Americans always rehabilitate former presidents.
George W. Bush, who got us into the disastrous Iraq War and badly botched the response to Hurricane Katrina, is a charming amateur who plays friends with Michelle Obama and gives her candy. It was fascinating to see them rebrand as artists.
And it didn’t just happen to him. The Monica Lewinsky scandal has faded when I think about Bill Clinton. President Barack Obama’s reliance on drone strikes and his nickname “Chief of Foreign Transportation” are now rarely mentioned.
That’s because our political memory is not fixed, but constantly adjusted. Politicians’ negative aspects often decrease while their positive aspects increase. As Gallup noted in 2013, “Americans tend to be more charitable in their evaluations of past presidents than of their current presidents.”
Without a doubt, Donald Trump is benefiting from this phenomenon. The difference is that other presidents’ flaws pale in comparison to his, and his interests are not passive. He is seeking to return to office, and part of that effort is rewriting the history of his presidency. His desperate attempts to first cling to power and then regain it included denying the 2020 election results and embracing the January 6, 2021, insurrection in which his denial gained momentum. It was
His revisionism is working very well, especially among Republicans. A University of Maryland Washington Post poll conducted in December found that Republicans were “less likely to believe that the January 6th participants were ‘mostly violent’ and that Trump was responsible for the attack.” They found that they were less likely to believe that, and were slightly more likely to think so. They are less likely to think Joe Biden’s election is legitimate than in 2021.
This is one of the truly remarkable aspects of the current presidential cycle. In other words, our collective memory of President Trump’s litany of transgressions has become less of a political issue for him than one might have expected. Even the multiple legal charges he currently faces, most of which relate to things that happened years ago and, to many, are things the country should keep in the rearview mirror. There is.
In fact, the same poll found that 43 percent of Americans and 80 percent of 2020 Trump voters said they believed the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was an event from which the country should recover.
Many Americans have experienced the Trump era as traumatic, and one of the most disconcerting aspects of this year’s presidential election is how many other Americans are ignoring or downplaying that trauma. .
In 2021, a study was published on how we remember political events, specifically examining memory for two watershed moments, one of which was the election of President Trump in 2016. Linda J. Levin, lead author of the study and a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, wrote: , “People recalled and exaggerated how angry they felt about political events, but underestimated how happy and fearful they felt.”
This is part of what she describes as “memory reconstruction,” which is updating past memories to reflect current feelings and beliefs. And what that tells me is that many of us remember the outrage of 2016 more vividly, but more vaguely the sense of foreboding that hung in the air in the years that followed. It means it’s a memory.
People, not just Republicans, remember exactly how it felt just a few years ago, when you had to brace yourself before you woke up every morning and checked the news, not knowing what new outrage was waiting for you. I don’t know if it is. .
I don’t know if people fully remember the sense of confusion and confusion of the constant stream of lies flowing from President Trump’s White House.
I don’t know if people remember Puerto Rico’s family separation policy, the quarantine of “very fine people” or the tossing of paper towels after a hurricane hit the island.
Today’s economy is stronger than the one Trump left behind, even though Trump can make a strong case that he overpowered the world’s dictators and incited the American nation, and still does. Too many people have settled into a hagiographical view of Trump’s presidency. Allies.
“Voters typically only respond to very recent memory, very recent messages,” University of Kentucky political scientist D. Stephen Vos told me this week. As he says, “candidates can easily forget their past.”
This election quirk stems from human nature. Staying in the moment of anxiety is so emotionally costly and consumes so much energy that we often become numb to it or allow ourselves to reduce it. I’ll put it away.
However, the threat that President Trump poses to our country has not diminished. It’s increasing. He continues to say things that prove he is a danger not only to the country but also to the world order — he will not be a dictator “except on day one.”
And in the end, that’s the most important issue in this election, not Biden’s memory, disagreements over foreign policy, immigration at the border or economic instability. You cannot improve a country unless you first save it.
Those fighting to save our democracy can never lose sight of that, especially as many of those who support Trump view his manifold sins through rose-tinted glasses.