During Donald Trump’s latest event in Iowa, the former president raised a rhetorical challenge that isn’t generally part of his standard stump speech:
“Together we’re going to bring our country back from hell. Not one thing, if you think about it, has gotten better under ‘Crooked’ Joe Biden. Name one thing where we’re doing well. We’re not respected, the world is laughing at us. Under the Trump administration, you were better off.”
Watching the video clip, the former president delivered the line with certainty, as if the answer were self-evident, and no one in their right mind could possibly point to a single thing that’s improved in the United States after the Republican left office in January 2021.
The problem, of course, is that it’s fairly easy to think of all kinds of things that have gotten better under Biden’s presidency.
The nation’s unemployment rate, for example, has dramatically improved, and for the first time in over a half-century, Americans have seen a jobless rate below 4% for 22 consecutive months. Economic growth has also improved, and the major stock market indexes have reached all-time highs.
When Trump left office, the pandemic was claiming the lives of thousands of Americans per day, and vaccines were not widely available to the public. Or put another way, the Covid crisis has gotten better under Biden, too.
The nation’s uninsured rate got better under Biden. The supply-chain challenges got better under Biden. The cost of many prescription drugs got better under Biden. Infrastructure investments got better under Biden. The budget deficit got better under Biden. The U.S. murder rate got better under Biden. The United States’ global standing soared after Biden replaced Trump in the White House. To be sure, some of these areas of progress can be attributed to the Democratic president’s agenda, and some of the developments simply happened on his watch. But the bottom line remains the same: Whether Trump understands this or not, the difficulty isn’t naming “one thing” that’s improved; the challenge is knowing when to stop citing improvements from a list that is both significant and growing.
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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