He's sitting third overall in the favoured odds to win the 2024 US election (after Kamala Harris and then Joe Biden), but James Goodman, distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark, says there's little to no chance of Donald Trump running again.
Why? Because he is simply too lazy to put in the work required, he told Jim Mora.
Photo: Screengrab / YouTube / The White House
“I think that Trump, on top of all sorts of other things wrong with him, is lazy as can be and he’s not going to actually do the work that would be required to keep a movement going or to run for president again.
“He’s just going to, with as little effort as is humanly possible, try to punish enemies and reward supporters.
Forces, decades in the making, which Trump tapped into are still there, but Goodman believes Biden is making headway on remaking a more stable country.
“The lid is part way on, and depending on the success that Biden has with helping to bring the virus under control and helping the economic recovery that the lower middle class and the lower class especially most desperately need. I think that maybe the lid can go farther on.
Biden must bring back some of the voters who went with Trump in the last election, he says.
“He is very much in the mainstream, he may in fact begin to peel off, besides those people that he already peeled off to win the election.
“Right now, he’s flying high there has not been a president in a very long time with a 60 percent approval rating.”
Many of those he must appeal to have been voting against their economic interests, Goodman says.
“This has not been an easy series of decades for a lot of people, there are people who have been spinning their wheels and their families have been spinning their wheels for years.
“And yet they’ve still been voting Republicans on cultural issues, on racial issues on not wanting the country to change in ways that the country is invariably going to change.”
Biden’s $2 trillion stimulus plan seems to have broad appeal among Democrats and Republicans alike, Goodman says.
“The popularity of that stimulus that he is proposing is running at about 60 to 65 percent. So, he is saying this is a bipartisan stimulus plan even if Republicans in Washington DC are not behind it.
"Ronald Reagan did this, he leaped over Democratic opposition in Washington and got people behind his programme.”
And the US is in desperate need of a programme to tackle its stark inequalities, Goodman says.
“We have to do better than we’ve done, because you have a nation as wealthy as the United States, as rich in resources as the United States, that has such stark inequality that is sinking in all sorts of basic metrics of quality of life, if you can’t do better than that then what hope is there for just about anyone?
“If the poor are always going to be poor in a country as rich as the United States, then we’re in deep trouble.
“Because we’re going to have either revolution or we’re going to have authoritarianism. Something has to give on one end or another.”
