America heads to the polls this November, with Donald Trump and Joe Biden set to go head-to-head for the second time. But where would we be if Trump had won a second term in the 2020 election?
“I think it would be a better and safer world,” author and Cambridge politics professor David Runciman told audiences at Hay Festival.
Taking part in The News Review, an event held in partnership with The Independent, Runciman posed a “counterfactual” situation, “which I think is worth thinking about”.
“Without Covid, Trump would have won in 2020, almost certainly, there’s overwhelming evidence. Try and think of a world in which Trump won then – I think it would be a better and safer world.
“It might sound odd. Who knows what would have happened with the invasion of Ukraine. Nonetheless, Trump in a second term would have been a lame duck, and he would have felt gratified,” suggested Runciman.
Biden won 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232 in the 2020 election, but the vote was followed by an ugly period in which Trump refused to concede defeat, which culminated in a mob of his supporters breaking into the Capitol building in Washington DC on 6 January.
“Trump being defeated, believing he wasn’t defeated, having four years with the people around him to plan what he’ll do second time round and come back, is a completely different ball game,” said Runciman.
“Also had Trump won in 2020, what would we be facing now? It would have been a new generation of politicians coming through. America would be moving beyond Trump. Now, which way that would have gone I don’t know. Joe Biden wouldn’t be running. There would have been a generational shift in American politics.”
He added that Biden’s victory in 2020 may have “spared us Trump”, but “now I find myself thinking what it did was it froze everything, and we’re running that story again, and it’s astonishing that it’s a rerun”.
Runciman was speaking alongside American writer Sarah Churchwell and novelist Lionel Shriver in a conversation chaired by The Independent’s chief books critic Martin Chilton.
Responding to Runciman’s hypothetical scenario, Churchwell argued that “your counterfactual presumes that at the end of eight years, Trump would have peacefully stopped being president”.
Runciman said he believed Trump would attempt this, but “I also don’t believe that American institutions would allow it”. He added: “American politics would now be moving on. For me, the horror is that we’re not moving on.”
America’s election takes place on Tuesday 5 November, four months after the United Kingdom’s 4 July general election. Trump is currently embroiled in a criminal trial in which he is charged with 34 counts of fraud, in relation to the payment of hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels. The case makes him the first former US president to be tried for a crime.
Elsewhere in the conversation at Hay Festival, Churchwell said that “Trump’s brain is rotting in front of us” and claimed it was “dangerous and wrong” to compare him to Biden.
Hay Festival continues until 2 June; hayfestival.com
