After the fire

The 2020 election will be by all accounts "a big one". Commentators on both sides, not to mention an ex-president and an ex-vice-president and have said so. It's not just voter turnout that makes it big; it is perhaps a turning point for the struggle for what it means to be America, what the country strands for, its fundamental values.

On one side you have the idea of a land of equality of opportunity, a meritocracy, where good ideas and hard work flourish in a capitalist free-market system.  On the other you have fear, division, defending of old money status and privilege, grievance, racism and resentment that the American dream has turned into a nightmare.
  
If Trump wins, a good portion of the country (though quite possibly not a majority) will have chosen door number 2, That path leads to increasing unrest, backsliding to a racially divided past that many will see as intolerable, and where that ends up is anybody's guess, but it won't be pretty.

If America chooses door number 1 and Trump looses, he will likely have to be dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming (recall Julian Assange being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London). But while some will see his defeat as a victory for racial justice, a less Utopian future lies ahead. The most optimistic but realistic scenario is that we return to the pre-Trump status quo, which while not great, was nothing like a terrible as Trumpism.   

But even that's unlikely; not all social processes are reversible. The damage done over the last four years will not be washed away. Trust in government and the media have declined and won't easily be restored. The black-blue divide will have deepened and policing will in general be an increasingly difficult problem. The catastrophic damage Trump's four years have wrought will take years, and probably a generation or more to undo. Much like Rome's most decadent Emperors, Trump may be both a symptom of the end of what was a relatively short-lived American 'empire' and the cause of its decline.