Exploring Trump’s alternate reality pitch

In addition to falsely insisting that he did not lose the 2020 election, former President Donald J. Trump has advanced a series of related theories that focus on one question: What would the world have been like if he had remained in office?

Mr. Trump, in meetings And Job interviewshas repeatedly claimed — more than a dozen times since December, by a rough count — that three separate events, both in the United States and abroad, are a product of the 2020 election.

“There would have been no attack on Israel. There would have been no attack on Ukraine. And then we wouldn’t have had inflation,” he says stated at a meeting in January in Las Vegas. The following month in South Carolina, he unfounded claim that the Democrats had admitted that.

Politicians routinely deal with what-if questions, which are impossible to prove or disprove with certainty. But Mr. Trump’s assumptions underscore the ways in which he often makes dubious claims without explanation and that may not be supported by the broader context.

And unlike simply attacking an opponent’s reputation or making a campaign promise, such alternate realities have the advantage of being untestable.

“People are already grappling with how to hold elected officials accountable,” said Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University who has researched 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 settled before I even come to power. Needs to be arranged. It would never have happened. And even the Democrats admit that if Trump were president, that would have been the case – Putin would have listened to me 100 percent.”
— during a January rally in New Hampshire

Mr. Trump’s speculative idea that he could have simply stopped President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from invading Ukraine is not necessarily borne out by history.

The circumstances that led to Mr Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 date back many years. Mr Putin has insisted that Ukraine is fundamentally part of Russia, ignoring evidence to the contrary – including the views of most Ukrainians. And he has long criticized NATO’s expansion, including the addition of former Soviet republics, and the prospect of Ukraine one day joining.

Asked to elaborate on Mr. Trump’s argument, his campaign simply pointed to a 2022 poll in which 62 percent of respondents answered ‘no’ when asked whether they believed Mr. Putin would turn against Ukraine if Mr. Trump were president.

Still, experts see no realistic scenario in which Mr. Trump would have stopped Mr. Putin from advancing on 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 slide toward Western influence — as a means of de-escalation. But he noted that lawmakers and allies would almost certainly have opposed such a position.

Juliet Kaarbo, 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 not provided a reasonable causal chain connecting him as president to an alternative outcome.”

In a recent magazine articleMs. Kaarbo and her colleagues partly reject the theory, concluding that “it is reasonable to argue that Trump’s re-election would not have prevented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Instead, they argue why Trump remaining in power would likely have made the West’s concerted response to the invasion “incredible” and might have contributed to an early Russian victory. They cite his cynical attitude toward NATO and his request that the Ukrainian president help investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., his political rival, before the 2020 election.

“Although Trump’s record on Russia and Putin has been mixed (after all, his administration continued some sanctions on Russia and sent some military weaponry to Ukraine), Trump at times opposed some of these policies and was very supportive of Putin and very negative. towards Ukraine,” Ms. Kaarbo said in an email.

A former national security adviser to Mr. Trump, John R. Bolton, offered a similar view in a 2022 interview after the invasion.

“We have imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs and several others over their sales of S400 anti-aircraft systems to other countries,” said Bolton, who has become a critic of his former boss. “But in almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it and saying we were being too harsh. The fact is that he hardly knew where Ukraine was.”

He added: “It is simply not right that Trump’s behavior has somehow deterred the Russians.”

WHAT WAS SAID

“The horrific attack on Israel would never have happened. They wouldn’t have even thought about doing something like that if President Trump was sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.”
— during a rally this month in Virginia

There are no clear Trump-era policies that would have prevented Hamas from carrying out the October 7 attack on Israel, experts say. His campaign did not elaborate on his theory, and aside from his attempt to blame his successor, he has said very little about the conflict.

At best, Mr. Trump can argue that there was a sense of calm in the Middle East during his presidency, though that argument has its flaws.

“What we can say that might support Trump’s claim is that we have not seen 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, a organization that has criticized Hamas. He added that the unpredictability of Trump’s foreign policy could theoretically have worked to deter adversaries in the Middle East from fomenting conflict.

But, Mr. Schanzer said, that calm was deceptive: Hamas was building up its military infrastructure at the time.

Others are more adamant that Mr. Trump’s argument has no 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, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

He noted that the Trump administration facilitated this Abraham chords, in which Israel normalized relations with several Arab countries. “But the downside of the Abraham Accords was also the marginalization of the Palestinian issue,” Mr Sachs said.

Mr. Trump sometimes makes his claim while insist that Iran, who has supported Hamas over the years, had less access to money due to the sanctions imposed during his government. But that is not evidence that Hamas could not or would not have carried out the attack as a result.

Although Trump-era sanctions left Iran with fewer resources, “that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped financing Hamas,” said Mr. Schanzer, a former terrorist financing analyst at the Treasury Department.

Iran’s support “is certainly relevant to Hamas because of its ability to carry out this attack,” Mr. Sachs said. But he said the attack was not an expensive operation that would necessarily require real-time financing from Iran.

“There is nothing that Trump or 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, inflation wouldn’t have happened.”
— during a rally in Georgia this month

Mr Trump’s claim ignores the reality that the coronavirus pandemic undoubtedly helped drive up prices – meaning inflation was all but inevitable no matter who won the 2020 election – and he has not explained in detail how he would have averted inflation. The wave started in early 2021 and peaked in mid-2022.

“The 2020-2022 pandemic caused massive disruption to supply chains around the world and made it more difficult to produce and ship goods over extended periods of time,” said Tarek Hassan, an economics professor at Boston University. “This led to what we call cost inflation in all major economies, causing the prices of goods to rise. Neither outgoing President Trump in 2020 nor President Biden had much influence on this outcome.”

But analysts have attributed many factors to the upturn, including government policies. Research shows that pandemic relief packages signed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden played a role in boosting consumption.

Three notable developments before January 2021 fueled inflation, said Campbell R. Harvey, professor of finance at Duke University.

In 2020, as the pandemic took root, the Federal Reserve began buying mortgage bonds and government debt in large quantities – or what is known as quantitative easing. Are balance that year rose from $4 trillion to $7 trillion in assets. At the same time, lawmakers and Mr. Trump spent trillions to respond to Covid and its economic fallout, driving up the federal deficit. And housing costs and rents began to rise. (The average price of homes sold nationally increased by 14.6 percent compared to the second quarter of 2020 until the first quarter of 2021.)

“When you put that together, it’s a challenge to argue that there would be no inflation,” Mr Harvey said. “But again, we don’t know the counterfactual scenario.”

Mr Trump has suggested that if elected this year he would lower inflation, although economists say some of his proposals – including tariffs on imported goods and his calls for massive deportations – could have the opposite effect.