Reminder: Trump’s last year in office was a national nightmare

One of the surprising political achievements of Republicans this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to forget Donald Trump’s final year in office.

Voters should remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting the plague year that followed.

However, after Trump’s victory in the Super Tuesday primaries, the former president and his surrogates began attempting an even more impressive act of revisionism:

paints his entire presidency (even 2020, that terrible first year of the pandemic) as pure magnificence.

On Wednesday, Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, attempted to echo Ronald Reagan:

“Are you better today than you were four years ago?”

And Trump himself, in his victory speech Tuesday night, reflected nostalgically on his tenure as one in which “our country was joining”.

Sequence

So let’s set the record straight:

2020 (the fourth quarter, so to speak, of the Trump presidency) has been a nightmare.

And part of what made it a nightmare was that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness, focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good.

Before we get there, a quick note for Stefanik:

When Reagan uttered his famous phrase, the United States was suffering from an unpleasant combination of high unemployment and high inflation.

March 2024 looks very different. Although we, like other major economies, have experienced a period of inflation during the post-pandemic recovery, most workers have experienced wage increases considerably larger than price increases.

and the president Joe Biden currently presides over a notable episode of “Immaculate disinflation”: Inflation falling rapidly and unemployment near its lowest level in 50 years.

But even if focusing on the start of 2020 doesn’t tell the story Republicans believe, what we should really be discussing is what happened in America when the crisis hit. corona virus.

Once we knew that a deadly virus was spreading (and we now know that several officials warned Trump of the threat in January 2020), the appropriate policy response was clear:

do everything possible to slow the rate at which the virus was spreading.

Goals

Although large numbers of Americans would inevitably contract COVID-19 sooner or later, “flattening the curve” had two huge benefits.

First, it would help avoid the real possibility of a tsunami of infections overwhelming our healthcare system.

Second, it bought time for the development of effective vaccines: since vaccines could significantly reduce mortality from COVID-19, deaths delayed by public health measures would, in many cases, be deaths prevented.

What kind of public action was needed?

In the early stages of the pandemic, as scientists tried to understand exactly how the virus spread, strong measures were needed:

socially distance and block high-risk interactions as much as possible.

These measures have been costly: in April 2020, the unemployment it jumped to 14.8%.

But the United States is a wealthy country that could, and largely has, mitigate the economic pain with financial aid to the hardest-hit workers and businesses.

And once researchers and medical officials realized that the virus is airborne, they could limit its spread by having people wear masks, which was annoying but not at all a serious difficulty.

And the logic of flattening the curve said that speed was of the essence.

We spent every day wondering whether taking strong action to protect public health meant more Americans would die needlessly.

Unfortunately, at that point, the man responsible denied, hesitated, and delayed almost every step of the way.

It is worth reading a chronology of Trump’s statements in the midst of the growing pandemic, which by some estimates he had already caused approx half a million more deaths when he left office.

On January 22, Trump declared:

“We have it totally under control. “He IS a person from China.”

On February 27 he said:

“It’s going away. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

On April 3 he said:

“With the masks, it will really be voluntary. You can do it. You don’t have to do this. “I choose not to.”

At the time, the main purpose of masks was not to protect the wearer but to protect those around them;

Why should exposing others to the risk of fatal diseases be a voluntary choice?

And why shouldn’t the president set an example by masking up?

On May 21, he responded to that question, admitting that he wore a mask while visiting a Ford plant but took it off when he left because he “didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it”.

And there’s much, much more. There is no real doubt that thousands of Americans he died needlessly due to Trump’s dereliction of duty in the face of COVID-19.

He responded to the one major crisis of his presidency with self-serving fantasies:

with complete indifference to the lives of other Americans in an effort to improve their image.

Do we really have to be nostalgic for 2020?

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