Without Pandemic, Trump Probably Would Have Won the 2020 Election
What if, in 2020, there was no pandemic? Would Donald Trump win re-election? His pre-pandemic ads were pretty confident.
If swing voters applied the same standards to the Presidency in 2020 that they did in 2020, all they care about is the short-term impact of the economy on their pocketbooks. Perceived inflation was the central issue in the 2024 campaign. Voters didn’t care about corruption charges against Trump, even convictions for felonious behavior. They didn’t care about his obnoxious, insulting comments or threats.
If Trump won the 2020 election, his second term would likely have been far less radical than his second term starting in 2025 because he and his allies would have had less time to plan for it.
It will take some time for history to answer these questions if it ever does. The smoke will clear within years or decades, as principals publish their memoirs and historians study the intricacies of this era.
As a chaotic one-term president, Trump had less long-term impact than other one-term presidents John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Joe Biden, who oversaw the passage of major legislation and dealt decisively with major international crises and movements.
The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board abandoned Trump in the last year of his first term. It was quite influential with people in the financial services industry.
But by the third year of Joe Biden’s second term, the WSJ was promoting an alternative, any alternative, to Trump. First, it liked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. When his campaign capsized, it supported or wrote very positive things about Nikki Haley as an alternative to Trump. When she lost, the Journal blamed Trump’s nomination victory on Democrats for over-prosecuting him and making him a marytr.
In the fall 2024 campaign, perhaps on orders from publisher Rupert Murdoch, the WSJ was far more critical of Kamala Harris than it was of Trump. The harsh criticism of Trump could no longer be found on the WSJ’s opinion pages.
In Trump’s second term, if he maintains physical health, holds together his coalition and makes methodical and strategic rather than rash and impulsive decisions, he might raise his stature to that of a major change-maker in American society.
