2024 offers America something it hasn't seen in a long time: a match between two people for the White House, both of whom have records as serving Presidents. The choice between what President Biden has to offer versus the record of his predecessor would seem to make this a no-brainer, but something strange is happening.
The NY Times has an article by Jennifer Medina and Reid J. Epstein asking:
It’s only been three years, but memories of Mr. Trump’s presidency have faded and changed fast.
...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. 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. Social scientists say that’s unsurprising. In an era of hyper-partisanship, there’s little agreed-upon collective memory, even about events that played out in public.
But as Mr. Trump pursues a return to power, the question of what exactly voters remember has rarely been more important. While Mr. Trump is staking his campaign on a nostalgia for a time not so long ago, Mr. Biden’s campaign is counting on voters to refocus on Mr. Trump, hoping they will recall why they denied him a second term.
Others have taken note of this, suggesting that 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency and the start of the pandemic were so traumatic, people have blocked it out of their memories, choosing only to remember a less chaotic past. There’s also a saturation effect — there is so much bad connected with Trump, so much chaos 24/7, it all tends to blur together.
“Negative information about Trump is no longer distinctive, it is just the air that we breathe,” Dr. Franks said. “It’s the water that we are swimming in. It just becomes a conditioned emotional response, where you either feel joy and admiration or disgust and anger at the sight of his face — but each individual act is just a drop in the ocean.”
The Biden campaign is attempting to remind people of just what we survived, but it’s an uphill fight. How many people want to be reminded of a time when they would wake up in fear of what might have been tweeted overnight? It shouldn’t be a hard choice between Biden and his predecessor — so why is there what is almost nostalgia for the former guy?
It should not be forgotten that the press spent a lot of time trying to normalize what Trump was doing — saying he misspoke instead of saying he lied for example. There simply was no precedent for the press to cover someone who would lie reflexively, make stuff up, deny he had said or done something he clearly had, who has no shame. There was a lot of really outrageous, even dangerous stuff going on in the Oval Office — but we often didn’t find out about it until months later, usually after someone had resigned/been fired and decided to do the tell-all thing. That lessened the impact — because there was always some fresh outrage taking place. Here’s a partial list:
The recording of Mr. Trump saying he could grab women by the genitals. Praising Russian intelligence. Crudely disparaging African countries. Separating children from their parents at the Mexican border. Telling children Santa Claus isn’t real. Considering buying Greenland. Suggesting using nuclear weapons to stop a hurricane. Threatening to withhold aid from Ukraine if its president wouldn’t investigate the Biden family. Suggesting Covid patients inject bleach.
(And as always, IOKIYAR — or at least it was before Dobbs and IVF.)
There are those, of course, who have drunk the Koolaid and are committed to the MAGA snake oil dream. They live in a world of alternative facts — although their numbers are in decline, as evidenced by the number of primary voters looking for an alternative. We also should not forget how Republicans and their media have been aggressively rewriting history and repeating the Big Lie over and over, flooding the zone with sh*t.
There’s also the point that Biden is in charge now — so everything that people are unhappy about is his fault now. What Trump did was old news — and has gone down the memory hole. Where the former guy made all kinds of promises that never went anywhere, Biden has actually been bringing about real change and promises more. That threatens powerful interests who are pushing back, not to mention the usual suspects on the Right and their media propaganda outlets.
It also doesn’t help that reporters, who’d gotten addicted to the over the top flummery and exciting chaos around Trump found Biden, a guy who just gets stuff done, boring. It doesn’t make the news because it’s not their job to provide coverage of people actually doing their jobs.
Further the press has been pushing a narrative for months now that Biden is old, unpopular, losing it — and then they wonder why voters are ‘concerned’ about those issues. There was also the hope that by not covering Trump and how he become even more unhinged, he would just fade away. That’s what normal former presidents are supposed to do — except Trump has never been normal. Meanwhile the relief people felt in 2020 with Biden has transitioned to “so what have you done for me lately?”
So, people may be looking back — but not all that far.
And what about looking ahead?
David Kurtz in the Morning Memo at Talking Points Memo the other day warned:
After many months of very explicit promises from Donald Trump about what a second term as president would look like, Morning Memo still encounters folks who think it will merely be a repeat of his first term. Been there, done that. If we survived it once, we can survive it again.
That is an enormous misjudgment. It misunderstands the nature of the threat. It is an error of degree in that it wildly underestimates what can happen. It’s a failure of imagination because it takes Trump I as a starting point and can’t foresee beyond it. But it’s ultimately a category error, putting Trump II in the wrong bucket.
Kurtz spells it out. Trump now has a clear picture of everything that held him back in his first term, and he’s not going to hold back. If he gets back in, he will act without restraint.
...Trump will see his re-election as a vindication of all of his prior grievances, a green light for all his plans and proposals, a ratification of his promise of retribution. He is putting it all out there for voters to accept or reject. If they accept it, he will be imbued with enormous powers both in his own mind and in fact.
Trump’s retribution will be mean. It will be ugly. It will be merciless. It will not just be performative in a pro wrestling way, like so much of Trump I was. Just in the past few days, we have witnessed Trump’s adoration for strong men, learned that he praised Hitler for doing “some good things,” and seen him promise to “free” the Jan. 6 defendants.
Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is stronger than ever. He’s purging the RNC of anyone who isn’t a total loyalist — and he will make sure the same will be true of his administration the second time around. Further, he has a lot of groups planning to ride right behind him while he carves a path of destruction. Project 2025 wasn’t written as a theoretical exercise.
Between people who’ve forgotten just how bad it was, and those who don’t understand how bad it could be, we have a lot of work to do before November.