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.”
I remember being very worried about Trump’s presidency in the year before and directly after the 2016 election. I also remember people saying the US was ripe for a widespread pandemic circa 2014 or so. I would never have imagined a more wildly destructive event than those two things combined.
Plus the death of RBG in the midst of it was the triple play of “we’re fucked”
God I’m still pissed at her for not stepping down
People like Joe Biden, who suggested shutting down commercial flight over H1N1.