On March 6, 2020, Donald Trump visited the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. The appearance did not go especially well.
During the then-president’s relatively brief stop, which came against a backdrop of a looming pandemic, he flubbed a variety of important details, attacked his critics, claimed he might have “a natural ability” to understand virology at a sophisticated level because his uncle taught at MIT, and suggested that people with Covid on a cruise ship docked near San Francisco should remain on the boat because if they came ashore, it might create a public-relations problem for his re-election campaign.
At the time, the United States was entering a deadly public health crisis that would ultimately kill 1 million Americans, overwhelm hospitals, and devastate the economy, all while our hapless amateur president — the guy who talked about injecting human beings with disinfectants during a White House briefing — failed spectacularly to respond effectively.
On March 6, 2024, exactly four years to the day after Trump’s CDC trip, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik spoke at a Capitol Hill press conference and struck a nostalgic note.
“As Ronald Reagan famously asked us, ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’” the New York congresswoman said. “The answer for hardworking Americans across the country is a resounding no.”
I’m mindful of the fact that Stefanik, a Trump sycophant, is auditioning for the role of her party’s vice presidential nominee, which has led her to make some deeply unfortunate comments of late.
But the idea that conditions in the United States got worse after Trump left the White House is demonstrably ridiculous.
As regular readers know, 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 two years. 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. Crime rates got better under Biden. Domestic manufacturing got better under Biden. The United States’ global standing soared after Biden replaced Trump in the White House.
These aren’t opinions. They’re just what happened.
And yet, Stefanik is basically trying to pull off a Jedi mind trick. “You don’t remember what actually happened four years ago,” she effectively says with a wave of her hand. “You’ll believe the Republican version of recent history instead.”
Complicating matters, the Jedi mind trick appears to be working.
“More than three years of distance from the daily onslaught has faded, changed — and in some cases, warped — Americans’ memories of events that at the time felt searing,” The New York Times reported this week. “Polling suggests voters’ views on Mr. Trump’s policies and his presidency have improved in the rearview mirror. In interviews, voters often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics.”
I realize that in American politics, parties and candidates are routinely encouraged to be forward-looking, because voters tend to respond to messages about the future more than the past. “Look forward,” politicians are told, “not backward.”
But if the 2024 election is going to be decided in part on the “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” question, Biden and his fellow Democrats should probably be prepared to remind the American electorate of just how catastrophically bad things were when Trump was in office, and how much better conditions are now.