Aside from falsely insisting that he did not lose the 2020 election, former President Donald J. Trump has promoted a number of similar theories centered on one question: What would the world have looked like if he had remained in office were?
Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed in rallies and interviews — more than a dozen times since December, by a rough count — that three separate events both in the United States and abroad were a result of the 2020 election.
“There would have been no attack on Israel. There would have been no attack on Ukraine. And we wouldn’t have had inflation,” he said during a rally in Las Vegas in January. The next month in South Carolina, he baselessly claimed that Democrats had admitted this.
Politicians regularly deal with what-if scenarios that cannot be proven or disproven with any certainty. But Mr. Trump’s assumptions underscore the way he often makes questionable claims without explanation that may not be supported by the broader context.
And unlike simply attacking an opponent’s record or making a campaign promise, such alternative realities have the advantage of being unverifiable.
“People are already struggling to hold elected officials accountable,” said Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University who has studied campaign promises and accountability. “And what’s super interesting here is that there’s no way to hold anyone accountable at all because there’s no way to measure any of this.”
Here’s a closer look at his claims.
WHAT WAS SAID
“I will ensure that the terrible war between Russia and Ukraine is resolved before I even take office. Needs to be clarified. It would never have happened. And even the Democrats admit that if Trump were president, Putin would have listened to me 100 percent.”
— during a January rally in New Hampshire
Mr. Trump’s speculative assumption that he could have easily dissuaded Russian President Vladimir V. Putin from invading Ukraine is not necessarily borne out by history.
The conditions that triggered Mr. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 date back many years. Mr Putin has claimed that Ukraine is fundamentally part of Russia, ignoring evidence to the contrary – including the views of most Ukrainians. And he has long had concerns about NATO expansion, including the inclusion of former Soviet republics, as well as the prospect that Ukraine might one day join.
When asked to elaborate on Mr. Trump’s reasoning, his campaign referred only to a 2022 poll in which 62 percent of respondents answered “no” when asked whether they believed Mr Putin would take action against Ukraine if Mr. Trump were president.
Still, experts see no realistic scenario in which Mr. Trump would have stopped Mr. Putin from taking action against Ukraine.
“There was no significant change in Russian policy because Trump was nice to Putin,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Kupchan said he could imagine a situation in which Mr. Trump would have encouraged Ukraine to capitulate to Mr. Putin — and reverse its tilt toward Western influence — as a means of de-escalation. But he noted that lawmakers and allies would almost certainly have resisted such a position.
Juliet Kaarbo, a professor of foreign policy at the University of Edinburgh, expressed similar skepticism. “Trump’s claim is not based on solid assumptions,” she said. “He (or others) have provided no reasonable chain of causation linking his presidency to an alternative outcome.”
In a recent journal article, Ms. Kaarbo and her colleagues partially reject the theory, concluding that “it is reasonable to claim that Trump’s re-election would not have prevented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Instead, they argue why Mr Trump’s remaining in power would likely have made the West’s collective response to the invasion “implausible” and may have contributed to an early Russian victory. They cite his cynical attitude toward NATO and his request for the Ukrainian president to help investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., his political rival, ahead of the 2020 election.
“Although Trump’s record toward Russia and Putin was mixed (his administration eventually continued some sanctions against Russia and sent some military weapons to Ukraine), Trump himself at times opposed some of these measures and was very positive toward Putin and very negative toward Ukraine “said Ms. Kaarbo in an email.
A former national security adviser to Mr. Trump, John R. Bolton, expressed a similar view in a 2022 interview after the invasion.
“We have imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs and several others for selling S400 anti-aircraft systems to other countries,” said Mr. Bolton, who has become a critic of his former boss. “But in almost all cases the sanctions were imposed because Trump complained about them and said we were too tough. The fact is that he hardly knew where Ukraine was.”
He added: “It’s simply not true that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians.”
WHAT WAS SAID
“The terrible attack on Israel would never have happened. They wouldn’t have even thought of doing something like this if President Trump had been sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.”
— during a rally this month in Virginia
There is no clear Trump-era policy that would have prevented Hamas from carrying out its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, experts say. He did not elaborate on his theory during his campaign, and other than trying to blame his successor, he has said very little about the conflict.
At best, Mr. Trump can claim that there has been a sense of calm in the Middle East during his presidency, although that argument has its weaknesses.
“What we can say that might support Trump’s claim is that we have not seen any significant conflict between Israel and Hamas during his time in office,” said Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an organization that who did this criticized Hamas. He added that the unpredictability of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy could, in theory, have helped deter Middle East adversaries from fomenting conflict.
But this calm was deceptive, said Mr. Schanzer: Hamas was building up its military infrastructure during this time.
Others are adamant that Mr. Trump’s argument is without merit.
“In the case of the Hamas attack, there is nothing his administration could or would have done differently than the Biden administration,” said Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
He noted that the Trump administration facilitated the Abraham Accords, through which Israel normalized relations with several Arab countries. “But the downside of the Abraham Accords was also the marginalization of the Palestinian issue,” said Sachs.
Mr. Trump sometimes claims that Iran, which has supported Hamas over the years, has had less access to money because of sanctions imposed during his time in office. But that is not evidence that Hamas could not or would not have carried out the attack.
While Trump-era sanctions actually gave Iran fewer resources, “that doesn’t mean they stopped funding Hamas,” said Mr. Schanzer, a former terror financing analyst at the Treasury Department.
Iran’s support “is certainly relevant to Hamas given its ability to carry out this attack,” Mr. Sachs said. But he said the attack was not an expensive operation that necessarily required real-time funding from Iran.
“There was nothing Trump, Biden or anyone else could have done to specifically stop Hamas from carrying out the attack,” he said.
WHAT WAS SAID
“If you think about it, there would have been no inflation.”
— during a rally in Georgia this month
Mr Trump’s claim ignores the fact that the coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly helped drive up prices – meaning inflation was all but inevitable regardless of who won the 2020 election – and he did not explain in detail how he could have prevented inflation. The increase began in early 2021 and peaked in mid-2022.
“The 2020-2022 pandemic caused massive disruptions to supply chains around the world, making it difficult to produce and ship goods over an extended period of time,” said Tarek Hassan, an economics professor at Boston University. “This led to so-called cost-push inflation across all major economies, which led to a spike in the prices of goods. Neither outgoing President Trump in 2020 nor President Biden had much influence on this outcome.”
But analysts have blamed many factors for the increase, including government policies. Research suggests that pandemic relief packages signed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have helped boost consumption.
Three notable developments before January 2021 helped boost inflation, said Campbell R. Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke University.
In 2020, as the pandemic spread, the Federal Reserve began buying mortgage bonds and Treasury bonds in large quantities – what is known as quantitative easing. Its balance sheet rose from $4 trillion to over $7 trillion this year. At the same time, lawmakers and Mr. Trump spent trillions responding to Covid and its economic impact, causing the federal deficit to rise. And housing costs and rents began to rise. (The average price of homes sold nationwide increased 14.6 percent from the second quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021.)
“When you put that together, it’s difficult to claim that there wouldn’t be inflation,” Harvey said. “But here too we simply don’t know the counterfactual.”
Mr. Trump has suggested he would lower inflation if elected this year, although economists say some of his proposals — including tariffs on imported goods and his calls for huge deportations — could potentially have the opposite effect.
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2024-03-16 19:09:02
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