Claims that former US President Donald Trump poses a threat to the country’s democracy have been weakened by the legacy of his first term, historian Niall Ferguson said on Friday.
“I think this whole argument that Donald Trump was going to end democracy and bring about some kind of American fascism has been blown to the wind because of the way his first term went. Remember, all these things were said in 2016, that Trump was a tyrant,” Ferguson told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the Ambrosetti Forum, an annual economic conference in Italy.
“The great weakness, in my view, of the Trump case has always been his conduct on January 6, 2021, and his attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, which I thought meant the end of his political career. I was completely wrong, he’s back,” Ferguson continued.
On January 6, 2021, dramatic scenes of rioting, vandalism, and looting took place at the U.S. Capitol, sparking protests over Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
A 2022 special committee report found that Trump repeatedly tried to “delegitimize the electoral process,” made false claims about the legitimacy of the outcome and committed a “dereliction” of duty by refusing to call off the mob.
“I think the key point to make here is that the system successfully contained Trump’s impulses in 2020 and 2021, and I think it would contain them again if he were just the first person since Grover Cleveland to have two non-consecutive terms as president,” Ferguson said, referring to another former U.S. president.
Ferguson, a senior Milbank family fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of books including “The Ascent of Money,” said that despite this, ordinary American voters would now view Democrats’ claims that Trump threatens democracy as less compelling than they once did — not least because they have already experienced a Trump presidency.
Trump remains under federal criminal investigation for election interference. He has been embroiled in numerous larger scandals, including being found guilty of sexual abuse in a civil case, being found guilty in a case involving bribes to porn star Stormy Daniels, and being ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in a civil fraud case.
Ferguson told CNBC on Friday that Trump’s opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, would have a hard time accepting the fact that she served as Joe Biden’s vice president.
He argued that this was because, even though the U.S. economy has continued to grow strongly, many voters are dissatisfied with rising inflation and increased legal and illegal immigration.Lation in recent years.
Regarding the economic implications of the upcoming vote, Ferguson said the significant differences between Trump and Harris lie in their policy proposals on taxation and regulation.
This week, Harris proposed a 28% tax on long-term capital gains for households with annual incomes of $1 million or more, lower than the 39.6% rate Biden proposed in his fiscal 2025 budget. The top rate for long-term capital gains, or assets held for more than a year, is currently 20%; Trump has proposed reducing it to 15%.
Whoever wins the November election will face a “massive fiscal problem,” Ferguson continued, describing the size of the U.S. deficit as “unsustainable.”
“Trump is not going to solve the problem by raising taxes. I think Harris would do it by raising taxes. Trump’s argument is that he can solve the problem by increasing the growth rate. And he has, in a sense, an argument to make, because the economy under Trump has done well in the sense that it has grown and it has not been inflationary,” Ferguson said.
— CNBC’s Rebecca Picciotto contributed to this report.
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