The History Of Trump's Presidency Has Been Whitewashed
The History Of Trump's Presidency Has Been Whitewashed
After years of right-wing revisionist history, many have forgotten how terrible Trump's presidency was. The truth is, his term was defined by chaos, pandemic negligence, and authoritarian actions.
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Last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) sought to echo former President Ronald Reagan, asking Americans: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Stefanik claimed the answer is a “resounding no.”
Really? Because I remember four years ago quite differently.
Four years ago, I was writing a weekly column for the news organization I co-founded, Rantt Media, where I documented every single day of Trump’s presidency in real time. I organized it all in an index where you can click into every week and see what happened, along with contemporaneous analysis.
Seeking to answer Stefanik’s question, I clicked into this week four years ago to see what I wrote in my column at the time. Four years ago this week, America was entering absolute crisis mode as then-President Donald Trump was leading us into catastrophe.
Four years ago this week, Trump declared a COVID-19 National Emergency after spending weeks downplaying the virus, failing to mobilize a national testing response, holding rallies throughout the entire month of February 2020, and calling fears about COVID-19 a Democratic “hoax.”
Four years ago this week, Trump was asked whether he took responsibility for lagging testing in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Trump responded by saying, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
In my column at the time, I wrote in response to Trump’s actions that week, “If enough people are paying attention right now, this is the week Donald Trump lost re-election.” I called Trump’s negligence a “stunning failure in leadership amid one of the greatest crises this world has faced in the 21st Century.”
“Failure in leadership” feels like an understatement in hindsight. Donald Trump downplayed the pandemic, lied about it, tried to manipulate case numbers, botched the response, and 400,000 died of COVID-19 during his presidency.
Countless American lives would’ve been saved if we had a competent, honest president in office during the pandemic. We literally have Trump on tape with journalist Bob Woodward in February 2020, admitting to lying about COVID’s deadliness. How many people died believing him?
Trump lost re-election, partly because of his willful negligence during the last year of his administration and his overall cruel incompetence. But in the years since, it appears right-wing media has been whitewashing the history of Trump’s presidency, and too many Americans are believing them.
Last week, The New York Times ran an article headlined: “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?” When looking at the polling and the fact Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee, the answer is a resounding yes for far too many Americans.
A Gallup poll conducted in June of last year found that perceptions of Donald Trump have improved since his presidency ended. The poll found that 46% of Americans said they approved of Trump’s handling of his presidency. When Trump left office, his approval rating was 34%.
This revisionist Trump history can also be seen anecdotally. It’s not uncommon to see people expressing nostalgia over the Trump era in interviews with news organizations. High inflation in the earlier days of the Biden presidency led people to look back at the Trump economy more fondly. Even as America has recovered to become the strongest economy on the planet in the Biden era, we still see polling indicating people remember Trump’s economy more fondly.
A CBS News poll from earlier this month found that “65% of Americans remember the economy under former President Donald Trump as being good, compared with 38% giving the current economy under President Joe Biden the same positive assessment.”
It’s becoming increasingly clear that a significant number of Americans have totally erased 2020 as part of Trump’s presidency or simply don’t blame him for his pandemic negligence and the economic and humanitarian devastation it enabled. Many Americans also appear to have forgotten the chaos Trump unleashed daily.
Why are so many Americans looking back at Trump’s presidency with rose-colored glasses? I have some theories.
The Rewriting Of Trump History
After Donald Trump left office, for a period of time he was no longer the center of America’s attention. He was banned from most major social media platforms after inciting the January 6 insurrection, and news coverage was mostly focused on the new Biden-Harris administration.
Trump went from being an omnipresent force, pushing unhinged rhetoric down our social media feeds and making incompetent decisions that impacted our lives to seemingly disappearing overnight. We all went from directly feeling the weight of his failures to him having no direct impact at all.
For a period of time after January 6, and before Kevin McCarthy revived Trump’s political career with his visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump was also toxic within the Republican Party. For a very brief moment, it felt like the Trump era could be over.
As America recovered from the pandemic under President Biden and we returned to a new normal, the absence of Trump in our day-to-day lives permitted many Americans to forget exactly how terrible his presidency was and how dangerous Trump still is.
Trump’s absence provided a vacuum for right-wing media to fill. They pushed exaggerated narratives of the problems America faces, and sometimes these narratives were spread by mainstream outlets, impacting the overall “vibes.” This is not to downplay the impact of inflation on prices, but it’s objectively true to say that things are not nearly as bad as polling suggests.
The overly negative sentiment about the current state of America, in spite of most available data indicating we’re on the upswing, has led many Americans to look back nostalgically at the Trump years. But, again, this completely ignores Trump’s failures, especially in 2020.
Seeing this has been frustrating, particularly for those of us who followed every development of the Trump presidency very closely and the warnings it presents for a potential second term. We know how corrosive his presidency was to our country and what his return to office would mean.
Now, as Trump increasingly re-enters America’s psyche as the imminent Republican nominee for President, it’s important for Americans to not only recognize the dangers of a second Trump term but also remember how damaging his first term was.
For those who need a refresher, let’s talk through some of Trump’s presidency, shall we? The following draws from my own documentation of the years.
I started documenting every day of Trump’s presidency seven years ago. Days after my 24th birthday, Trump began his term by standing on the Capitol building steps, draped in red curtains, warning of “American Carnage.” It turns out that was not a warning. It was a promise.
By the end of his presidency, Trump would be a twice impeached, one-term, historically unpopular president who failed to contain a deadly pandemic and incited a deadly insurrection against that very same Capitol building. But this time, it was draped in Trump flags with a noose hanging nearby as the symbol of a Confederate resurgence. There’s a reason historians rank Trump as the worst president in American history.
On the final day of Trump’s presidency, America surpassed over 400,000 deaths from a pandemic that his negligence allowed to run rampant. The unemployment rate when Trump entered office was 4.7%. It was 6.7% as he left. The US deficit was at $584B when Trump entered office and is at $3.3T when he left.
Trump is the first President in the history of polling to never rise above a 50% Gallup approval rating, and he also had the lowest polling average of any President. According to The Washington Post, President Trump told over 30,000 lies while in office, including the Big Lie that the election was stolen – a lie that would lead to an illegal attempted overthrow of American democracy by his own supporters.
In spite of what his supporters might say, Donald Trump has only one talent. It’s not “branding” or “showmanship” or any other buzzword that’s been attributed to him. Trump’s appeal has always come down to his ability to identify and shamelessly exploit the weaknesses in people, cultures, and systems.
From his fraudulent business career to his candidacy to his presidency, Trump tapped into the darkest corners of the American psyche and brought them out to the forefront. Trump didn’t break America; he took advantage of its existing fractures and deepened them. Trump served as a mirror the country could peer into and see its flaws laid bare.
Trump took advantage of the flaws he saw the Republican Party exploiting among their base. He took on a more overt Southern Strategy with his proud depravity, unmasking the Republican Party’s true nature. From his cruel migrant family separation policy to his coddling of white supremacists at Charlottesville to his brutalization of racial justice protestors, it was clear that Trump sought to be the ideological heir to the Confederacy.
Trump’s affinity for authoritarianism isn’t just some future threat derived from his rhetoric and plans for 2025 - it’s a past and present danger. Trump’s presidency was defined by his abuses of power and corruption. There’s a reason Trump is now facing 91 criminal charges across four indictments.
Trump’s love of authoritarians had a real-world impact on the Republican Party and US foreign policy. The modern Republican Party is now a pro-Putin party that praises right-wing dictators like Hungary’s far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán as a model to emulate in the US. When Trump was in office, he attempted this model, seeking a more nationalist approach.
Trump’s resentment of multilateral partnerships was clear. He withrew from the Paris Climate Accord and spent his presidency constantly attacking America’s allies and cozied up to dictators like Russian Dictator Vladimir Putin, North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-un, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Trump’s emulation of those dictators that he so clearly adored weakened America’s standing abroad.
Trump’s racism, dishonesty, and authoritarian tendencies culminated in his multifaceted effort to overturn the 2020 election. Trump was indicted for this criminal conspiracy by Special Counsel Jack Smith at the federal level and Fulton County DA Fani Willis at the state level.
We’re now actively awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s immunity claims in hopes Jack Smith’s trial can move forward. But for now, it appears, it’ll once again be on us, the American people, to deliver the final verdict on Trump at the ballot box.
Could The Right-Wing Narrative Spell Be Breaking?
Last week could prove to be pivotal in the 2024 election. Two dueling developments have shifted narratives and dynamics.
On one side, we have President Biden, who delivered a fantastic State of the Union Address that shattered narratives about his age and acuity and put forward his vision for the future while showcasing what he’s accomplished in the present. Biden’s optimistic vision of America resonated, according to viewer polls. It was seen by over 32 million Americans on broadcast networks.
On the other side, we have Senator Katie Britt's (R-AL) embarrassing State of the Union rebuttal. It was the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with the GOP's vision of America and an excellent example of the kind of propaganda narratives that have defined right-wing media for decades.
Senator Britt’s speech was a dishonest, overdramatic, fear-mongering screed that greatly exaggerated America's problems. It was an over-acted Fox News segment. It was so horribly delivered that everyone, including right-wing figures, mocked the speech.
Biden and Britt’s speeches provided a great contrast between the grounded, optimistic vision of Democrats and the paranoid, out-of-touch vision of Republicans.
In a notable moment from Biden’s speech, he made a point to remind Americans where we really were four years ago and where we are now:
“Four years ago next week, before I came to office, our country was hit by the worst pandemic and the worst economic crisis in a century. Remember the fear. Record job losses. Remember the spike in crime. And the murder rate.
A raging virus that would take more than 1 million American lives and leave millions of loved ones behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness. A president, my predecessor, who failed the most basic duty. Any President owes the American people the duty to care. That is unforgivable. I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history. And we have.
It doesn’t make the news but in thousands of cities and towns the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.”
Hopefully, that moment will build on previous momentum. Americans’ views on the economy are growing positive as consumer sentiment rises. Democrats are continuing to win elections, and Trump’s GOP primary performance showed real cracks in his coalition.
As President Biden and Donald Trump’s campaign ramps up, Americans will continue to be reminded of how far we’ve come. But we can’t just hope people come to their senses. We have to get to work.
We need to do everything we can to remind Americans about the facts of Trump’s presidency and the threat of what could come if he’s re-elected.
