At a campaign event in Allentown, Pennsylvania on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump asked the crowd a question Ronald Reagan also asked voters in the 1980 election against Jimmy Carter, and one many presidents before have asked. “Are you better off now then you were four years ago?” Trump said.
Despite a mixed bag of Reagan's escalation of the War on Drugs, Reaganomics, and his response to the AIDS crisis, the majority of Americans apparently did think they were better off after Reagan’s first term in office, and he won in a landslide victory. When Trump asks the question, however, he is zeroing in on the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — before stay-at-home orders were initiated and vaccines were rolled out — when the Trump Administration was discouraging mask wearing and toying with the idea of trying to reach herd immunity while public anxiety went through the roof.
Trump’s question reflects a widespread public amnesia that has clouded over our collective memory of COVID. In a poll from the New York Times/Siena College, just 4% of voters said COVID was the thing they remembered most about Trump's presidency. Instead, most respondents remembered his “behavior,” followed by fond memories of his economic policy and stance on immigration. Yet despite the fact that life as we knew it was shut down and morgues were running out of capacity to handle the sheer volume of dead bodies from COVID four years ago, more than half of voters in a recent Gallup poll said they did indeed feel like they were worse off today than they were four years ago.
“Politicians began to use that old question, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ during this campaign, where four years ago we were in the middle of one of the greatest public health catastrophes in the last century,” said Dr. George Makari, a psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medicine. “People are still framing questions like that as if where we were four years ago was not in the early stages of a pandemic … when deaths were piling up in hospitals and in nursing homes all around the country.”
It’s common for a misremembering to occur after a pandemic or collective traumatic event occurs, said Guy Beiner, a Boston College professor who studies the history of remembering and forgetting. There’s even a term for this phenomenon: “post-pandemic amnesia.”
After the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 killed 675,000 people in the U.S., it became known as the “Forgotten Pandemic,” because governmental and scientific institutions, along with the public, largely stopped talking about it, said George Dehner, a historian at Wichita State University who studies public health.
“Even though, at the time, we tend to say, ‘This is so bad and is going to have so much impact and is going to be instructive going forward,’ the reality is that oftentimes it is shoved into the back corners of our minds and doesn’t command much attention,” Dehner told Salon in a phone interview.
While cases are low right now, COVID has still not gone away, and for many who lost family members or are still suffering from long-term consequences of the virus, the pandemic is a traumatic event that is still very much present. But for the general public, COVID seems to be a distant memory, in part due to how it was handled by government leadership.
Anti-science movements have always challenged public health, but they are increasingly moving their way toward the heart of U.S. politics. What sets COVID apart from prior pandemics was how rapidly and deeply public health became politicized. Add on confusing and conflicting messaging coming from leaders in public health and government, and it becomes easier to forget what happened in early 2020 than to try to find an anchor of truth in a soupy mess of misinformation.
“The whole point of fake news is not only to circulate different narratives but to undermine our ability to distinguish between these narratives and to trust authoritative sources of information,” Beiner said.
During a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) facilities in Atlanta in March 2020, Trump, whose grandfather died in the 1918 influenza, said something that quintessentially defines his presidency during the Covid-19 pandemic and its ensuing amnesia.
“Does anybody die from the flu?” he said. “I didn’t know people died from the flu.”
Trump’s time in the White House during the pandemic was fraught with stream-of-consciousness sound bites that often contradicted national or global health advisories. He suggested injecting bleach to fight COVID, recommended people take the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which had not shown to be safe, and encouraged people to protest social distancing restrictions. In the early months, he denied the threat of the pandemic, saying some iteration of the fact that the COVID pandemic was “going to disappear,” over 40 times.
“The Trump Administration was engaged in trying to disremember and trying to engage in kind of obfuscating the record of COVID-19 throughout,” Beiner said.
Prior to the pandemic, Trump dismantled a pandemic preparedness initiative that Barack Obama had started in his presidency. During the pandemic, he fired top public health officials and withdrew funding to the World Health Organization (WHO). Overall, he responded in a political manner rather than one based on science, which created an opposition to public health among many of his supporters, said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) at the University of Saskatchewan.
“I think that political framing has really done everybody a disservice,” Rasmussen told Salon in a phone interview. “It’s going to take a long time for the damage that’s been done by this to be repaired.”
The Trump Administration did authorize Operation WarpSpeed, which brought life-saving vaccines to the U.S. public in record time. However, these vaccines wouldn’t reach many of his supporters. During the pandemic, counties that voted majority Republican had significantly more deaths than counties that voted Democratic, in part due to reduced vaccine uptake.
Overall, U.S. life expectancy dropped 2.7 years between 2020 and 2021— the largest two-year decline in life expectancy since the 1920s. This nosedive was largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, of which 450,000 Americans died during Trump’s last year in the Oval Office.
According to a study published in The Lancet, the Covid-19 death rate in the U.S. was 40% higher than it was in similar high-income countries, and the Trump Administration’s undermining of science and public health agencies directly “impeded the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.”
The denial, confusion and misinformation that was so characteristic of the pandemic response also made it more challenging for the public to remember what happened. In many instances, it was left to the individual to determine which political party was telling the truth, rather than being able to rely on objective scientific truths.
“The fact that we had almost no common ground in our narratives between different kinds of political parties in this country about what happened is, ultimately, very disruptive,” Makari said. “Having some common understanding of what we went through is a way of also putting things to bed.”
The Biden Administration made huge strides in making vaccines more accessible, reopening schools, and reducing racial disparities in COVID deaths. However, Biden's response remained political and he for the most part has been criticized for not being able to build back much of the trust in public health that has been lost.
“This lack of action allowed the Republicans and the far-right interests that have been active to promote their anti-vax stuff without much of a challenge from the other political party,” Rasmussen said. “There are anti-vaxxers in Congress and in the Senate who are really mainstreaming this now, and this is going to have an effect on the budget that can be allocated toward pandemic preparedness and scientific research in the future.”
Public health experts have repeatedly said it is a matter of “when” and not “if” the next pandemic occurs, and their concern is that the politicization of public health will again undermine the government’s response when that time comes. Already, threats of infectious diseases like bird flu are demonstrating what happens when public health falls to the wayside, Rasmussen said.
“We’re not doing enough testing and we’re just kind of hoping and praying that this burns out in cows, which it is clearly not doing because it has been going on for almost a year now,” Rasmussen said. “The lack of urgency we see in this is a direct consequence of a political decision to not prioritize the response to infectious threats and pandemic preparedness.”
To some degree, the collective amnesia that seems to have occurred was a protective mechanism from the trauma of the great loss and uncertainty that sprang from COVID. Like with any traumatic experience, our collective fight or flight mechanisms were triggered to help us escape the threat, and this may have pushed the memories of early 2020 to the recesses of our minds. Plus, there were plenty of other crises — the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, climate change and the battle for reproductive rights — to dominate our immediate attention.
Yet unless these memories are processed and commemorated, they will remain dormant in our collective memory, where they run the risk of being triggered, Makari said.
“All of the fear and the anxiety and the threat lingers unattached to anything,” Makari said. “You can make the argument that some of the intensity of the division in our country is hypercharged … and is made to some extent worse by all of this emotional remainder from COVID that hasn’t really been fully processed.”
