Wait, Who Was President In 2020, Again?

Republicans are trying to trick people into thinking Joe Biden was President in 2020, and some actually believe their own falsehoods.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks during a drive-in campaign rally at Heinz Field on November 02, 2020 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images. Logo via Biden campaign.

If we’ve learned anything from the Trump years, it’s that Republicans love their myths…and they revere their mythmakers.

Ever since he came down that escalator eight years ago and began spouting racist lies, Trump has filled this seemingly unquenchable thirst within the Republican Party for a mythic figure built on falsehoods and contradictions.

So the failed businessman with 4+ bankruptcies and 3 marriages under his belt somehow sold himself as a successful businessman and devoted family man.

And the man who paid off an adult film star for her silence and was found liable for sexual assault, not to mention being twice impeached and four times criminally indicted, has become the overwhelming choice of the religious right evangelical movement.

And the GOP eagerly ate it up.

This up-is-down and down-is-up mythologizing is nothing new for the party of “fiscal discipline” that blows up the deficit whenever in power, of “limited government” that forces women and girls to give birth against their will, and of “law and order” that rallies behind a criminal and con man as its standard bearer.

But now as the 2024 election heats up—an election that looks like a re-match between Trump and President Biden—a whole new myth has taken root on the right: that Joe Biden was president in 2020.

Come again?

The chaos of 2020

Who can forget 2020? 

The global pandemic that led to the shuttering of workplaces and schools in the name of public health. 

The unrest on the streets of many of our cities in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. 

Republicans typically blame Democrats for such things, so it is inconvenient that it all happened on a Republican president’s watch.

No problem! 

As Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida demonstrated in a recent post on X, just blame it on Biden and muddy the waters about who exactly was president during that time.

X’s community note fact-check below the post explained:

“All 50 states governed by both major parties closed schools in 2020, 10 months before Biden assumed office.”

The fact that Donalds’s post is still up, even after having been thoroughly debunked, speaks to the intentionality of the deception here.

But it’s only the latest in a string of attempts by Republicans to pin the chaos of 2020 on Joe Biden rather than his predecessor.

Blaming 2020 on Biden

In the lead-up to the November 2022 elections, the National Republican Campaign Committee used footage of unrest in the streets during Trump’s term in 2020 in an ad to try to impugn Joe Biden’s presidency.

As CNN’s fact-check makes clear:

At least three of the images in the Republican ad were actually taken in 2020, during the Trump administration, not during the Biden administration in 2021…

It’s clearly deceptive to throw sensational images from the Trump days into this mix.

When confronted about the deceptive inclusion of Trump-era clips in an anti-Biden ad, NRCC spokesman Rick Berg “was unapologetic about the ad’s use of images from 2020” according to CNN.

Of course he was.

In February 2023, Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra tweeted a Wall St. Journal article exposing abuse stemming from the enhanced pandemic unemployment benefits signed into law by Donald Trump in 2020.

Except, Feensstra blamed it on Biden, with a little retweet assist from Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Aaron Rupar correctly noted:

And yes, the post is still live. 

For all the intentional conflating of the Biden and Trump presidencies by Republicans, others seem to simply just believe their own BS, even bringing their deranged misconceptions into committee hearing rooms.

Take Rep. Lauren Boebert, who tried to call out Biden administration employees for teleworking while on vacation. 

Her claim:

“We have 25% of federal employees not logging into work!”

Except, as the witness pointed out…

“You’re basing that on 2020, which is the last administration and I can’t speak to that.”

And then there was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tried to blame Biden’s border policy for the tragic fentanyl overdoses of two young men.

Except…

And it’s not just elected Republicans who do it. Remember Elon Musk’s “bombshell” Twitter Files?

Musk’s big reveal was supposed “evidence” that the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by demanding Twitter suppress an unflattering story about Hunter back in October 2020.

Putting aside the fact that that’s not how the First Amendment works, this was a total self-own by Musk:

“Acting under orders from the government,” he said.

Of course, Joe Biden was not in government at the time in question; he was a private citizen running a presidential campaign. But that didn’t stop Musk from leveraging his significant platform to try to attack Biden with a baseless charge.

And again, the fact that the tweet is still up speaks to Musk’s shamelessness and carelessness with the truth. He likely genuinely believed it at the time, but Musk is about as concerned with truth as his congressional fellow travelers.

But what that also means is the replies to Musk’s post are still public too, and…well…

And, hey, since Trump was president at the time and was, by Twitter Files’ own admission, making similar demands of Twitter, by Musk’s logic…

For modern-day conservatives, facts are irrelevant to what they believe. To what feels true.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene’s spokesman put it when asked for a response to the fact that these men died while Trump was in office, not Biden:

“do you think they give a fuck about your bullshit fact checking?”

Not the first time they tried this trick

While such revisionism seems to have been taken to a whole new level in the era of Trump, this is hardly new territory for Republicans faced with inconvenient facts about their own party’s leadership.

Take the pesky detail that 9/11 happened on Republican George W. Bush’s watch.

Back in 2011, Newsmax’s Eric Bolling, then with Fox News, famously declared:

"America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008.  I don't remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time."

He quickly had to revise his remarks, saying:

"Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11."

Obviously.

This delusion that Bush “kept us safe” would soon be repeated by none other than the former President’s younger brother Jeb, who tried an ad-lib about W. at the 2012 Republican Convention, declaring:

“My brother, well, I love my brother. He is a man of integrity, courage and honor, and during incredibly challenging times, he kept us safe.”

But he didn’t stop there, making it a talking point during his 2016 presidential campaign, such as in this famous debate moment head-to-head with Trump.

He said:

"As it relates to my brother, there's one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe."

For that audience, made up of GOP party faithful, that amounted to an applause line.

But it took Trump of all people, then running against the GOP establishment, to expose the absurdity of such a claim, drawing attention to the obvious point:

“So when he said we were safe, we were not safe. We lost 3,000 people. It was one of the greatest — probably the greatest catastrophe ever in this country."

Well, at least they didn’t try to blame 9/11 on Barack Obama, right? Not so fast. 

They left that one to Rudy Giuliani, who claimed in 2016:

“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

This tendency to deflect accountability for 9/11 away from Republican leadership was so pervasive, a parody tweet by comedy writer Dan Lyons went viral because many Republicans actually thought it was true.

In fact, it even had to be fact-checked by Snopes.

His tweet claimed:

GOP rallies around Trump 9/11 role. “While Obama and Biden were cowering in fear on Air Force 1, Mr. Trump was on the ground with first responders searching for survivors and pulling people to safety,” Jim Jordan says. “I remember seeing him on TV, running toward the danger.”

Lyons said after it went viral:

"You wouldn't be surprised if those guys said something that ridiculous. I kind of thought people would know it's a joke, but I guess I should stamp it. That's always the risk with satire."

It’s no accident that this parody tweet was conceived in response to Trump’s own revisionist 9/11 claim about having been at Ground Zero:

"Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could. We were not alone. So many others were scattered around trying to do the same. They were all trying to help."

Yes, even as Trump shattered any attempt at Bush family myth-building to rehabilitate the former Republican President’s reputation, Trump had no qualms about using 9/11 to bolster his own fictional persona when it suited him.

The latest in a long line of liars

Myth-building and storytelling are a part of politics, of course. Politics is all built on spinning narratives. But usually, myths catch on because they have a kernel of truth at their heart. These days, all too often with the Republican Party, the embraced narratives represent the complete inverse of reality.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank traces the Republican Party’s dodgy relationship with the truth back to Newt Gingrich’s tenure as House Speaker in the 1990s. 

For Milbank, it all started with Gingrich’s revolutionary style of politics, which cast Democrats as “the enemy.”

Well, when people first heard Newt Gingrich speak…he spoke with an entirely different language. And he - in fact, he recommended to his congressional peers, Republican peers and candidates, that they need to start talking about Democrats as traitors, as liars, as cheaters. So this was an entirely different way of talking about your opponent, your opponent as your enemy, as opposed to just being your opponent. 

And today we are sort of living in that world that Newt Gingrich birthed in 1994.

Gingrich’s insistence on investigating the death of Clinton aide Vince Foster, despite all probes concluding it was a suicide, perpetuated the notion that he was somehow murdered by the Clintons, who to Gingrich and his ilk were the ultimate villains. 

As Milbank notes, you can trace a direct line from Gingrich during the Clinton years to the Benghazi investigation during the Obama years, which led directly to the overblown Hillary Clinton email probe, which of course ultimately helped lead us to Trump.

The current GOP House majority’s fact-free investigations into Biden's so-called criminality, their insistence that there’s some “there there” with Hunter Biden, their “weaponization of government” hearings when no one has weaponized government or the Justice Department more than Trump himself, these are the direct descendants of a leadership style that began with Gingrich.

For if one believes that the current President of the opposing party truly is “the enemy,” as the modern GOP hardliners make clear they do, no wonder they may launch an impeachment inquiry in search of a crime they already believe exists.

And no wonder they are convinced that Biden is responsible for all the ills of recent years, whether he was actually president or not.

Every good narrative needs a clear hero and villain, and the modern GOP is nothing if not good at portraying the world in such simplistic and stark us vs. them terms. Trump may have mastered this dark art, but it’s hard to dispute Milbank’s thesis that it was Gingrich who pioneered it in modern-day politics.

So what now?

If Gingrich spearheaded this style of politics, it’s difficult not to conclude that Trump revolutionized it in two very important ways.

Rather than merely casting Democrats as the villains, Trump has portrayed himself as the “hero,” engendering in supporters an unrivaled sense that he will fight for “people like me,” even though in reality he loathes them and fleeces them to fund his criminal defense.

But connected to this bond he has with supporters is his exploitation of grievance and victimhood, specifically, as Ron Brownstein writes in a piece titled “Why Republican Voters Believe Trump”: 

the hardening tendency of conservatives to believe that they are the real victims of bias in a society irreversibly growing more racially and culturally diverse.

The good news though is that Trump supporters are not wrong in this fear. The country is becoming more diverse and yes, in a way, is leaving them behind.

It wasn’t so long ago that demographically, Trump’s hardcore base of White Christians and those without a college degree held majority stakes in the electorate.

No longer. 

And as Jay Kuo wrote this week, “Trumpism’s greatest enemy is the inexorable march of time.”

Not only are the older White voters who make up the core of Trump’s MAGA base dying off and being replaced by younger, more diverse and progressive voters, but these Millennial and Gen Z voters are far less likely to fall for the GOP’s lies and false narratives that fuel not just modern conservative campaigns, but also their governance.

Without a significant portion of the electorate willing to believe the Republican Party’s gaslighting, the political incentives may shift such that Republicans are forced to compete and govern in the realm of reality. 

And yeah, it won’t go well for them.