One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole. Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed.
Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as pure magnificence. On Wednesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, tried echoing Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
And Trump himself, in his Tuesday night victory speech, reflected wistfully on his time in office as one in which “our country was coming together.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole.
Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as pure magnificence.
And part of what made it a nightmare was the fact that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis with denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness — focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good.
In the early stages of the pandemic, as scientists raced to figure out exactly how the virus spread, blunt measures were required: engaging in social distancing, blocking high-risk interactions as much as possible.
And once researchers and medical officials keyed in on the virus’s airborne character, it became possible to limit its spread by getting people to wear masks, which was annoying but by no means a severe hardship.
It’s well worth reading a timeline of Trump’s statements amid the growing pandemic, which some estimates suggest had already caused around half a million excess deaths by the time he left office.
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Americans have the attention span of a dead squirrel.