In Democratic circles, it’s not uncommon to hear skepticism about Donald Trump’s 2024 prospects, recent national polling notwithstanding. Not only is the former president widely disliked, and not only is he likely to be a convicted felon by Election Day, but many Democrats find it hard to believe the American mainstream would want to return to catastrophes.
There is, however, one glaring problem with this line of thought: Memories are short. Politico reported this week:
Celinda Lake, a pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign, said that earlier this year, she was concerned voters might not take seriously the threat that another Trump presidency poses. In focus groups at the time, she said, voters remarked that, though Trump sometimes “speaks without thinking,” his time in office “wasn’t a disaster.”
To be sure, the same report noted that the takeaways from Lake’s more recent focus groups have shifted of late, as the former president starts echoing Hitler.
But it’s nevertheless striking that as recently earlier as this year, focus-group participants genuinely seemed to believe that the Trump era “wasn’t a disaster.”
It led MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to note online, “This is the whole ballgame. They have convinced a lot of people his term ended in 2019, and it’s aided by the fact that the pandemic was so traumatic and awful no one wants to think about it, and so there’s a collective memory-holing of the whole thing.”
I think that’s right. It’s also a frustrating fact to accept.
Returning to a point we recently kicked around, “disaster” seems like an entirely appropriate word to describe the United States during Trump’s time in the White House. It was an era dominated by scandals, corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, abuses, and a leader who brazenly lied with such regularity that there were widespread questions about his mental fitness. Job growth was worse under Trump. So was economic growth. And the nation’s uninsured rate. And the budget deficit. And the murder rate. And the United States’ standing on the international stage. In the final year of the Republican’s term, the year began with an impeachment trial because the scandal-plagued president tried to extort a U.S. ally abroad into helping him cheat in the 2020 presidential election. In the months that followed, a deadly contagion claimed hundreds of thousands of lives as the White House struggled to respond coherently. There was a recession. Nearly 10 million Americans lost their jobs. There was unrest in communities nationwide in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The Trump era “wasn’t a disaster”? Among the Democrats’ principal tasks in the coming months: reminding people of the recent history that many voters have forgotten.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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