If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that I frequently talk about where we were when Trump left office versus where we are now. In today’s edition, I’ve compiled a bunch of stats that demonstrate—just objectively—that America is measurably better off today. Why doesn’t this fact break through to the national narrative? I don’t know but it’s maddening. Maybe you’d like to join us in the comments today to hash out just why. At any rate, I’ll keep beating this drum and I hope you’ll join me sharing these ideas and the data because it’s going to take all of us to keep the authoritarians at bay. The Definitive Answer to the Question “Are You Better Off Today Than You Were Four Years Ago?”Here’s the complete reply to anyone stupid enough to ask.
1. Morning in AmericaWithout irony or embarrassment, Elise Stefanik asks, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” And then Stefanik claims that the answer is “A resounding no.” AYFKM? Let’s do this. And I mean, let’s really forking do it. First, let’s start with the baseline. What was it like four years ago? At this point in 2020, a few hundred Americans were dying every day from COVID. By April 2020 that number would be over 2,000 dead per day.
Let me give you a scale by which to judge this: Over the course of two decades, the total number of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was 6,817. In Donald Trump’s America, we topped that casualty number during a three-day stretch in April 2020. And what was President Donald Trump’s response? Please refresh your memory with this timeline. Select examples:¹ Trump on February 10, 2020: “A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in.” Trump on February 26, 2020: “[The number of people infected is] going very substantially down, not up.” “The 15 [cases] within a couple of days, is going to be down to zero.” Trump on March 13, 2020: “I don’t take responsibility at all.” On April 23, 2020, Trump suggested injecting people with disinfectants and shining ultraviolet lights “inside the body.”  Today, COVID is an afterthought. We have safe and effective vaccines available for anyone who wants them and testing is ubiquitous. Under Joe Biden, America beat COVID. How about economics? What was life like in 2020? In March 2020, unemployment was at 4.4 percent and rising. In April it hit 14.8 percent. Unemployment was at 14.8 percent under Trump!
Under Biden, unemployment has been under 4 percent for 24 consecutive months. Let’s look at the stock market, which crashed in 2020 and fell as far as 19,173 under Donald Trump.
Under Biden the Dow literally doubled from what it was at Trump’s nadir. How about GDP growth? In the first two quarters of 2020, the American economy contracted at a rate that was terrifying.
These numbers are all adjusted for inflation and you can see that under Biden, America has had the most sustained and robust economic growth in a decade. And here’s the Misery Index, which combines unemployment with inflation. You will see that 2020 was a very bad year.
For the last two years, Biden has been pushing this misery number steadily down. But those are just economic constructs. What about the median family in America? How are they doing, personally? For the median American household, real total wealth—accounting for inflation!—rose 37 percent from 2019 to 2022.² So is the median American family better off today than they were four years ago? Not only is the answer yes, but we can even hang an actual number on how much better they are: 37 percent better. How about crime? People care a lot about crime. Well, 2020 represented the largest increase in the murder rate in American history.
In Trump’s 2020, America became a criminal hellscape the likes of which we have never seen. Under Joe Biden, the murder rate has fallen every year—and the drop from 2022 to 2023 is one of the largest declines in the murder rate in American history.
And it’s not just murder that’s down: Violent crime is down across the board.
One more thing: In 2020, 8,600 American troops were in harm’s way in Afghanistan. Today that number is zero.³ 2. The “Disaster”In sum:
What else do you want? Is everything perfect? No. Border crossings are up. The price of something, somewhere, is higher than it was in 2020. Housing affordability is a real problem as the Case-Shiller Index shows. Just because most Americans have seen large gains in household wealth doesn’t mean that all Americans are better off. Unemployment at 3.6 percent is very low, but it still means that there are some people out of work and under financial strain. The world remains a dangerous place and Vladimir Putin is attempting to break NATO. But we do not live in paradise. The world is always complicated. There are always things to fix or improve. The point is that the answer to the actual question—“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”—is unequivocally “yes” for the majority of Americans and we can say this confidently because we have actual data that proves it. It’s not even close. All of which underlines the extent to which claims by idiots like former Nikki Haley donor Eric Levine, who says that Biden has been “a disaster,” are not—in the least—credible.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? People like Levine who understand exactly who and what Donald Trump is can’t bring themselves to say, “I have policy differences with Joe Biden and I believe he should have cut the corporate tax rate or whatever, so I’m voting for Trump.” Instead, they have to invent some bizarro world where America is in flames—and that this dystopia is forcing them to vote for Trump. The problem is, we actually did have that reality Levine is talking about. We had an America with double-digit unemployment, economic contraction, mass death, and skyrocketing crime. We had it exactly four years ago when Donald Trump was president. And in addition to all of that, we had Nazi marches and civil unrest. We had a president attempt to blackmail the leader of an American ally into helping his re-election campaign by lying about his rival. We had a president slam through two Supreme Court vacancies, at least one of which was achieved through irregular means. We also had an attempted coup. So here’s the deal: On the objective facts, America is better off now than it was four years ago. Which means that the only reason a person could feel as if we aren’t better off is if they’re relying on softer, subjective measures. In other words: The people who say that America was better in 2020 than it was today are either totally, completely misguided. Or they are nostalgic for the Nazi marches, and the civil unrest, and the Kavanaugh and Barrett confirmations, and the Zelensky affair, and the coup attempt. Because they see those parts of the Trump presidency as the value-add. So the next time someone asks if you’re better off now than you were four years ago—or says that Biden has been “a disaster”—drop the numbers on their head and ask them which parts of 2020, exactly, they are nostalgic for. 3. Graphic Design Is My Passion...Join The Bulwark to read the rest.Become a paying member of The Bulwark to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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