What Is Up With Americans' Covid Amnesia?
In poll after poll, voters say they trust Donald Trump over Joe Biden on issues such as the economy despite his disastrous Covid response just 4 years ago.
When I see poll after poll showing Donald Trump tied or even slightly ahead of President Biden—polls in which voters actually say they trust Trump more on the economy than Biden even as economic indicators are moving in the right direction—I want to shout, “Do you not remember 2020!? Do you not remember the economic turmoil Trump presided over in his final year in office when Covid wreaked havoc on our entire way of life?”
Why would anyone want to go back to that?
Increasingly, it appears people are willing to completely block Covid out of their memories, and essentially give Trump a pass, crediting him with the economy he presided over up until lockdown while ignoring everything that came after. And at the same time, they seem perfectly willing to blame Biden for the devastating economic aftermath Trump left us with, no matter how skillfully he has led us out of it.
Of course, Republicans have been doing their damnedest to revise history in order to reinforce this false narrative. Remember when Trump recently insisted with a straight face that “everything worked” when he was president?
And U.S. Senator Steve Daines even recently tried to claim that Joe Biden
inherited record job growth, record job increases, record wage increases.
Seriously?
How quickly some (choose to) forget.
Take this chart from CNBC, April 2020, just weeks after Covid shut down much of the country.
The total employment level of 133.4 million fell to its lowest since June 1999.
And this, from The Guardian:
US economy shrank by 3.5% in 2020, the worst year since second world war
And what about wages and earnings in 2020 versus 2019?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, most metrics showed a downturn on Donald Trump’s watch:
Median household income was $67,521 in 2020, a decrease of 2.9 percent from the 2019 median of $69,560
The real median earnings of all workers aged 15 and over with earnings decreased 1.2 percent between 2019 and 2020 from $42,065 to $41,535
The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 10.5 percent in 2019.
Not to mention all the death, disease and destruction wrought in 2020. That all happened on Trump’s watch.
The fact is, not only did many things NOT work during Trump’s presidency, but he made it much worse with his fumbling response to the pandemic. He downplayed the severity of the virus, signaled he wouldn’t wear a mask, and spread dangerous disinformation about Covid cures right from the White House press room. In fact, a 2021 report found that 40% of deaths from Covid could have been avoided if Trump hadn’t mismanaged the crisis.
These are inconvenient facts for Trump, of course, but lucky for him, voters appear willing to forget all about them, just as he would have them do.
Or as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie put it on All In With Chris Hayes, voters have given Trump “a Covid mulligan.”
So, how can people so easily forgive and forget? In this piece, I’ll explore how polls show people feel about Trump as president with 4 years’ hindsight and what might be behind the amnesia surrounding the traumatic year that was 2020. Also, I’ll explore what Joe Biden and Democrats can do to remind Americans of what it was really like while a madman was at the helm during a once-in-100-year crisis.
Americans’ Bizarre Trust Of Trump
On his show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes spoke with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times about why people have, understandably perhaps, ”blocked out” Covid.
Bouie remarked on why it is so maddening to see the public refuse to hold Trump accountable for his clear failure of leadership through the height of the pandemic.
“Here’s the thing: the job of the presidency is being prepared for crises. That’s all it is. We judge presidents hisstorically over how they handle crises…
“Donald Trump faced a crisis. And that’s the job and he failed to handle it. And so it’s strange that so many Americans—and I think a lot of coverage—has given him a mulligan as if it doesn’t count. No, this is precisely the thing that counts the most.”
Yet poll after poll shows people trust Trump over Biden on the economy despite what they went through just four years ago.
Take the NBC News poll from Jan 26-30 that found Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by 22 points on handling the economy.
Trump 55%
Biden 33%
Similarly, a Morning Consult poll of swing state voters taken from Jan 16-22 found an 18-point gap.
Trump 51%
Biden 33%
A more recent Financial Times poll found a double-digit advantage for Trump as well:
Overall, 42% of Americans said they felt Trump would be the better steward for the economy, with 31% choosing Biden and 21% saying they trusted neither candidate
This gap persists despite continued good economic news under Biden, from jobs to GDP to consumer confidence, and even a reduction in inflation from the peak of 9% in the summer of 2022.
But according to Yahoo Finance’s Biden Economic Scorecard, not surprisingly, it’s inflation that continues to keep voters sour on Biden’s handling of the economy. Namely: inflation-adjusted income.
Real incomes have dropped by about 1% since Biden took office. Under Trump, real incomes were up about 3%. Biden’s underperformance is entirely due to inflation, which on the whole has risen by more than nominal income during his term. Biden’s not the worst on this measure; Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush score worse. Both of them, notably, lost reelection bids.
Quite an ominous warning for the President, but the good news is that this metric is on the upswing.
But even this still doesn’t explain why voters have confidence in Donald Trump to do any better. Trump is not an unknown quantity. We went through four years of his disastrous leadership. But somehow people are nostalgic for the good ole days of Trump?
There’s another finding in the NBC poll that begins to get to this question, as the hosts of MSNBC’s The Weekend explored this past Sunday:
A new NBC News poll finds 40% of Americans believe Trump’s presidency was better than expected.
“Better than expected”? As Alicia Menendez rightly wondered:
“I don’t know what to make of that number.”
Michael Steele noted that this is largely a function of Trump’s ability to create “a fog…narratively speaking,” taking advantage of people’s tendency to look back on even rough times fondly in retrospect.
As The Weekend guest Tia Mitchell pointed out, it’s not unusual for this absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder effect to happen with former presidents. See the way George W. Bush, largely seen as disastrous at the time of his presidency, has benefited from time away from the public eye (not to mention a whole new level of a disastrous presidency to make him look downright competent by comparison.)
The worst year of Trump’s presidency coincided with a once-in-a-lifetime health and economic crisis. So there must be something else going on here than just looking back through rose-colored glasses.
Americans’ Covid Amnesia
There could be a psychological basis for Americans’ refusal to associate Trump with the trauma of Covid.
An ABC News article titled Why People May Be Forgetting Their Covid Memories points out that it is not unusual for us to “try to forget certain memories to protect ourselves from the trauma that we've been processing over the last three years.”
There is a documented mechanism for this self-protective behavior, according to Dr. Kevin LaBar, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University:
“The brain creates these event boundaries when important things happen and so there may be some natural forgetting that's happening because people are putting a boundary between, say, the beginning of COVID and then whenever they consider to be a kind of a post-COVID phase.”
He went on to state that without the everyday reminders of what life was like under Covid, such as masks, social distancing, and constant Zoom meetings:
“there's kind of a natural way in which the brain compartmentalizes things.”
Additionally, because of the monotony of lockdown, where most of us were cooped up in a single setting, likely with the same people and experiences for a long period of time, new memories weren’t formed, which in retrospect has the effect of:
“that time period is going to be dealt with in memory as almost like a single event, in a single extended event instead of lots of different events happening."
And as Covid deaths under Trump gave way to a vaccine rollout and return to normal life under Biden, there’s a certain natural forgetting that occurs of just how bad it was.
Ironically, then, Biden’s competent leadership as he ushered our nation back to normalcy has actually worked against him by helping contribute to the bizarrely rosy memories people now seem to have about 2020.
How Do We Remind People What 2020 Was Really Like?
About three years ago, as Joe Biden’s term had just begun, and Trump was already threatening to return to the national stage, The Washington Post’s James Downie warned that “we can’t forget [Trump’s] terrible Covid response.”
Downie wrote:
…the chilling prospect of Trump 2024 remains…
As long as this threat to the country’s future remains, with every death milestone passed, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the outsize role Trump played in an utterly incompetent pandemic response — and the grim human toll that accompanied it.
And so how does Joe Biden—and all of us for that matter—do that?
Trump himself may be giving just the clue.
As the new year began and it became clear that Joe Biden’s strengthening economy would not be the detriment for Biden that Republicans had originally hoped, Trump began to signal that he doesn’t want his presidency to be remembered for the disaster that was 2020.
Last month, Chris Hayes flagged a speech Donald Trump gave in which Trump asked supporters:
“Were you better off 5 years ago or are you better off today?”
5 years, eh?
You can watch it at 1:25 in the video below.
As Aaron Rupar noted:
“gee i wonder why Trump is trying to erase the last year of his presidency.”
Ever since Reagan, the iconic question every president running for re-election has asked the voting public has been, “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?” It’s essentially an argument against a change in leadership. Why change when things are moving the right way?
The fact that Trump is asking people to think back 5 years is, as Hayes rightfully pointed out, “a really amazing tell.”
But can you blame him? The last thing Trump wants is for people to remember the trauma of 2020 and how he made it even worse with his divisive lack of leadership.
So it’s our job to remind them.
According to Pew Research, it only took a month into Covid lockdowns for Americans to see Trump’s response for what it was: dismal, with majorities disapproving of his handling of Covid for “ordinary people” as well as most other metrics:
So while it may not be pleasant to relive those traumatic days, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” should be Democrats’ ongoing refrain beginning in late March and early April throughout the election. We should share videos reminding Americans of the disastrous press conferences Trump presided over, the economic devastation, and the public health lockdowns.
I can see the ad now:
Video shows Trump asking the question about being better off “five years ago,” then the voiceover comes in, over indelible images from that disastrous year:
“Excuse me? Five years? He must mean four, right? Or maybe he doesn’t want us to remember where we were four years ago. The panic. The failed leadership on Covid. The misinformation about a ‘Chinese hoax.’ The bungled response and the shut downs. The press conferences that presented medical misinformation. And the hundreds of thousands of deaths. Trump wants us to forget where we were four years ago. But we remember, Donald. We remember.”
The more that voters are confronted with the question, “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?”—accompanied by a stark reminder of the realities of 2020—the more likely Americans will realize that the answer is an unqualified “Yes.”
Poll after poll is generating the response that the billionaires want. It's time to ditch the polls and use our own common sense. Life was horrible during the trump regime and I and millions more voted for needed change in 2000.
Well, this girl hasn't forgotten!
Bleach cocktail anyone?