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Roughly eight months into President Joe Biden’s term, the FBI released new data on crime rates. Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany seized on the figures, which showed an increased U.S. murder rate, as part of an effort to blame the Democratic White House.
There was, however, one unfortunate detail McEnany overlooked: The FBI’s data pointed to crimes committed in 2020, which was the final year of Donald Trump’s term, not the first year of Biden’s term. The conservative media personality was trying to make Biden look bad, but she inadvertently drew attention to an embarrassing detail for her former boss.
McEnany had plenty of company. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado blamed the Democratic president for Covid-related school closures in 2020, when Trump was president and Biden was a private citizen. Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, blamed Biden for “paying people to stay home” in 2020, referring to a measure that Trump signed into law. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia blamed the Biden administration’s policies for a Michigan woman whose sons died of overdoses in 2020 — when, again, Biden was a private citizen.
To be sure, it’s been odd to see so many Republicans forget who was in the Oval Office three years ago. But just as strange as watching GOP voices say that things were bad in 2020, and people should blame Biden, is watching the same party reverse course and claim that things were great in 2020 and people should credit Trump.
The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, a prominent conservative media voice, generated a fair amount of conversation a couple of weeks ago with a social media message along these lines, predicated on the idea that conditions in the United States were good before Biden replaced Trump.
The former president himself made a related pitch via his own platform yesterday afternoon, arguing, “Just three years ago, our economy was booming, the world was safe, and America was strong.”
I realize that in politics, memories can be short, but celebrating conditions in the United States from three years ago is genuinely bizarre. In 2020, a deadly contagion claimed hundreds of thousands of lives as officials struggled to respond. There was a recession and a collapse in the job market. There were social-justice protests in communities nationwide in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The national murder rate worsened.
The nation’s executive branch was led by a scandal-plagued amateur, who was unpopular and ineffective, and who lost his re-election bid by a fairly wide margin. In the months and years that followed, Covid deaths declined; the unemployment rate fell to its lowest point since before the Moon landing; and the economy grew at a healthy pace.
Those longing for the halcyon days of three years ago should probably make more of an effort to remember what actually happened three years ago.