Trump asks, 'Better off today than 4 years ago?' Biden says yes, adds: 'Let's talk about it.'
Donald Trump resurrected an iconic Ronald Reagan question from 44 years ago, and President Joe Biden answered it by reminding Americans of the COVID-19 pandemic and business shutdown.
In a social media post on Monday, Trump simply asked in all capital letters: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
The Biden campaign responded on Thursday by airing a commercial "reminding voters about what their lives actually looked like four years ago: March Madness canceled, stockpiling toilet paper, businesses shut down, proms cancelled, as thousands of loved ones died every single day."
The ad is a collage of images of empty supermarket shelves, car lines for food donations, a quarantined elderly woman, ill hospital patients, a makeshift morgue and then-President Trump talking about ingesting "disinfectants" and rating his response to the crisis a "10" and saying "I don't take responsibility at all" and that the 1,000 people a day death toll "is what it is."
"Trump wants to talk about ‘four years ago?’ Let’s talk about it," the campaign said in a statement accompanying the unveiling of the roughly 40-second spot that also said "Trump failed to prepare for" the pandemic "and then couldn’t lead when we needed him the most."
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COVID-19 ranks among top national emergencies, but had been absent from political discourse
This week marks the first time the pandemic, declared four years ago this month, entered the 2024 campaign debate. The global crisis ranks among the top national emergencies of the past century, along with the Great Depression, the bombing of Pearl Harbor that roped Americans into World War II, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Great Recession of the late 2000s.
But the crisis that irrevocably changed ways of life across the United States had been largely absent from the current presidential campaign. Analysts said Americans' profound resentment toward COVID policies and restrictions that upended the early years of the decade provided neither camp with a clear advantage.
"It's not a great differentiator between the two of them," said Chris Tuttle, a senior fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, of why neither presidential candidate could gain an advantage. "And you're dealing with a lot of hangover effects and a generalized perception among the general public that there was an overreaction."
Kevin Wagner, a political science professor and pollster at Florida Atlantic University, noted that most polls, including the ones FAU has done in partnership with Mainstreet Research, ask about topics prevalent on voters' minds, from immigration to incivility. COVID-19 isn't one of them.
"My suspicion is that it probably wouldn't have gotten picked a lot," Wagner said earlier this month. "It's not at the forefront of most people's minds right now, for whatever reason."
Will Reagan quote work for Trump?
That was until Trump opened the box with the Reagan quote.
The 40th president asked the quesiton as a drop-the-mic moment in a 1980 presidential debate. Reagan, the GOP nominee, posed the question in a televised face-off with incumbent President Jimmy Carter, and won the contest and election in a landslide.
Whether the question works for Trump remains to be seen.
Carol Bishop Mills, a professor at the School of Mass Communication & Multimedia Studies at FAU, said Trump's posting of the question may have lacked self-insight, given the country in the spring of 2020 was mired in the national and global coronavirus-fueled economic shutdown.
"Four years ago we were fighting with people over toilet paper in the middle of a Costco aisle and using coffee filters if you couldn't find any," Mills said. "So I did think they are misguided in asking that particular question."
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Trump bemoans lack of credit for 'fantastic job' on pandemic. Historian explains why.
During his Mar-a-Lago "Super Tuesday" victory speech on March 5, Trump conceded "I don't talk about that" in reference to the pandemic. He said it was "such a horrible thing" and lamented the $60 trillion "worth of damage" globally.
He then lamented that his administration's pandemic management has not been fully appreciated.
"We did a fantastic job on that. We never got credit for that," he said. "We never got the kind of due that we should have for the COVID, or as I call it, affectionately, the Chinese virus, the China virus."
Presidential historian Robert Watson said there is a reason.
"In any way shape and form, if you look at what made the greats great when there was a crisis, Trump falls short," said Watson, who teaches at Lynn University in Boca Raton.
Watson said the assessment is neither partisan nor totally subjective. It's based on long-held basics for analyses of presidential action, decision-making and legacies so often dissected in academic journals, scholarly conferences and debates over presidential rankings.
It's the same rubric used to assess Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression, or Theodore Roosevelt and the pressure for conservation, or George H.W. Bush as the Berlin Wall collapsed, or Lyndon Johnson on civil rights.
"Every president gets a handful of really big issues that come across their plate, and those are things that separate the greats from everybody else," he said. "In a hundred years, the first line on your bio, the legacy of a president is not something you do on a Tuesday afternoon, or a bill you signed in September. It's the crisis stuff. It's when the you-know-what hits the fan and how you respond to the big issues."
There, historical analysis adjudicates based on some key markers, including whether the president sitting behind the Resolute Desk took ownership of the emergency and rallied the country with "honest and frank" discussions.
Examples, he said, were FDR's fireside chats or Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg and his second inaugural address to the nation.
In Trump's case, said Watson, who has long been a voter in C-SPAN's presidential rankings, that's where his standing in history slides mightily. Scholars fault him, he said, for his erratic approach, such as promoting ill-advised treatments, calling the pandemic a "hoax" and undermining the nation's public health experts.
"Trump tried to avoid all responsibility," he said. "I don't think anybody with a serious face could say that Trump was able to put a check mark in any of those boxes."
Trump's message on economics resonates with voters, polls show
But Trump has hammered home, in rally speeches and social media posts, that Americans of all walks of life "were better off under" his administration and has touted "MAGAnomics" as far superior to "Bidenomics."
The message seems to be gaining traction as polls show voters agree with the former president.
A CBS News/YouGov survey issued this month had 46% of respondents rating Trump's term as excellent or good, while just 33% of them said the same about Biden's administration. And 65% said the economy was good under Trump versus just 38% said the same about the past three years under Biden.
The poll is not an outlier.
An NBC News survey of voters released in February showed 55% said they felt Trump "would be better" when it comes to "dealing with the economy" and just 33% said Biden, a 22-point gap.
And an FAU-Mainstreet Research poll issued this week showed that those between the ages 18 and 34 chose Trump by a landslide, 54.4% to 36.6%, over Biden. The gap narrowed but still favored the former president in the 35-to-49 bracket, 48% to 43.6%.
One factor in that result, Mills and others say, is that younger Americans are still struggling financially, and with the fallout of pandemic policies, and generally feel dissatisfied and discontented with their economic standing.
That is the prevailing view the Biden camp seeks to change with the ad, and Biden's travels to swing states to tout the economic gains under his administration. The president's team is pointing out that under Trump almost 10 million Americans lost their jobs, almost doubling the number in the Great Recession, while Black and Hispanic unemployment shot up to nearly 10% in 2020 and estimated 9.4 million small businesses closed.
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at [email protected]. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump: Better off today than 2020? Biden says yes, voters may disagree.