President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are united by the conviction that the American economy no longer works for all Americans—a populist consensus that increasingly challenges America’s free-market system. But do their claims have any factual basis? In a new paper for the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, AEI Economic Policy Studies Director Michael R. Strain marshals data showing that the American Dream in fact remains alive and well.

One major source of this misinformed pessimism about the future of our country and the world is the pervasiveness of climate catastrophism on the left. In testimony before the Senate Committee on the Budget, AEI climate expert Roger Pielke Jr. debunks one aspect of this hysteria by showing that there is little scientific basis linking human-caused climate change with droughts around the world.

Similarly, there is little basis for the America First foreign policy that Trump and his allies propose for his second term. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Johns Hopkins professor and AEI scholar Hal Brands outlines the disastrous consequences for the world and ultimately the US if it abandoned its leadership of the free world.

Nonetheless, these viewpoints remain appealing and electorally viable because much of the American public remains mired in uncertainty, apathy, or outright pessimism. Director of AEI’s Survey Center on American Life Daniel A. Cox, Kyle Gray, and Kelsey Eyre Hammond document these findings and others about the political climate from a new survey of 6,500 adults designed and conducted by the center.

This pessimism presents a political opportunity for Trump in November, but would he be able to deliver genuine policy results for his new coalition? AEI Director of Domestic Policy Studies Matthew Continetti uses the parallel of Richard Nixon to explore how a second Trump term might succeed, or fail, domestically.