Four years ago this week, the stock market was collapsing — hitting its worst week since the Great Recession of 2008 — as the country spiraled into a years-long pandemic that claimed more than 1 million American lives, cratered the economy, upended daily life and, arguably, helped cost Trump a second term in the White House.
The third week of March 2020 — four years before Trump sent his query — reveals a nation that was on the precipice of crisis, and a leader exhibiting the full panoply of characteristics that his supporters love and his detractors revile.
Reported covid cases exploded that week, growing from 588 to 3,659, and covid deaths more than tripled, from 16 on Sunday the 15th to 52 the following Saturday. Over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump regularly indulged in his most combative and erratic impulses, alienating large swaths of the public along the way.
During that seven-day stretch, Trump promised the country had “tremendous control” over the virus and that “we’re winning it.” In fact, the opposite was true.
Throughout the year, Trump rarely agreed to wear a mask — publicly undermining the advice of his own health experts — and at one point suggested injecting disinfectant as a possible treatment. He held near-daily news conferences — spectacles he came to view as ratings bonanzas rather than serious information sessions for desperate and terrified Americans. He diminished and feuded with his team of scientists and public health officials, and he ultimately contracted covid himself, having to be airlifted from the White House to the hospital.
Voters did not blame Trump for the pandemic, a once-in-a-lifetime calamity thrust upon the entire globe, but they did fault his response to it.
From May 2020 through November 2020, polls consistently showed most Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, and most polls showed Trump’s ratings for his handling of the pandemic were worse than his overall job performance.
Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who conducts weekly focus groups with voters, said Trump critics like herself are answering his question literally “and if you answer it literally, Trump loses every time.”
But three years after Trump left office, polls show that some of the voters who helped oust him are looking back on his administration more favorably now, either forgetting or willing to look past much of the chaos and mayhem that characterized his presidency. In interviews, some speak of his first term with a sense of gauzy nostalgia and rate his performance better than Biden’s.
They seem to have forgotten some of Trump’s myriad controversies and scandals, from the trivial — toying with buying Greenland and doctoring a hurricane’s projected path with a Sharpie — to the more serious, like claiming there were “very fine people on both sides” at a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and encouraging his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump and his campaign seem to be posing the question in a less literal and more emotional way: Do you, the voter, feel better off under Biden than you did under Trump?
They are also making the calculation that when it comes to the pocketbook issues that so often decide elections, voters will reward Trump for the strong economy that he presided over until the pandemic sent it plummeting.
In fact, Trump had plenty to tout about the economy before covid upended it. The civilian unemployment rate had been trending down and hovering between 3 and 4…
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