2020 Revisited

Last week, during a lull in the work day, one of my colleagues floated an idea in the Dispatch Slack which he described—and I quote—as “Nick Catoggio bait”: Would America have been better off if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, he wondered?

Verily, I was baited. That hypothetical sits at the intersection of two strong currents in my political thinking.

One is Never Trumpism. Donald Trump winning is never (well, almost never) the least bad outcome. By definition, America wouldn’t have been better off if the outcome in 2020 were different.

The other is pessimism. We’re in the darkest timeline and things are only getting worse. By definition, America would have been better off if the outcome in 2020 were different.

You don’t need to be Harry Turtledove to find alternate histories of presidential elections intriguing, especially within the last 25 years. If Al Gore defeats George W. Bush in 2000, 9/11 probably doesn’t lead to war in Iraq (or, perhaps, never happens). If Mitt Romney defeats Barack Obama in 2012, he’s the Republican nominee for president four years later and Trumpism on the right is delayed or denied. If Hillary Clinton defeats Trump in 2016, Trump goes back to network television or runs in the 2020 GOP primary without any halo of populist invincibility.

America missed a lot of exit ramps en route to the darkest timeline.

Alternate electoral histories are also irresistible because most presidents have a calamity or two to their records that invite speculation about how their opponent might have handled it. What does the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or the financial crisis look like with John Kerry in charge? How does America’s pandemic response play out with Hillary Clinton calling the shots instead of this guy?

Revisiting 2020 is especially tempting right now, with another frightening winter of conspiracy theories, coup-plotting, and violence looming if Trump loses again. If he had been reelected four years ago, he’d be term-limited today and none of that would be on the horizon. Wouldn’t that be nice?

He’s never been more lowbrow and feral in his demagoguery than he’s been lately. At this moment of all moments, it seems perverse to say, “It’d be better if Trump were still president.”

And yet.

The case for a 2020 Trump victory.

There are policy reasons and what we might call civic reasons to prefer a Trump victory in 2020 with the benefit of hindsight.

Obviously, a Trump White House would have taken mass immigration more seriously than the Biden White House has. Deterring and preventing inflows of migrants across the southern border would have been a top priority. The border crisis in a Trump presidency wouldn’t have been as severe, assuming there was a crisis at all. 

The odds of a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia also would have improved under Trump, I think. That was the diplomatic coup to which the Abraham Accords were obviously building, and he and his advisers (notably Jared Kushner) had good relations with both sides. As it is, neither the Israelis nor the Saudis trust that Biden and the Democrats share their mutual fear and loathing of Iran, which reduces America’s leverage in brokering a deal.

It would have been better for the country, too, if certain unavoidable policy failures had happened on Trump’s watch rather than Biden’s.

Maybe Trump would have refrained from signing the COVID stimulus bill in early 2021 that goosed global inflation, but I doubt it. He’s never cared about fiscal restraint; if anything, he would have seen another stimulus as a new opportunity to take personal credit for putting money in Americans’ pockets. Even if he had vetoed the bill, supply chain disruptions plus the trillions in stimulus that he approved in 2020 assured that inflation would have haunted his second term anyway. And unlike Biden, Trump might not have deferred to the Federal Reserve when it raised interest rates to address the problem. The thought of the economy cooling on his watch, even for salutary reasons, would have bruised his ego and led him to consider a dramatic—and disastrous—intervention.

I also doubt that he would have done any better managing the withdrawal from Afghanistan that ultimately shattered perceptions of Biden’s competence. A month before the 2020 election, he announced that he hoped to have all U.S. troops out of the country by … Christmas. A few days after the vote, he signed a memo ordering the total evacuation of American soldiers by January 15, 2021. (He was eventually talked out of it.) Biden’s own decision to withdraw in the summer of 2021 was compelled by a May 1 deadline that his predecessor had negotiated with the Taliban.

Trump wanted U.S. troops out and he wanted them out fast. Had he returned to office in 2021, there’s every reason to think he would have followed through on that impulse and no reason to think the rapid collapse of the Afghan government wouldn’t have followed.

Inflation and Afghanistan: Two momentous, discrediting Biden failures that almost certainly would have been momentous, discrediting Trump failures had the 2020 election gone the other way.

From a civic standpoint, the great virtue of Trump winning in 2020 is that January 6 wouldn’t have happened. There would have been no coup plot, no vote-rigging hysteria, no attack on the Capitol, no arrests. The corrosive disillusionment that the right now feels about the fairness of American elections and that the rest of the country now feels about the right wouldn’t exist.

Three of the four criminal cases against Trump wouldn’t exist either, as they relate to actions he took after losing the election or after leaving office. And the fourth, regarding his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, would have been set aside by a state court until he finished his term as president. America would have been spared the ordeal of the leader of the Republican Party being tried repeatedly by his political opponents.

Another important civic consideration: As my colleague pointed out in our Slack discussion, Trump’s advisers in a second term would have been of a higher caliber had that term begun in 2021 instead of 2025.

Granted, he had already burned through most of his capable Cabinet members by the end of his first term and was running on fumes with various acting directors in charge of agencies. But those acting directors were qualitatively different in their loyalties, I think, from the cabal of fanatics Trump is cultivating for a second term. You can (and should) hate Bill Barr, but he had the decency as attorney general not to conspire in Trump’s coup plot. The next AG will be carefully selected to ensure he lacks that decency.

Defeat in 2020 gave Trump and the worst populists in his orbit time to radicalize and build a postliberal personnel infrastructure for his next term. Had he won, they wouldn’t have had that opportunity. He would have had to make do with incompetent but more or less normal deputies who were readily available instead of building his own authoritarian kakistocracy. Mike Pence would still be his right-hand man, not J.D. Vance.

By 2022, after six years of Trump fatigue, Democrats would have been teed up for a blue-wave midterm win. By 2024, after two terms of Republican rule, the left would have had the political wind at its back while the right coped with a succession crisis triggered by Trump’s impending retirement. A ticket of Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro would be on its way to victory over Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump Jr., perhaps comfortably.

In the aftermath, many of us would wonder if the right’s turn toward populism was actually just window dressing for an infatuation with Trump specifically. With a charismatic celebrity at the top of the ticket babbling about “America First,” populism was an electoral force; once Trump himself had been swapped out for some less lustrous demagogue, voters lost interest.

Somewhere right now in an alternate timeline where Trump won in 2020 and Whitmer is up 7 points in the polls over DeSantis, maybe I’m writing today’s newsletter about how populism was an electoral mirage and we should rejoice at the imminent prospect of being rid of it.

The case against a 2020 Trump victory.

I resent the idea instinctively that America would have been better off had Trump won in 2020, not because I loathe him (which I do) but because it absolves Republican voters of their own corruption. The argument assumes on some level that we were fated to have him dominate our politics again in 2024 and perhaps until 2029 after he lost the last election, in which case wouldn’t it have been better to hand him a second and final term in 2020 so that we could be done with him now?

But we weren’t fated to have him dominate our politics. Republican voters chose that fate for us. If there’s another national tantrum after Trump loses in November, they’ll have chosen that too. The proper response when asked when the most optimal time for a second Trump term might have been is to reject the premise of the question and reflect that he never should have gotten a first.

That would make for a boring newsletter, though. So let’s concede the premise and go through some of the points above.

It’s true, undoubtedly, that Trump would have responded more aggressively than Biden did to a border surge. But what would that response have looked like? Would he have bombed Mexico? Instructed the Border Patrol to start shooting migrants? Resumed separating children from their parents while in custody? Thrown together a mass-deportation dragnet on the fly that ended up being enforced chaotically, with U.S. citizens getting tangled up in it?

In 2020, after four years of Trump-style enforcement, Gallup found public support for increasing immigration at its highest level since 1965. The dirty little secret of his first term as president is that his excesses galvanized interest in some of the left’s worst ideas, like “wokeness.” Even if you don’t care about the brutality of his immigration crackdown as a moral matter, you should care about what sort of long-term political backlash toward beefier enforcement it might generate.

How about inflation? As he approaches 80, Trump has decided that tariffs are a miracle cure to all of America’s economic problems. Despite this presidential cycle being dominated by the rising cost of living, he can’t resist arguing at every turn that making foreign goods much more expensive for U.S. consumers is somehow the key to prosperity. It’s easy to imagine him as president two years ago, when inflation was peaking, compounding the problem by talking himself into believing that new tariffs would somehow make things better.

And what of Ukraine? What does that war look like under President Trump?

There is a case that Russia wouldn’t have attacked in February 2022 with Trump in office, but it’s not the pat answer that he always gives about how foreign leaders are too afraid of him to behave aggressively. Vladimir Putin wasn’t going to go to his grave without trying to fulfill his ambition of restoring Russia’s empire; what he might have done, though, is bide his time to see if Trump would follow through on his intentions to withdraw from NATO.

For obvious reasons, Russia would have preferred to delay launching a major war in Eastern Europe until NATO was fractured and the United States was in retreat. Perhaps Putin would have waited and given Trump a chance to make that happen. But he wouldn’t have waited forever, especially knowing how reluctant Trump would be to sabotage his dream of better relations with Russia by siding squarely with Ukraine once the conflict began. There is no scenario in which a Trump White House arms Kyiv to the teeth for nearly three years for the sake of depleting the Russian military, and the Kremlin would realize it.

The supposed civic benefits of Trump winning in 2020 also aren’t as clear as one might think. 

As repulsive as the “Stop the Steal” hysteria was, for instance, it was illuminating in a singular way about how rotten Trump’s movement had become. Even its staunchest critics underestimated what it was capable of until Trump successfully rallied the American right behind a coup attempt playing out in plain sight.

America paid a terrible price for that insight, but we now have clarity about the threat that we wouldn’t have had if Trump had won the election. January 6 and what preceded it may come to be seen in time as having vaccinated Americans long-term against postliberalism before the ideology could gather force. Certainly, the prosecutions that followed inoculated some of Trump’s more excitable fans against political violence: Paranoia about infiltration by “the feds” has kept MAGA gatherings peaceful since early 2021, even after the horrendous assassination attempts against their candidate this summer.

One wonders at what dangerous moment his ugliest authoritarian impulses might have finally shown themselves in a second term had he won the election and there had been no “Stop the Steal.” Would the 2024 race have been overshadowed by Trump arguing that he shouldn’t have to leave power after all?

Is today’s newsletter on Earth 2 an impassioned argument that there’s no “national emergency” exception to the 22nd Amendment?

There is, finally, the question of how a second Trump victory might have affected Republicans’ affinity for populism. Maybe, as I said earlier, DeSantis would be en route to defeat this year and the commentariat would be murmuring about how populism is weaker than thought. It was Trump who was strong, you see, not populism.

But I don’t know: Nothing breeds success like success. In reality, Trump is 1 for 2 in national elections and at risk of ending up 1 for 3 at the hands of a Democrat who’s running one of the most vacuous campaigns in American history. Practically the entire argument for Reagan conservatives to vote for Kamala Harris this year, in fact, is that Republican voters might conclude from another defeat that Trumpism isn’t a winning path for their party.

Had Trump won in 2020, though, making him undefeated as a politician, that would be a hard argument to make—especially after the polling had predicted a comfortable Joe Biden victory. Trump had detected an untapped vein of popular support for populism that the smart set didn’t realize was there, his fans would say. He’d cracked the code for winning elections for the GOP.

DeSantis’ looming defeat would be dismissed as partly a “cyclical” problem, as parties almost never win three straight terms in the White House, and partly as a charisma problem. It’s not Trumpism that failed, it’s merely that the party had nominated the wrong messenger. Trumpism won the presidency twice in a row!

Like I say, nothing breeds success like success. There’s a chance this year, if not much of one, that Republicans will change course after a second consecutive defeat; there would be less of a chance of them doing so with eight years of President Trump under their belt, I think, even if his successor lost this fall. If you crave a saner American right, every Trump defeat is useful. This isn’t the worst timeline after all.