Assuming everything else was the same, but we branch off into a parallel universe where the US Supreme Court just ignore facts and arbitrarily decided by a 5-4 vote (assuming Roberts side with the 3 liberal justices, because that’s probably the most realistic scenario) that Donald J. Trump is the winner of the election. What would happen? Civil war?
Asking because I’m a pessimist and always think of worst-case scenarios.
The Supreme Court decided the election.
More to the point, they stopped the recount.
Which in turn declared Bush the winner when clearly lost.
Had the recount proceeded it was still close enough that either Bush or Gore could have won depending on which counties were recounted and how ballots were counted. Election post-mortems found that, had a limited recount proceeded as advocated by Gore’s lawyers, Bush likely would have won anyway. (Edit: A statewide recount as ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have likely given Gore the win.)
Florida also had those crappy punch card ballots that didn’t always cleanly punch, and eventually started falling apart if they were handled too much. (Anyone remember all the fuss about “hanging chads” and “dimpled chads?”) Any recount result was going to be dubious.
The Supreme Court shouldn’t have intervened IMO, but they didn’t directly decide the election.
Ok, but that’s not a useful statement. If you can arbitrarily change the rules or decide one person has the responsibility instead of another, you can decide the election without any direct involvement. And if they do that, I promise no one will give a shit whether it was direct. They didn’t directly stop abortion either, but birthing parents are still dying because doctors can’t help them. I guarantee their partners and orphaned kids dgaf if the Supreme Court did it directly.
But they didn’t decide it directly and arbitrarily, as OP is suggesting might have happened. The power to elect the President is in the hands of the Electoral College, and the House of Representatives. The most that a Supreme Court can do is tamper with the process of tallying the popular vote.