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.”
Fall of Rome in real time, expedited by its media and put under a microscope thanks to the Internet.