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Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Hell yes.
Donald Trump has never been very original. Not many people remember that he stole his “Make America Great Again” slogan from Ronald Reagan. Perhaps without even realizing it, Trump also appropriated “America First,” which was the isolationist creed of the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh and others before World War II.
Now MAGA Republicans are trying out Reagan’s famous line from his final debate with Jimmy Carter, which capped a remarkably successfully political campaign that faced a lot more obstacles than we remember today. But it just won’t fit. In fact, in just about every way you can imagine, Americans are better off in 2024 than they were in 2020.
Writing for The Bulwark, Jonathan Last assembles a definitive case against the Trumpian contention. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s the highlights:
Without irony or embarrassment, Elise Stefanik asks, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
And then Stefanik claims that the answer is “A resounding no.”
AYFKM?
Let’s do this. And I mean, let’s really forking do it.
First, let’s start with the baseline. What was it like four years ago?
At this point in 2020, a few hundred Americans were dying every day from COVID. By April 2020 that number would be over 2,000 dead per day.
And here’s the Misery Index, which combines unemployment with inflation. You will see that 2020 was a very bad year.
For the last two years, Biden has been pushing this misery number steadily down.
In sum:
In 2020 your friends and family were dying by the thousands every day from COVID. Today they’re safe.
In 2020, between 6 percent and 14 percent of Americans were out of work. Today, unemployment is under 4 percent and wages are rising.
In 2020, the American economy actually contracted. Today it’s on a steady and sustainable growth curve.
In 2020, violent crime spiked to a level America had not seen since the 1970s. Today, crime is on the decline across the board.
In 2020, America was still entangled in Afghanistan. Today, American troops are safe and our foreign policy can take dead aim at our adversaries without losing focus.
What else do you want?
And lest we forgot, it wasn’t just 2020 that was a disaster. Seth Meyers, the late night host, has a funny -- and truthful -- video explication of just about everything that we shouldn’t forget about Trump’s tenure as president. If you haven’t seen it already, don’t miss it!
Indeed, instead of defending himself against the wildly misplaced charge of making things worse, Biden has a surprisingly good case for adopting Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan instead: “Morning in Amerca.” Moreover, Bill Scher, writing in The Washington Monthly, argues that Biden should also remind Americans of the nightmare we were living under just four years ago.
Joe Biden is the first incumbent president to face off against a member of the previous presidential administration since 1984, when President Ronald Reagan beat former Vice President Walter Mondale in a landslide.
It's time for Joe Biden to channel Ronald Reagan in his attacks on Donald Trump. In this May 29, 2020, file photo, protesters gather in front of a burning fast food restaurant in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) Credit: AP
But Reagan’s communications strategy was not all positive. His ad makers also took direct aim at the record of his predecessor. As his own four years were not without problems, he had to make sure his record would be judged in comparison to the worst possible characterization of his predecessor.
f Biden were to do an ad that began with him saying, “This was America in 2020,” what would come next? Your first thought might be: the Covid-19 pandemic. But while footage of Trump suggesting we inject ourselves with bleach would be a useful reminder of the insanity of his response, centering the pandemic risks a painful relitigating of the value of lockdowns and masks. That’s not the turf on which Biden wants to battle.
What else happened in 2020 that was disruptive? Widespread riots.
You might think: why should Biden talk about that? Back then, Trump and other Republicans used the riots to pillory “Democrat-run cities” for descending into anarchy following the homicide of the African-American George Floyd by a white police officer.
But four years later, most cities are still run by Democrats. And while all cities always have their problems, none of them are currently burning. . .
As Reagan portrayed an America of recent past marked by inflation and declining global influence, Biden could narrate an ad over a montage of riots from both the summer of 2020 and the January 6 insurrection:
This was America in 2020: literally on fire. After four years of a president spewing hatred toward business leaders, soldiers, athletes, immigrants, people of different faiths, political opponents, even at times political allies, our country was falling apart. We were turning on each other, and democracy itself hung by a thread.
Then just like Reagan, Biden can pivot. Over multicultural scenes of cooperative workers and happy families, Biden could say:
But then we rediscovered the love of democracy that binds us as a nation. We found ways to bridge our differences and rebuild our economy after the pandemic. We have more work to do, but compared to four years ago, America is stronger, safer, and kinder.
For a story to resonate it needs to not just be true, but feel true. That Trump is a divisive person who divided America meets both criteria. Many of Trump’s own supporters acknowledge it, to either lament or revel in it. Whatever divisions presently remain, after the last 37 months of calm, moral leadership, the national temperature has indisputably simmered. An ad campaign that ties Trump’s hateful approach to politics to the 2020 unrest is not going to fail any fact checks. . . .
The job of a re-election campaign is to affirmatively answer the succinct question Reagan posed as a challenger in 1980, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” And when your opponent is from the administration you defeated, you have the complementary task of reminding voters how bad things were four years ago.
This can be harder than it looks, because no presidential term is without hiccups, the past can be romanticized in comparison to the present, and an around-the-clock media environment steadily pumps the discourse full of negativity.
But Biden has a straightforward argument to make. We are better off economically than we were four years ago, and his predecessor’s record is decidedly unromantic. Morning in America will beat Nightmare in America.
With many Americans still complaining about inflation (the price of eggs!) and immigration (yes, a number of cities are indeed overwhelmed by refugees), a lot of Democrats are worried that accentuating the positive will create a political backlash among voters who are still struggling to get ahead. So remind Americans of how much things have improved and also fight fire with fire – taking on Trump’s apocalyptical “campaign,” which is little more than a litany of his personal grievances combined with a host of lies blaming Biden for everything that Fox News Republicans imagine has gone wrong with America.
What a week in America’s most bizarre campaign ever. And yes, I know: the 2020 election was also pretty damn crazy, what with the global pandemic and Trump fans storming the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying his loss. But this time the ex-President is not only repeating threats of violence if he loses again; he also faces the realistic possibility of both bankruptcy and prison time. If he sounds more frantic on the campaign trail, that’s probably because he is. For more than a year, the former President has been calling this election “the final battle” for America—an end-of-days apocalyptic message that seems calculated to appeal to the Republican Party’s evangelical-Christian base. It could also be interpreted as a very personal lament by Trump, who looks to end the year either as the world’s most powerful man, or as a bankrupted crook dodging creditors and criminal sentences. For him, 2024 could in fact turn out to be a final reckoning.
But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.
Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur. . .
It was no surprise, of course, that Trump began his speech by panning Biden’s: “the worst President in history, making the worst State of the Union speech in history,” an “angry, dark, hate-filled rant” that was “the most divisive, partisan, radical, and extreme” such address ever given. As always, what really stuns is Trump’s lack of self-awareness. Remember his “American carnage” address? Well, never mind. Get past the unintended irony, though, and what’s striking is how much of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform is being built on an edifice of lies, and not just the old, familiar lies about the “rigged election” which have figured prominently in every speech Trump has made since his defeat four years ago.
Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”
The 2024 campaign, of course, should be more about the future than the past. And while I know that many of you are thinking about Trump’s overall threat to democracy or his impulse to let Putin run wild in Europe by withdrawing from NATO, I think it’s worth paying much more attention to the seemingly mundane decisions about taxes and budgets that are the actual bread-and-butter of governing our nation. I’ve been writing for a while about how Trump’s trade tariffs and proposed tax cuts represent a profound threat to our economic prosperity. I’m glad to see that others, starting with Matt Yglesias and Josh Barro and now including David Leonhardt in The Morning newsletter for the NYT, and Ron Brownstein in The Atlantic, are picking up that theme and circulating it far more widely than I can.
A decision Donald Trump made in his first presidential term has triggered one of the most important policy choices at stake in this year’s election. The massive tax cuts for individuals that Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress and the next president act to extend them. So far, the question of whether to preserve the Trump tax cuts has received almost no attention in the early stages of a presidential contest dominated by other issues (including abortion, inflation, and immigration), Trump’s legal troubles, and Joe Biden’s age.
But the fate of Trump’s expansive and expensive tax cuts will frame all the budget decisions for the federal government over the next decade, determining how much money is left for other priorities—including investing in children, cutting taxes for the middle class, and preserving entitlement programs for seniors.
“It is the largest economic-policy debate of the decade, with trillions of dollars on the table,” Chuck Marr, the vice president for federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, told me.
Trump has already indicated that, if elected, he will push to extend for another decade all of the expiring individual tax cuts. Trump and his allies argue that such reductions are the best way to generate sustained economic growth and higher wages—a claim that critics say is simply not supported by academic research. “It’ll be very bad for this country if that’s not extended,” Trump insisted in an interview earlier this month on CNBC. Trump advisers have floated the possibility that, if reelected, he would seek even more cuts for individuals and possibly corporations.
In the federal budget Biden released last week, he again indicated he would allow the tax cuts to expire for individuals making more than $400,000 and families making more than $450,000 a year. He said he would extend the reductions for those earning less, but pledged to fully offset the costs.
This difference in approach has huge implications for the federal government’s balance sheet. The best estimates are that the Trump cuts have already cost the federal government about $2 trillion, and extending them in full for another decade starting in 2026 would reduce federal revenue by an additional $3 trillion to $3.5 trillion. (That doesn’t include the hundreds of billions more in increased interest costs, because the lost revenue would raise the federal debt.) Taxpayers in the top 1 percent of all earners would save an average of about $49,000 a year, and those in the top one-tenth of 1 percent would save nearly $176,000 a year, according to projections by the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. By contrast, taxpayers in the middle of the income distribution would save slightly less than $1,000 annually. . .
Neither party is considering meeting the financial needs of an aging society by restoring tax rates to their level before the Bush and Trump cuts. And even a Congress with narrow Democratic majorities in both chambers would be unlikely to pass all the tax increases Biden has proposed. But Biden’s plan would at least seek to meet future revenue demands and limit debt growth by substantially increasing taxes on the affluent and corporations. Trump’s blueprint would shrink federal revenues and enlarge the debt to provide large further tax reductions that disproportionately benefit those same constituencies. As on so many other fronts, the difference between the two candidates could not be starker.
It’s only March, of course. The campaign may already be bizarre, as Susan Glasser wrote, but somehow we have to get through the next 7 ½ months without going crazy. So I’m wasting a lot of time watching men’s college basketball and obsessing over my bracket.
In the first round, I got 25 of the 32 games correct, with 9 upsets, including Grand Canyon, James Madison, Duquesne, NC State and Oregon. Entering the Sweet 16, the favorites are reasserting themselves, but I’ve still got 12 of the 16 teams alive. I’ve picked UConn, Arizona, Houston and Tennessee for my final four, with Tennessee beating Arizona in the championship. We’ll see.
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