the Soviet Union. Imagine June 1941:\u00a0\u201cHitler and Stalin? They’re both tough guys. Let them work it out.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0No American Lend-Lease to the USSR, perhaps dramatically less aid to Britain, and no undeclared American naval war in the Atlantic.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n\n
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