You can always count on the aptly-named New York Times columnist Charles Blow to completely miss the point.
In a recent op-ed titled, “The Trauma of the Trump Years Is Being Rewritten,” Blow states that America is somehow in danger because the public is forgetting the threat that the Orange Man What Is Bad™ poses to the future of the nation. In the piece, he makes the case to his readers that they must reacquaint themselves with the hysteria they felt when former President Donald Trump was in office.
However, his arguments don’t hold even a Dixie cup full of water.
In the piece, Blow discusses how American attitudes toward presidents tend to soften after they leave office.
This is because our political memories aren’t fixed, but are constantly being adjusted. Politicians’ negatives are often diminished and their positives inflated. As Gallup noted in 2013, “Americans tend to be more charitable in their evaluations of past presidents than they are when the presidents are in office.”
While he acknowledges that this phenomenon is normal, he asserts that “the difference is that other presidents’ shortcomings pale in comparison to his and his benefit isn’t passive: He’s seeking the office again and, as part of that, working to rewrite the history of his presidency.”
Without a doubt, Donald Trump benefits from this phenomenon. The difference is that other presidents’ shortcomings pale in comparison to his and his benefit isn’t passive: He’s seeking the office again and, as part of that, working to rewrite the history of his presidency. His desperate attempts, first to cling to power, then to regain it, include denying the 2020 election results and embracing the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that his denials helped fuel.
The author goes on to state that the “revisionism has worked remarkably well,” highlighting a poll showing that Republican voters “are now less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were ‘mostly violent’” and “less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack.”
He also points out that “43 percent of Americans and 80 percent of 2020 Trump voters said they believe that the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol was an event that the country needed to move on from.”
But he doesn’t stop there. Blow then quotes a psychologist who discussed how Americans recall political events.
In 2021, a study was published about how we remember political events, specifically examining recollections about two watershed moments, one being Trump’s election in 2016. The study’s lead author, Linda J. Levine, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, wrote, “People exaggerated when remembering how angry they had felt about the political events but underestimated their feelings of happiness and fear.”
This is part of what she describes as “memory reconstruction,” the updating of our memories of the past to reflect our current feelings and beliefs. And what it says to me is that many of us have a clearer recollection of our indignation from 2016, but have developed a hazier recollection of the sense of foreboding that hung in the air during the years that followed.
So, basically, America has forgotten how evil Trump was when he occupied the White House, and this is why they no longer check under their beds before going to sleep to make sure the Orange Monster isn’t lurking down there to get them.
While this phenomenon might apply to Trump as well as other presidents, there are certainly other factors at play here. For starters, Blow brings up some of the issues leftists obsessed over when Trump was president.
I’m not sure that people are remembering the family separation policy, the “very fine people” refrain or the tossing of rolls of paper towels in Puerto Rico after a hurricane ravaged the island.
For starters, it’s hard for America to be upset about the family separation policy when President Joe Biden has been doing the exact same thing. Moreover, thanks to honest journalists and commentators, many more Americans know that Trump did not call Nazis and white supremacists “fine people.” Lastly, nobody actually cared about the paper towels in the first place.
The bottom line is that much of the hysteria fostered by Democrats and their close friends and allies in the activist media has been shown to be wildly deceptive and overblown. Trump was not a perfect president, but he was nowhere near as horrific as the left wanted everyone to think. Indeed, now that the nation has gotten more than a taste of Biden in office, it is not surprising that many might have a softer view of the former president. After all, the nation wasn’t living under oppressive inflation and other economic woes while Trump was in office, were they?
The notion that people simply forgot how awful Trump was is the type of simplistic claptrap that folks like Blow have to push to their audiences because it ignores factors that he would rather people not consider. Still, polling shows that Blow’s effort to remind them about Trump’s supposed evils is going to fall on deaf ears.