"If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination."
Paul Simon, Kodachrome, 1973
"Thanks for the memory
Of faults that you forgave,
Of rainbows on a wave,
And stockings in the basin
When a fellow needs a shave,
Thank you so much."
Lyrics by Leo Robin, Thanks for the Memory. Sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross, 1938
We experience the present in the bright light of day. We experience the past in moonlight.
We remember the Trump years better than they were. That is a huge advantage for Trump in the 2024 election.
For decades Gallup has been asking Americans whether they approve of past presidents. There is a pattern. We remember them better than we experienced them.
This result is not surprising. It reflects our common experience.
My high school and college years were full of hassles and insecurities as I lived them, but I remember them now as "happy days."
Covid. What a mess. What lost opportunities. What worry. Yet, now, alive, mostly free of the uncertainty and dread of a mysterious disease, I feel relief. Relief is a happier emotion to associate with Covid than is fear.
The points of crisis in past years which should define an era -- the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, the 9/11 attack, the Great Financial Crisis, the January 6 attack -- fade a little in emotional intensity. Our minds reflect on the aftermaths and how we coped. Again, we feel relief.
We saw January 6 revisionism in real time. When the memory was fresh, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, and Kevin McCarthy were furious with Trump, and they publicly blamed him with clarity and certainty. Lindsay Graham said he was done with Trump. McConnell and McCarthy said he was responsible. Then they recanted and began defending Trump. They forgave. They forgot.
Trump says things were wonderful when he was president and that they are terrible now. His narrative benefits from our selective forgetting. Trump is a high pressure salesman with a story. At his inauguration, he defined the immediate past as "carnage," then in three months he said we are in a golden era of prosperity. He talked up the country throughout his presidency. As soon as Biden was inaugurated, Trump said things are terrible, a disaster, the worst ever, and he has said that relentlessly. Trump gave us a roadmap.
Biden is not a strong communicator by presidential standards, and no one is as omnipresent and relentless as Trump. Trump is the voice-over narrator for this era, telling us what we are seeing. Even people who dislike Trump and disagree vehemently cannot help but hear him.
All this is an electoral headwind for Joe Biden, but it is not hopeless for him. Trump is not just the moonlit past because he never became the past. The all-too-present Trump is a manic, increasingly dangerous-sounding and desperate politician in deep legal and political trouble. The present-daylight-Biden does not compete with moon-glow Trump. Trump is on center stage today for having falsified business records to mischaracterize as a legitimate business expense his payments to quiet a porn star in order to suppress yet another revelation of sexual misconduct just prior to the 2016 election.
That sounds bad for Trump, but he may survive it and be stronger because of it. The problem for Biden with the Stormy Daniels trial is that everyone knows that this is the sort of thing Trump has done for decades. Some people admire his rascally audacity. Most other people don't care. The only people who care a lot already dislike him anyway.
This chart is the stuff of nightmares. Ronald Reagan's high points is truly nuts, as well as the youngest Bush...why anyone admires these two is well beyond me.