New York Times headline, March 5: “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?”
This is the third Times article within less than a month to suggest that surveys and polls are showing a highly competitive presidential election largely because voters are suffering some form of political Alzheimers. After everything the media have done to render Donald Trump an untouchable, toxic sludge — no less, a racist sludge that threatens democracy — Democrats can fix on no other reason so many people could openly declare their support for him outside of inexplicable memory loss.
From the Times: “More than three years of distance from the daily onslaught has faded, changed — and in some cases, warped — Americans’ memories of events that at the time felt searing. Polling suggests voters’ views on Mr. Trump’s policies and his presidency have improved in the rearview mirror. In interviews, voters often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics. Social scientists say that’s unsurprising. In an era of hyper-partisanship, there’s little agreed-upon collective memory, even about events that played out in public.”
Don’t you remember the daily onslaught?! Don’t you recall one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics?! God bless the poor voters. Those memories have faded. Those recollections have warped. The past has gone hazy.
People surely forget details, misremember facts, and even sometimes unintentionally fabricate things that didn’t happen (false memory). But the Times suggests there’s something much different at play here, that Trump’s reign as president was so eventful, frenetic, and even traumatic that no person of sound mind and reliable memory could possibly consider putting him back in office. And if such a voter does exist, there certainly aren’t tens of thousands. Right?
The Times: “For now, the erosion of time appears to be working in Mr. Trump’s favor, as swing voters base their support on their feelings about the present, not the past. A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted late last month found 10 percent of Mr. Biden’s 2020 voters now say they support Mr. Trump, while virtually none of Mr. Trump’s voters had flipped to Mr. Biden. The poll found Mr. Trump’s policies were viewed far more favorably than Mr. Biden’s.”
In essence, because a substantial number of voters have experienced a memory clean sweep of the pre-Biden years, they’re unable to truly compare the current president to the previous one. If they could, the Times suggests, poll numbers wouldn’t be nearly this close.
The Times’s deputy opinion editor, Patrick Healy, made a similar argument last month when he wrote on the results of a focus group of 13 swing voters. Eleven said they voted for Biden in 2020 but would be voting for Trump in this year. “A lot of our focus group participants — and many voters — see Trump as an acceptable option in November, ” wrote Healy, “yet they don’t know or remember a lot about him.”
His colleague Charles Blow wrote a few days before that positive polling for Trump indicated voters are “disregarding or downgrading” the “trauma” they lived through in the previous administration.
What makes this coping mechanism so remarkable is corporate media are inadvertently admitting all the blood, sweat, and tears they put into controlling voters’ perceptions of Trump isn’t having the intended effect.If that’s true, then man, oh man, has that been a lot of wasted body fluid.
CNN and MSNBC won’t carry Trump’s live appearances. The New York Times and Washington Post won’t write a single article about him that isn’t bogged down to the point of illegibility with “false,” “no evidence,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and on and on. Cable news commentary is limited to either calling the former president a racist, a rapist, or the ever-so-devastating “threat to democracy.”
You mean to tell me after all of that, at least half the country is nostalgic for a time when gas, groceries, and rent didn’t inspire crippling anxiety? A sizable portion of the electorate still maintains second thoughts about further handcuffing us to Ukraine in the middle of a hot war? Perhaps even a majority of Americans are a little restless about the flood of destitute migrants dumping themselves into taxpayer care at the southern border?
Nah, something’s got to be wrong with their memories.