What might have been had Trump’s 2020 Election Night victory-claim stuck.
Photo: Evan Vucci/AP Photo
When Donald Trump’s megabill passed the Senate, consummating nearly a half-year of aggressively reactionary policymaking by the 47th president, a colleague commented that “it’s like the Biden presidency never happened.” That’s true in the sense that between Trump’s executive orders and the megabill, it’s hard to find a single stone unmoved from where he found it when he took office in January. But on reflection, it might be quite literally true. The country, and even the Democratic Party, would very likely have been in better condition today had Trump been reelected in 2020 over Joe Biden.
By that, I don’t mean Trump reversing his 2020 election defeat in Congress, the courts, or via the Capitol riot; I mean had he gained 77,000 more votes in four battleground states and hence won a majority in the Electoral College. Barring some lurid scandal, Democrats (with scattered dissents) would have accepted Trump’s victory as legitimate just as they did after his 2016 win, which similarly came with a national popular-vote deficit.
At first blush, the idea that things would be better had Trump been peacefully re-inaugurated on January 20, 2021, seems nuts. But we can all agree it would have been good if there had been no “stop the steal” rally, no gatherings of Christian-right extremists blowing shofars, no Capitol riot, no shattered windows, no dead or injured police officers, and no enduring right-wing myth of a rigged election. A Trump win would have also meant no second Trump impeachment, then no federal criminal prosecution of Trump for his involvement in an attempted insurrection. These developments, while momentarily satisfying to Democrats, did virtually nothing to limit Trump’s political support while doing a lot to intensify polarization.
Moreover, think of the burdens Trump would have inherited as a second-term president taking office in 2021. He would not have been able to hand off the final stages of the coronavirus epidemic, and all the unpopular and unpleasant measures it involved, most of which he had originally supported. He would have almost certainly become the “inflation president,” too. The supply-chain interruptions that boosted prices under Biden would have afflicted a different president just as surely. And even if you attribute the worst of the inflation to overspending by a Democratic Congress in the American Rescue Plan, Trump would have almost certainly backed similar stimulus measures. Remember how avid he was to mail people large “stimulus checks” with his name on them? Being a Republican, he might have doubled down on red ink with tax cuts, too. And if you think the 2022 Build Back Better legislation somehow made inflation worse, the odds are pretty good a second-term President Trump would have finally redeemed his pledge to enact his own infrastructure bill with lots of big, showy projects. Indeed, a reelected Donald Trump might have had to compromise with a Democratic House and/or Senate, making any of the sort of legislative coups he has pursued in 2025 impossible.
A reelected Trump would not have had four years to plan a scorched-earth second term with audacious power grabs far beyond anything he tried from 2017 to ’21. While he might have been more successful than Biden in limiting border crossings from 2021 to ’25, he also would have probably been unable to muster the political support in or beyond his party for the mass-deportation effort he’s now undertaking.
A reelected Trump would have been in office when the Supreme Court majority he created during his first term overturned Roe v. Wade, making his responsibility for that disaster clearer to the whole country. The 2022 midterms would have been a referendum on cumulative disgruntlement with Trump; second-term midterms are almost always calamitous for the party of the incumbent. Had Trump come out of 2020 with control of either congressional chamber, he would have almost certainly lost it in 2022.
Most of all, a Trump reelection in 2020 would have made the 2024 election in whose shadow we stand a very different proposition. There would have been no Trump campaign of vengeance to rouse the MAGA faithful and desensitize the public to his failings. His heir apparent would have been a two-term vice-president, Mike Pence, a milquetoast low-charisma politician who would have almost certainly attracted at least as large a field of challengers as Trump himself did. There would have been intense wrangling over the future of the GOP, of conservatism, and of Trump’s own MAGA movement (much as there will likely be in 2028). Republicans might have entered the general election “in disarray,” knowing that no major party had won three straight presidential elections since the 1980s.
The effect of this scenario on the Democrats of 2024 would have been even more dramatic. A defeated Joe Biden would have gracefully ended his political career in 2021. Kamala Harris would have suffered two debilitating losses in the 2020 presidential cycle, once as a presidential nomination candidate and once as a veep nominee; no one would have considered her a serious candidate for 2024. Democrats could have had a relatively harmonious nominating contest, finally overcoming the divisions the Clinton-Sanders and Biden-Sanders battles reflected, uniting around an agenda for undoing the damage Trump had done to the country. The Democratic Party would not be defending record inflation, uncontrolled immigration, too much “wokeness,” a mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan, and all sorts of other problems. No one would be writing exposés about an aging Democratic president losing his grip but hanging grimly on to power. Democrats could have managed a fresh start and a likely 2024 win without losing ground with key constituencies or earning the bitter enmity of so many unhappy young people.
The counter-factual narrative is instructive. The alignment of a Democratic administration with all sorts of terrible events, some beyond any president’s power to control, made a Trump comeback doubly possible by making his own first term seem better than it was at the time and by making him the lesser of evils. And now the Trump comeback has led to horrific policies that will be exceptionally hard to reverse; a government and a judiciary full of deeply entrenched MAGA loyalists who have been rewarded for lawlessness; a Republican Party devoted to hatefulness and extremism; and a Democratic Party, with no clear sense of direction, full of bitter recriminations over what went wrong last year. Would it have been worse had Trump won in 2020? I don’t think so.
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