Guess all those voters forgot about this in 2018
View attachment 1749
Eric Lutz had
a piece up in Vanity Fair after the 2024 Super Tuesday primaries reminding readers of the selective amnesia Trump supporters quickly developed about Trump 1.0 administration. VF paywalls its politics coverage but the flavor comes through in these quotes
“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Republican Representative Elise Stefanik asked in remarks after Trump’s Super Tuesday victory, channeling the old Ronald Reagan line. “The answer is a resounding: No.”
It’s an absurd thing to say: Next Monday will mark four years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, which brought shutdowns, mass death, social and economic upheaval—and, of course, daily efforts by Trump to downplay the whole thing or to convince Americans to inject bleach into their bodies. “Do these people have amnesia?” Virginia Democrat Don Beyer asked Wednesday.
Americans across the political spectrum do seem to recall “chaos” throughout Trump’s term. But it is too often cast as a kind of vague entity that “follows him,” as a Nikki Haley supporter put it to me in Iowa earlier this year, rather than something he himself creates. The “chaos” characterization doesn’t even come close to capturing the corruption, cruelty, and madness of those years.
Indeed, Trump’s supporters are keen to cast his transgressions as merely “mean tweets,” as Utah Senator Mike Lee put it in endorsing him back in January. But the term wasn’t defined by Trump’s rudeness: It was his deluge of lies, depravity, and extremism every day for four years—and another four would be even worse, as Trump charts an even more authoritarian course and surrounds himself with more capable loyalists to execute it.
Of course VF wasn't targeting the average MAGA voter. Even if the same stuff landed in a token-leftie column in a right-leaning pink slime paper, the problem with trying to attach a future vote to recollection of anything older than last night's Xit feed is about attention spans, the "information highway firehose" and above all, the detachment of policy from personality in the mind of Trump cult fanatics.
Still, it wasn't just hyperfans of Trump himself who put his electoral college vote over the top and brought him nearly half the pop vote in 2024.
The other Americans who went for Trump had even more selective amnesia about how this country fared in the Trump 1.0 administration. Some of them are bankers, private equity managers and their clients, i.e. among the 0.1% who actually pay attention to facts, figures and the world at large past Main Street and the Beltway in DC.
What they remembered mostly amounted to tax cuts and deregulatory efforts, never mind many opportunities to profit off arbitrage of Trump's myriad policy swings from the dawn of one day to noon of the next. It was an era when "moving the markets" with a single social media post officially became a blood sport, not something to report to the SEC with alarm. An era when elected officials indicted for insider trading kept their seats or ran for re-election, figuring (correctly in some cases) that on appeal they'd be scot free to resume their grifting,
And some voters pegged their vote to one or another of the international conflicts in which the US has been engaged during the Biden administration. Some complained about grocery costs (mostly attributable to jacked up profit margins for chain supermarkets). Some complained about the cost of housing. As if all these were attributable solely to actions of the Biden administration.
What a lot of people forgot about was stuff from Trump 1.0 like this:
"fine people on both sides..." Trump's attempt to gloss over the behavior of white supremacists in Charlottesville;
inexcusable racism and personal cruelty dished out in public, insults and threats to other Americans, immigrants, allies, political opposition, journalists, his own party and administration... the pot stirring of anger and grievance, whether his own or that of someone else, amplified for his personal or political gain;
a 92% turnover rate in the management of Cabinet agencies, sometimes over policy disagreements, other times eyebrow-raising conflicts of interest or evidence of personal abuse of perks and powers of agency, sometimes over outrage at Trump's behavior either in public or private;
preventable covid_19 deaths due to early denial of pandemic, failure to curb conspiracy theories against masking and vaccines;
cutting the Afghan government out of negotiations with the Taliban in order to cut a deal, and saddling the next administration with how to implement an actual withdrawal and evacuation of American nationals and endangered Afghans;
worsening relationships with China via accusations related to covid and tariffs that actually ended up with the US having a higher trade deficit than in 2016... . and China having stronger trade relationships now in the global south, to the detriment of US agricultural producers;
net loss of over 9 million jobs, devaluation of millions more due to shortened hours or dropouts from the workforce;
unilateral exit from the JCPOA leaving our European allies and Iran alike in a state of uncertainty on how to try to resume building on a tangible foundation for bringing Iran back from the roster of rogue states;
jacking up the national debt by 7.6 trillion dollars;
and then there is the matter of Ukraine.., starting with Trump's response to election meddling by Putin, proceeding through his attempts to extort personal gain by withholding federal funds meant to shore up Ukraine's defenses, all the facts underpinning his first impeachment;
and of course what is now shortened into "J6" but is the shameful attempt of Trump to remain in power past 2020 despite losing election.
And, a lot of people who voted for Trump's return to power in the 2024 elections on "policy" issues may have been taking the word of his fluffy "Agenda 47" proposals, which of course omitted some of the
au contraire facts of his first administration.
For instance Trump proposed in his 2024 campaign to completely eliminate homelessness for America's military veterans.
This despite his track record of having raided the Pentagon's budget for improvement of military veterans housing and school facilities when Congress in bipartisan votes three times denied him funds for his "border wall that Mexico will pay for." Yeah. Not to mention GOP's consistent refusal to upgrade funding for existing programs that assist veterans with housing issues.
We all remember what we choose to remember, either out of appreciation or grievance... and we cannot remember what we never learned, either out of ignorance, lack of opportunity, by choice or by lack of time.
But the actual denial of past facts in order to VOTE for a rosier future than is feasible? Well, if enough people engage in that, the result comes down to a bill that the children of the whole country may well be unable to pay.
Still enough of us went there in 2024. We don't actually give a damn about the next generations and have been proving that for decades.
It's the worst election outcome I've ever seen, bar none, and I can remember sitting in front of a TV set watching the 1984 returns come in and thinking "1984, indeed" with irony in mind and dread in my heart, as the USA signed up for another round with Reagan atop an already truly destructive Repubican Party.
Speaking of that party's history from the era of Newt Gingrich forward, I can't recommend highly enough Dana Milbank's book
"The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party." Even if you follow news and politics, It's impossible to keep in mind all the ways in which a party doomed to extinction by its obsession to cling to power --and yes,
at any cost as more of us now finally begin to realize-- has succeeded in establishing tyranny of a minority at the expense of the actual will of the American people. That book calls it all out.
prospect.org
