Donald Trump’s Democratic opponents must have read Rich’s syndicated column on the phenomenon of “Trump nostalgia” overtaking the American electorate, because, as if on cue, they appear resolved to remind voters of all the events in the Trump era that drove them insane. An inadvertent and certainly undesirable consequence of that effort, however, compels Trump’s critics to descend back into the madness to which so many succumbed in the Trump era.
As Rich noted, the polling environment has provided political observers not just with evidence of Joe Biden’s unpopularity but of the fondness with which voters look back on the Trump years. The voting public remembers a good economy — at least, a better economy than the one over which Biden presides. They recall with affection the price stability of the Trump era. They have not forgotten a vastly more secure southern border. They believe Trump cared more “for people like” themselves than Biden does.
This has proven profoundly vexing to Biden’s allies. They have, therefore, made it their mission to berate the American public until it summons just some of the hostility toward Trump’s personal conduct that most voters retained during much of his tenure.
A New York Times dispatch published Tuesday leaned into that imperative when it castigated Trump voters for compartmentalizing the “host of major and minor dramas” that typified the former president’s administration:
Mr. Trump noting he had “great friendship” with the North Korean dictator. A government shutdown. Mexico not paying for the border wall. Mr. Trump describing “very fine people on both sides” at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. His supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 . . . 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.
Just as the Times advertised, this litany certainly does encompass large and small offenses against propriety. But it does little to address the reasons for retrospective affection for Trump, which are rooted in voters’ perceptions of their own material circumstances. Save “extremely online” provocateurs, you’re not going to find Trump voters aghast at the former president’s attempting to strip the innocence of Christmas from a child or using a black Sharpie to draw hurricane cones making their way into Alabama just to avoid confronting the inaccuracy of his own meteorological predictions. That is the stuff that filled hours of cable-news programming, and it captivated political-news junkies. But it is ephemeral compared with a general sense of economic and physical security that pertained at the time and voters no longer perceive.
The Times report brings to mind the Saturday Night Live sketch with the late Chris Farley in which the comedian, as the eponymous host of his own show, had precisely one pitch to his celebrity guests: “Do you remember the time when . . .” Of course, his interlocutors did remember, but the events Farley recalled were far more formative for him than for his guests. They had moved on long ago.
Like the Times’ reporters, the New Republic’s Greg Sargent is unnerved that pollsters are merely taking the temperature of the electorate rather than nudging respondents toward voting in ways he would prefer. He cited the work of one Democratic pollster who found that swing-state voters were unaware of or did not recall Trump’s “most authoritarian statements” past and present. When voters were reminded, their disposition toward Trump was not nearly as friendly.
The result of this exercise in priming was, not unsurprisingly, an electorate primed to look unfavorably on Donald Trump. Sargent concludes that Biden’s reelection team “has not seriously used the levers of power at its disposal to highlight Trump’s staggering corruption and malice.” To rectify this, Sargent cites the work of one-time New Republic writer Brian Beutler, who would commit the country to an exercise in remembering.
Maybe voters have compartmentalized the drama of the Trump years in the interests of preserving their own sanity, Beutler concedes. That’s why “reminding them how Trump’s first term actually ended is important.”
Trump and his vast army of propagandists have successfully seeded the idea that his presidency was a time of economic bliss, undermined only by the pandemic for which (they insist) he bears no responsibility. And as that revisionist history has sunk in, people have adjusted tehri mental models of the behavior that should and should not disqualify a president. If in retrospect, after years of spin and deceit, you’ve come to believe Trump was a great steward of the American economy, you may also reassess your sense of what should count as normal or tolerable behavior for national leaders.
“Without consensus,” Beutler concludes, “pro-democracy liberals screaming ‘this isn’t normal’ sound, perversely, like they’re the true reactionaries braying against change.”
He’s got a point there. To judge by what Biden campaign officials are telling their increasingly nervous supporters in the press, the president’s reelection team seems likely to focus their efforts on reminding voters how Trump conducted himself during the transition period to the exclusion of other trivia. That would be smart. If the Biden campaign flails like a wacky, inflatable-tube man outside a car dealership — displaying as much passion and intensity in inveighing against Trump for chucking paper-towel rolls at Puerto Rican hurricane survivors as they do in decrying his team’s efforts to rewrite the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution — it’s the Biden people who will appear to uncommitted voters to be the crazy ones.