Republicans Were Against 2020 Before They Were For It
Now, they consider it the ‘glory days.’
During his closing remarks at the 1980 presidential debate, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan delivered a fatal blow to President Jimmy Carter when he asked Americans watching, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment ... than there was four years ago?”
The answer from most Americans was a resounding “no,” and this wasn’t rooted solely in vibes. Economic conditions and the overall American mood were far worse than they were when Carter took office — although technically Republican Gerald Ford was still president four years prior to Reagan’s campaign. That was just the first example of Reagan’s fuzzy math.
Republicans have recycled Reagan’s searing question as part of their desperate effort to cast Joe Biden in their Jimmy Carter revival. It’s fitting for a party so unmoored from reality and so eager to lie. Donald Trump posted the question — in all caps, of course — on social media. It was exactly four years to the day that COVID crashed the stock market, wiping out every gain accumulated since Trump’s inauguration.
Schools were closing and businesses were shutting down. Broadway went dark. The NBA suspended its season. COVID infections and deaths started to escalate. A spreading plague and record unemployment are not how most normal people define the “good old days.”
The year didn’t end that well, either. People celebrated Christmas with their extended family over Zoom. Unemployment was at 6.7 percent. Biden’s presidency began in January 2021 — the biggest month in presidential coups but also the country’s deadliest month of the pandemic. Americans were dying at a greater per capita rate than the rest of the developed world — you could call it the “Curse of Trump.”
Do you dummies even remember 2020?
No one was all that happy during 2020, but it’s impossible to understate how unhappy right-wingers were. Conservative philosophy is big on flag pins and other hollow displays of patriotism, but it tends to balk at any real shared sacrifice. The U.S. was on lockdown for barely a month before conservatives were revolting.
When Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer extended the state’s stay-at-home order, far-right groups launched “Operation Gridlock.” Spoiled babies swarmed downtown Lansing, Michigan, without masks or any effort to social distance. The protests backed up traffic, even blocking entire streets, while especially annoying people honked their car horns and shouted nonsense. They claimed that Whitmer had “locked people inside their homes” and taken away their “civil liberties.” Armed protesters later descended on the Michigan statehouse — an eerie prelude to January 6. This was in April, less than a month after Whitmer imposed the original stay-at-home order. It’s also worth noting that there were MAGA-coordinated protests against COVID restrictions well before the protests that occurred after George Floyd’s murder.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson, just weeks into the lockdown, that he was certain senior citizens would gladly roll the dice on COVID so America could “get back to business.”
“No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren?’ And if that is the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said.
When elected officials are metaphorically invoking the Donner Party in response to a crisis, it’s probably not a great year.
Republicans weren’t just upset about COVID restrictions. For most of the year, they believed the country was literally on fire. Just the other day, a MAGA acolyte declared on social media that cities “burned to the ground” during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. This isn’t true, of course, but Fox News had its dudgeon meter permanently set to the highest setting.
It’s true there was unrest in many US cities, but I lived in Portland, Oregon, during its “anarchist jurisdiction” phase. The city wasn’t on fire, and the disturbances were restricted to a relatively small area downtown. Meanwhile, COVId was causing a riot of its own in many Republican-run states.
Do you dummies even remember who was president in 2020?
Nonetheless, Republicans are of the opinion that Americans were locked in their homes, denied freedom of movement, and forced to wear masks while violent mobs roamed city streets like The Purge. However, it bears constant repeating that Joe Biden wasn’t president during this year of hell. It was Donald Trump who presided over what Republicans considered at the time a personal low point.
has observed that Republicans want you to forget who was actually president in 2020. He wrote over at :It’s also important, though, to realize that when they say, “Were you better off four years ago?” Republicans are not asking for a comparison of Biden and Trump. They’re asking instead for a referendum on Biden that deliberately denies and erases who his opponent is.
The GOP wants to run on negative partisanship and Biden hate alone. To do so they try to evoke a magical, imaginary past that never happened. That’s, after all, what the slogan, “Make America Great Again” has always meant.
Even while Trump was still in the White House and plotting never to leave, Republicans blamed their discontent on everyone but the commander in chief. The buck stopped with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who they soon regarded as a tiny tyrant behind the throne. Somehow, Dr. Fauci forced the shutdowns and mask mandates on an unwilling populace, and the president was powerless to stop him. Trump isn’t much of a strong man if he’s Dr. Fauci’s puppet, but MAGA excels at this level of cognitive dissonance.
Trump’s botched pandemic response was incompetent and malicious. A panel examining Trump’s policies estimated that 40 percent of U.S. COVID deaths could’ve been avoided if the bleach guy wasn’t in charge. Forget the attempted coup — COVID alone should’ve ended Trump’s nightmare political career.
Trump himself is running a reprise of his “I alone can fix it” campaign from 2016 even though he alone broke it in 2020. It’s literally why he lost re-election, which is rare for an incumbent president. Of course, true self-reflection is impossible when Trump and MAGA won’t admit he actually lost. Instead, he’s acting as if he’s the noble King Richard come to reclaim his kingdom from a usurper.
There are many ways that the years 2017 through 2019 were preferable to 2021 through 2024. It’s not surprising that Republicans would prefer voters not recall why 2021 was so much more difficult for everyone than 2019. They don’t want to give Biden credit for pulling the country out of a ditch, especially since Trump was behind the steering wheel when it crashed. Trump often claimed that he “inherited a mess” from his predecessor, Barack Obama, but he left behind a nation that was divided, dying, and broke.
Yes, we are objectively better off today than we were in 2020 … and 2021, 2022, and 2023. The Republicans who were most upset about the state of the nation four years ago probably know how much better things are now. They just can’t admit it. Convenient amnesia about 2020 is the only way they can possibly rationalize putting Trump back in the White House.
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One final thing about Biden's economic performance--considering that so much of it is based on liberal policy (pro-union administration, direct payments to poor and middle class families, expanded health care coverage, industrial policy like IRA/infrastructure) it is politically suicidal for anyone on the Left to "talk down" this economy, and asinine to complain about the cost of services like fast food (what happened to "oh, I don't mind paying a few dollars more for Big Macs, if it means a living wage for the guy making them"--we now have higher relative wages for fast food workers and yep, higher fast food prices, so why complain now?). If the political signal is "do liberal policy, and when it brings economic gains you'll still get no credit (and maybe no votes) from the left" then guess what, no future president is going to stick their neck out to deliver liberal policy. You're literally telling them that it doesn't work and gets no payoff.
I hope that you do not mind, Stephen, if I call attention to just how bad the Covid years were especially for minorities by linking to another Substack post. I have not done any deeper digging into what he’s written but for the Trump administration it’s totally in their wheelhouse. It was NOT better 4 years ago and it certainly won’t get better a second time around.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/covid-this-month-4-years-ago-trump-73b