President Donald Trump will lose in 2020, according to his biographer and executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, Tim O’Brien.
O’Brien, who wrote TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald , explained why he believes Trump will not win his second term to MSNBC in an interview broadcast on Friday, Raw Story reports.
What prompted the discussion was a New York Times report published earlier this week, which — as it is based on Trump’s tax returns leaked to the publication — revealed that the president spent an entire decade in red, losing over $1 billion between 1985 and 1994. Perceived by many as a savvy businessman, Trump appears to have gone through quite a bit of turbulence in his career.
As Joy Reid pointed out, Trump ran in 2016 on a populist platform, promising to help the American working class. The public perception of him as a successful businessman who makes deals and gets things done may have helped Trump win in 2016, but the image the president had been cultivating for years may have been shattered by the NYT report which paints an unflattering picture of a struggling, incompetent businessman.
According to Tim O’Brien, this could play a key role in 2020 and make matters more complicated for President Trump, perhaps even becoming a major obstacle. The writer described Trump’s 2016 economic populism as “one of the great hoaxes” that the president had perpetrated, posing as “a friend of the little guy,” going on to suggest that the president can no longer count on that asset.
“I think one of the great hoaxes he perpetrated during the 2016 campaign was that he was a friend of the little guy and that he was an adept businessman who was going to shake up Washington and make sure Washington worked on behalf of the forgotten American. And the reality is Donald Trump doesn’t care at all about average Americans.”
To prove his point, O’Brien discussed Trump’s fiscal policy, stating that his overhaul of the tax code had helped the rich, instead of helping the working class. Furthermore, according to the biographer, Trump’s other economic policies — such as trade and tariffs — have also hurt the American people.
The ‘great hoax’ that Trump is for the little guy will come crashing down in 2020 — in the key states he needs: biographer https://t.co/fIBMUFdlEF
— Raw Story (@RawStory) May 11, 2019
Due to tariffs that Trump has imposed on Chinese goods, the prices have gone up, according to the writer, who concluded for MSNBC that the president’s economic policy will hurt Americans in the states that he had won in 2016, largely by campaigning on economic populism.
Because of this, three swing states that carried Trump to victory in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — could go to the Democrats in 2020, according to O’Brien.