Ian Bremmer Says Trump Running in ‘First Depression of Our Lifetime,’ Odds of Winning ‘A Coin Flip’
The odds President Donald Trump will prevail over former Vice President Joe Biden in November amount to “a coin flip,” Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer said Wednesday, despite overseeing the first depression in nearly 100 years. He added that the election will be “unprecedentedly nasty,” leaving many Americans feeling cheated after it is over.
“We talk about national polls for reasons that are unbeknownst to me, because we do not have a national election, we have swing states that matter vastly more,” Bremmer said in an interview with Bloomberg Daybreak’s Francine Lacqua. “He will be running for reelection in the first depression of our lifetime, economically. That’s clearly going to hurt him a lot, but there’s going to be social distancing going on in this pandemic very much still in November, which means you’ll have lower turnout, and the enthusiasm from Trump’s base is not as wide as Biden’s base, but it’s much sharper.”
Bremmer, who has said he votes for candidates from both political parties, holds a PhD. from Stanford University and founded the Eurasia Group in 1998. He added that it would hurt Biden’s chances of winning if his public appearances do not improve, especially in debates against Trump.
“It is pretty close,” he said. “We don’t know how Biden’s going to hold up in debates, how he’s going to hold up on the campaign trail. He’s not looked great the last few times I have seen him on television, frankly. We don’t know what kind of measures Trump will take to politicize the investigations against both Biden and his son, Hunter, especially as it relates to China. We don’t know exactly what the Russians will do. We do know that Trump has no interest in trying to ensure that the elections are secure against external intervention. So you’re asking me here in May, what we can say is that this election will be unprecedentedly nasty in the modern era, and we also know that a lot of Americans are going to feel like it is rigged even before they go to vote. That’s not exactly what you want to see when we need legislation from our government.”
He added that even if Biden wins the election, the “America first” movement that began under Trump could get even stronger.
“I think the unilateralist moment in the United States is actually going to get stronger, and the recognition that existing international institutions, that we set up after World War II, increasingly do not reflect the nature of the geopolitical order, and they don’t reflect American interests as well as they used to,” Bremmer said. “That’s going to be a problem for a lot of other countries in the world.”
Watch above via Bloomberg.
