Have Enough People Forgotten That Señor T Was The Worst President In History To Vote Him Back In!?

Another Trump Festival Of Grievances, Eruption Of Impulse

I was relieved that the Teamsters decided to not endorse this cycle, especially because a majority of members prefer Trump. How’s that possible, you wonder? What would you rather hear— a story about my far-right Teamster brother-in-law or David Corn’s story about political amnesia? Yeah, me too. I’ve spent enough time bad-mouthing my sister’s husband… and Corn’s new piece in Mother Jones is far more interesting. “Trump,” he reminded us, “seeking to become the first former president since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House after being voted out of the job, has waged war on remembrance. In fact, he’s depending on tens of millions of voters forgetting the recent past. This election is an experiment in how powerful a memory hole can be. In March, Trump posted this all-caps question: ‘ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?’ A realistic answer for most would be, hell, yeah. Four years prior, the Covid pandemic was raging, the economy was cratering, deaths were mounting, and anxiety was at a fever pitch. Trump responded erratically, downplaying the threat, pushing conspiracy theories, and undermining scientific officials and public health recommendations. (Bleach!) In the final year of his presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died of Covid. A Lancet study concluded the US death rate was 40 percent higher than in similar countries, and that many of those deaths could have been averted had Trump handled the crisis responsibly... [T]to regain the White House, Trump needs to cover not just the pandemic but a lot else with the mists of time, including his attempt to overturn an election and his incitement of January 6’s insurrectionist attack, a trade war with China that cost the US hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in GDP, his love affairs with dictators like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, his broken vows to boost infrastructure and to replace the Affordable Care Act with a better and cheaper program, his two impeachments, and nine years of chaos, scandals, and mean-spirited, racist, and ignorant remarks.”

He sure has a majority of Teamsters snowed! “Fortunately for him,” observed Corn, “the nature of human memory plays to Trump’s favor— even, perhaps especially, when it comes to a pandemic… ‘Humans are really good at compartmentalizing things in the past, and Americans appear to be especially good at that. That’s a nicer way of saying we don’t keep track of history very well,’ [Historian George] Dehner tells me, explaining Trump is ‘counting on, and his supporters are cultivating, this tendency to compartmentalize unpleasant associations from the past.’”

In August, Weill Cornell Medical College psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman argued in the New England Journal of Medicine that a “collective inability among many people in the United States to remember and mourn what was endured during the pandemic” could help explain why, in early 2024, half of Americans told pollsters they were no better off than they had been “at the height of the deadliest epidemic in the country’s history.” They likened the finding to classic studies by German social psychiatrists that explored how many post–World War II­­­­­ Germans “had seemingly lost the ability to acknowledge the atrocities.” Makari points out that chronic trauma and stress can inhibit memory— and the pandemic yielded much of both. “In addition,” he says, “psychologically this loss of memory is compounded by defenses against helplessness. Finally, socially this is all made worse by collective amnesia. No one wants to remember how terrifying that first year was, before tests, before vaccines. I can barely recall…So from biological, psychological, and social points of views, we grow hazy.”

In a way, this is a mechanical issue. The basic function of memory allows for— or even facilitates— such forgetting, says William Hirst,  a New School for Social Research psychology professor. “When you recall the past, you do so selectively,” he explains. “Trump people do that selectively with his agenda in mind.” As Hirst puts it, a narrative that leaves out information “induces forgetting of the unmentioned material.”

“You might think that normally if you don’t mention something, it slowly fades,” he says. “It’s much more dynamic than that.” Talking about other parts of the story actively leads people to forget what is not discussed. So when Trump brags about how wonderful his presidency was and, of course, doesn’t mention the horrors of Covid or the violence at the Capitol, memories of these events become suppressed— but only, Hirst adds, for “in-group members” who see Trump as a legitimate conveyor of information.

“We seem to have a brain that is designed to build a collective memory around collective remembering and collective forgetting,” he explains. “Why? It’s adaptive. We’re social creatures oriented toward our in-group and away from out-groups. Memory is designed to reinforce our in-group membership.”

When Trump falsely says no one was killed during the January 6 riot— which he doesn’t call a riot— and calls the marauders victims and patriots, this shapes the memories of his supporters, according to Hirst, and recollections about brutal facts of that day are smothered. Trump’s repetition— a cornerstone of propaganda— boosts this process. “Each time they hear his account of that day,” Hirst remarks, “the negative part— the breaking-in, the broken windows, the violence— becomes less accessible. And once you suppress the memory image of people breaking in, it’s easier to impose the false memory of protesters having been invited in. There’s no longer a competing memory. So Trump creates this collective forgetting to establish the groundwork for another narrative that is not accurate.”

…Trump is in a unique position for a non-incumbent presidential candidate. He has a record as the nation’s chief executive. And to win, he needs to shape how millions of voters remember that time. Whether he realizes it or not, the human mind affords him much opportunity. How we recall the past, Hirst says, “is a real memory hole, and it can become so deep it’s difficult to get out of…It’s not a pleasant story, but it’s what we are as humans.”

Dehner wonders if accurate memories might end up prevailing in this election, but he is not sure: “In the quiet of the voting booth or just in thinking about it, will voters revisit what it was really like during the previous administration? These personal memories remain, and I suspect there will be a certain unease about how one portion of the candidate pool is seeking to portray that past. As an academic, I’m curious about how this all will turn out; as a citizen, I’m quite disturbed.”

Worth noting that David Frum is looking as closely at the presidential campaigns as Corn is and when it comes to Trump and the weirdo he picked as a running mate, he says it’s what a losing campaign looks like. “What we’ve been seeing from Trump-Vance,” he wrote, “is not the behavior of a winning campaign… Trump was live-streaming to promote a dubious new cryptocurrency venture. That same day, he gave an interview  to the conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root in which Trump reverted to old form to denounce mail-in voting because the U.S. Postal Service could not be trusted to deliver pro-Trump votes fairly. The day before that, the Secret Service had fired upon a man with a rifle near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course. The apparent assassination attempt [or not] drove the headlines, but beneath the story was the reality that a candidate for president took a day off to golf only 50 days before Election Day. Trump golfs a lot, and campaigns surprisingly infrequently. When he does campaign events, he makes odd choices of venue: Today, he will appear in New York’s Nassau County. New York State has not voted Republican for president since 1984.  In 2020, Trump won 38% of the New York vote. Yet Trump has convinced himself, or somebody has convinced him, that this year he might be competitive in New York.”

"The Running Mate" by Nancy Ohanian

Trump’s main message of the week, meanwhile, has been that he was not wrong to accuse Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of stealing and eating pets— a message that has put him at odds with the state’s Republican governor and local mayors and police chiefs. The only thing Trump said that made more impact were the four words he posted Sunday morning: I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!

Adding to the self-harm, Vance indicated that the Trump health-care plan would allow insurers to resume denying coverage for preexisting conditions. Trump himself proclaimed that he would address high food prices by barring food imports— a policy guaranteed to raise costs instead. All but two Senate Republicans got baited into voting yesterday against a law to protect in vitro fertilization from state-level abortion restrictions. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House seem to be stumbling toward forcing a government shutdown because Trump vetoed their own plan to fund government operations through the November election. That’s all just in a single week.

He concluded that “Every losing campaign has a different shape. Sometimes, campaigns lose because of insurmountable difficulties… Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has. The campaign seems to have stumbled into a strange unintended message: ‘Let’s go to war with Taylor Swift to stop Haitians from eating dogs.’ The VP candidate wants to raise tariffs on toasters and worries that with Roe v. Wade overturned, George Soros may every day fill a 747 airliner with abortion-seeking pregnant Black women. The stink of impending defeat fills the air— and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.”