It is indeed a difficult question to frame. What I’ve learned in this thread is that chaos is chaotic: there’s a broad field of weird shit that Trump could do, only a small portion of which he would do.
With other politicians you can merely look at their incentives as politicians, and forecast from there. But Trump a) doesn’t care about the Republican party, b) is corrupt as hell, so can be influenced by hostile foreign powers more than friendly democracies, c) has his own quixotic set of resentments that sway him, not to mention, d) has a sense of what will play well with the base such that e) if he wants expert advice, he’ll tell you what that is.
So forecasting Trump’s behavior based on historical experience with normal people is a bad idea. Goldman Sachs hasn’t figured that out yet: back on Jan 21 they set the odds of a trade war at only 20%, despite Trump’s rather clear pronouncements.
Taking it from another angle, if Trump cancels income tax this year I seriously doubt whether he would cancel tax refunds - that would piss a lot of his base off. Trump has enough animal cunning to sense that. Furthermore, it’s early in the fall of the Republic: we haven’t seen how much the courts restrain the executive branch. I’d bet 10:1 that the courts will do more than nothing and furthermore 10:1 that internet hotheads will claim that they did nothing. Militant poltroons gotta bray.
I would bet on that, but my axiom is also that Trump always turns out to be Trumpier than you think, and the definition of Trumpiness is not yet fully emerged.
So specifically what I mean in the above case is Trump might say, we’re not collecting income taxes this year, but we’re processing refunds if you did file. And then he’ll have fucked up the government so badly that it’s not even capable of processing refunds, and he’ll blame DEI for screwing up the refunds, and 20% of the country will nod wisely and say “of course, this was all predictable, the wokes somehow stole our refunds.”
It may not be exactly that, but it’ll be something that dumb.
I think that, if you’re seriously considering the possibility that Trump will completely eliminate all income tax, then the only sound financial advice is to hoard canned food and ammunition. Because a move that extreme would mean the utter end of civilized society.
Trump’s razor via Joan Scalzi (2016) should be a robust indicator: “Ascertain the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts."