Short Memories Are the Gravest Threat to the American Republic | Opinion

If you’re still a undecided in the presidential election, you’re not alone: up to 13 percent of voters may be in the same boat, according to Change Research—having doubts, or looking at a third party, or just not being sold yet.

To get unstuck, try this short exercise. It’s three easy steps that can make things a lot clearer.

First, remember what things were like at the end of the 2010s. It’s hard, because it was 6 or 7 years and a pandemic ago, but cast your mind back. Donald Trump was president. He had come from a business that looked glitzy and successful, but turned out was mostly made up by Hollywood and based on a ton of fraud. Many of his top political allies were actually sketchy con men who eventually went to prison. Trump ended up filling his administration with unqualified grifters who didn’t know how to run things, like him.

The result was week after week of relentless turmoil that caused many functions of the U.S. government that Americans rely on to fall apart. In just one example, Trump delayed desperately needed aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, partly because he insisted on the longest government shutdown ever. And that was just one of his three shutdowns.

During Trump’s term, a lot started going off the rails. Crime was spiking, including the largest one-year jump in the murder rate ever. Jobs were getting outsourced overseas even faster than during the Obama presidency. Costs were going up due to Trump’s trade war with China. The national debt was exploding. And everything that people hate about politics went on steroids: after Trump abused his power, work on anything productive out of Washington ground to a halt. Trump famously has a glass jaw and thin skin, so he attacks everybody. He spent most of his term rage tweeting instead of accomplishing anything for the people that elected him. That’s why historians rank him the worst president ever and Americans gave him one of the lowest approval ratings ever.

Second, move forward just a bit to what you were going through four years ago. It was the tail end of Trump’s term. Covid was raging. American deaths were already almost 200,000. Eleven million were out of work. Crushing stress for parents trying to manage their kids’ “remote school.” Couldn’t get toilet paper. Tough to get groceries. It was awkward and uncomfortable if you were masking and distancing, but kind of anxious if you were in a place that didn’t do those things (who the hell was coughing on you anyway?). The grind of Zoom. The claustrophobia of being alone. The boredom of exhausting your binge watch list. And what about dating? The gym? Your immunocompromised grandmother?

Try to remember why things got so bad. Trump had actually known how big a threat Covid posed. But he ignored it and lied about it. He had already dismantled the government apparatus for fighting pandemics, and then he threw away the game plan for fighting new diseases. So, we missed the window to limit the damage. Once our best and only remaining weapon against the pandemic was smart, cohesive public health strategies, he confused, undermined, politicized, and outright stopped every measure that could help. His own lead coordinator on Covid said that Trump caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans all on his own (he certainly caused many more people to die in Republican areas). His incompetence and destructive decisions made the economic and social pain of the pandemic far worse.

Fast forward one final step. Remind yourself of what happened in our economy as the pandemic rose and fell (you can read this for yourself in the congressional testimony of Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s analytics). Covid forced stores, schools, restaurants, and factories to close, people to stop driving, and products to stop shipping. So, demand fell for everything.

Once Joe Biden became president, he executed the most successful American vaccination program in history. That allowed us to get everything going full speed again (for example, under Biden we went from less than half of schools open to almost all of them). So, demand came roaring back. But the supply for most of our goods and services had been badly disrupted. More demand and less supply meant prices started to rise. Then, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine restricted energy supplies and shot prices up further.

So, what can we take away from this mental refresher? The biggest point—and if you remember just one thing, please remember this— is that Donald Trump had more to do with causing high costs than anyone else: the reason prices went up so much is because of Covid, and the economic effects of Covid were much more severe because of Trump.

Trump tries to shift the blame. He argues that it was all government spending under Biden that made inflation worse. That’s BS. Trump actually spent way more than Biden, both on Covid and in general. And if it was Biden’s spending here in the United States, why did inflation soar all around the world? And why did the U.S. do better than any other advanced economy in bringing inflation back down? And while we’re at it, why is Trump now pushing a plan that would make inflation skyrocket again? Trump is an arsonist trying to blame the fire department.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing with Trump, a lot of hoping that we’ll forget critical things. Take an issue that undecided voters say makes them hesitate about Vice President Kamala Harris: concern about the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza. Remember that Trump was one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s closest friends and gave him whatever he wanted, which is partly why former Trump officials believe that “compared with the Biden administration, a second Trump administration would probably be more permissive toward the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and less inclined to bring U.S. leverage to bear in shaping Israeli conduct.” Trump is hoping we’ll forget that.

If you’re undecided, no one should tell you how to vote. But before you do, just try to remember accurately what happened before. And based on that, think about what’s likely to happen in the future.