Would We Be Better Off If Trump Had Won in 2020?

A thought experiment: Would the country be better off if Donald Trump had won a second term as President in 2020? 

Don’t wince; I haven’t gone over to the dark side. But the idea has nagged at me over the past few months, as I’ve watched with alarm the increasingly likely prospect that Trump will again be the Republican nominee for President in 2024 — and could very possibly win reelection. After suffering through four years of the disastrous Trump presidency, and another four years of Trump as aggrieved President-in-exile, the thought of yet another four years of a country in thrall to his chaos and craziness is almost too much to bear.

But imagine, for a moment, an alternate universe in which Trump had actually won reelection in 2020 — in reality, rather than in his own fantasies. We would now be seeing the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Assuming that even Trump wouldn’t be able to circumvent the two-term limit set by the 22^nd Amendment, we would now be just a year and a half away from finally being rid of him.   

Now, I’m not naïve. A second term of Donald Trump as President would have been terrible for the country. The courts would be packed with even more right-wing judges — including, most likely, another Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice. We would have had to endure four more years of inaction — or outright regression — on vital issues like climate change, health care, and racial justice. Most tragically, the war in Ukraine would probably have been over quickly. Vladimir Putin, Trump’s pal, would have won. 

Bad stuff, to be sure. But at least one very important — maybe supremely important — consequence of Trump’s reign would have been averted: his efforts to undermine the very foundation of our democracy. 

Follow me here. If Trump had won fair and square in 2020 (as he came uncomfortably close to doing), he would have had no reason to challenge the election results. No cries of fraud at the polls. No wild conspiracy theories about phony ballots or rigged voting machines. No attempts to game our constitutional system and overturn a legitimate election. No election-denial movement. No January 6. 

To be sure, Trump’s reelection would have been a painful price to pay for ensuring the survival of American democracy. But it might have been worth it.

For one thing, it’s not at all certain that a second Trump term would have been as bad as the first. Without the need to rev up his base for another election campaign (or seek revenge for his “fraudulent” defeat in the last one), some of Trump’s worst instincts and dangerous stunts — blackmailing Ukraine, say, to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden — would have been blunted. Trump, as many have noted, is a lot better at running for President than actually being President, and with another four years in office, his incompetence and inattention to the job (see: the early days of the pandemic) would have become even more obvious. 

What’s more, with another four years in office Trump would have had much more trouble evading responsibility for the issues he uses regularly to slam Democrats. Inflation would be Trump’s problem, not Biden’s. Crime in the streets, the flood of illegal immigrants, the growing national debt — a lot harder to complain about when you’ve been running the show for eight years. All that and Roe v. Wade too — Democrats would almost surely have done even better in the 2022 off-year elections, likely retaining control of both houses of Congress and limiting the damage Trump could do in his last two years.

Most important, with Trump as a lame duck unalterably headed out the door, Republicans would be able to decouple from him more easily. Yes, he would still retain a rabid following, and his endorsement would still be sought after. But it’s hard to imagine Trump, the ultimate narcissist, investing too much of whatever political capital he has left for any candidate not named Donald Trump — much less for a Republican party to which he has no loyalty. Most important, both parties could return to the great American tradition of accepting the results of democratic elections. 

This is hardly the ideal scenario, I admit. Much better to have Joe Biden, after four successful years as President, sending Trump to a resounding defeat in 2024. If I could be confident of that happening, I would stop dreaming. But I’m not. And I can’t.