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By any fair measure, 2020 was a nightmarish year. Americans confronted a deadly contagion. And a recession. And the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. And higher crime rates. And social unrest.
For Republicans, this is politically inconvenient. GOP officials keep trying to tell voters that they’re worse off now than they were four years ago — reality notwithstanding — but it’s impossible to look back with a sense of nostalgia for the final year of Donald Trump’s term. It was, after all, one of the worst years many Americans have ever experienced.
With this in mind, the Republican National Committee is having to get creative. This week, for example, the party’s frequently mocked social media account pushed back against President Joe Biden’s claim that crime rates have fallen during his White House tenure — by comparing the status quo to 2019, instead of 2020.
So, a few things.
First, it’s ironic to see a political party focusing on crime rates while nominating a suspected felon for the nation’s highest office.
Second, the truth is that violent crime rates really have fallen in every year of Biden’s presidency. That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of quantifiable data. A recent NBC News report added that the murder rate in the United Sates in 2023 plummeted “at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded.”
Third, it’s been genuinely bizarre to watch Republicans play calendar games in recent years. Throughout Biden’s term, prominent GOP voices have blamed him for school closings in 2020, unemployment benefits in 2020, crime rates in 2020, fentanyl deaths in 2020, and even developments inside the Justice Department in 2020, seemingly indifferent to the fact that Biden was a private citizen in the final year of Trump’s tenure.
But this latest RNC effort puts a mind-numbing twist on the strategy. Instead of pretending Biden was the president in 2020, the party this week decided to skip over 2020 as if it didn’t happen.
I fear it’s only a matter of time before Republicans decide it’s easier to tweak the old Ronald Reagan adage and start asking, “Are you better off now than you were five years ago?”