I’m happy as the next guy to mock Donald Trump’s increasingly addled verbiage along the campaign trail, but it’s Trump’s momentary flashes of coherence that worry me most.
I’ve written previously about Trump’s plans—as revealed in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership (much of it repeated in Trump’s Agenda 47 videos), and in the Republican Party platform—to replace as much of the progressive income tax as he can with a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all imports, and also to lower corporate taxes, cut the capital gains tax, and do anything else he can think of to accelerate economic inequality. We mustn’t pretend that any of this (except for the tariff part) departs substantially from the paleoconservative playbook, which for 40 years has expanded the budget deficit with tax giveaways to the rich. That’s why billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Schwarzman, and Twitter blowhard Bill Ackman hold their noses and support Trump.
Today, however, I’d like to discuss not Trump’s economic policies but his economic record, about which the press is guilty—to apply the neologism du jour—of sanewashing.
The word “sanewashing” was invented to suggest that the press, and especially The New York Times, is guilty of whitewashing the crazy nonsense pouring out of Trump’s mouth. I’ve never subscribed to that criticism. Trump’s derangement has never been a secret, and although it’s more pronounced lately I don’t feel that, as a faithful reader of the mainstream newspapers, I’ve been denied the evidence. Trump’s erratic behavior is the principal story about him now because he spent 40 minutes at a Pennsylvania town hall earlier this week just standing on a stage and swaying to music. But Trump’s addled mental state has never not been a story. Nearly seven years have passed since Trump, risibly, described himself as “a very stable genius.” More than nine years have passed since Trump, shockingly, said of Arizona Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” If you didn’t know before now that Trump was a toxic Snickers bar, you weren’t paying attention.
My beef, not only with the mainstream press but also to some extent with Kamala Harris’s campaign, is a little different. It’s that these organizations—along with just about everybody else—have, in assessing Trump’s economic record, largely accepted Trump’s ridiculous insistence that we all agree to forget about the Covid pandemic.
“I had the country going,” Trump said earlier this month, “just prior to Covid coming in, at a level that nobody had ever seen.” Trump has been saying some version of that since his 2020 presidential campaign. It isn’t true, and plenty of news accounts have explained that it isn’t true. Even discounting for Trump’s habitual hyperbole (“a level that nobody had ever seen”), the economic expansion over which Trump presided was one that he inherited from President Barack Obama, and in some respects Trump’s expansion was inferior.
For example, as MSNBC’s Steve Benen, among others, pointed out, during Trump’s first three years he created 6.5 million jobs, which is good. But President Barack Obama, during the first three years of his second term, created more than 8 million jobs, which is better, and President Joe Biden, during his first three years, created nearly twice that. Gross domestic product, under Biden, grew consistently faster during Biden’s first three years than under Trump’s (and continues to do so in his fourth).
When Trump boasts that his economy was better than Biden’s, he’s mostly talking about inflation, which was 2.3 percent in February 2020, the eve of the Covid outbreak, compared to 3.2 percent at the same point in Biden’s term. Under Trump, inflation peaked at 2.5 percent in June and July 2018; under Biden, inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022. Inflation headed downward after that, and today it stands at a very respectable 2.4 percent. But that 9.1 spike was the highest in forty years, and two years later people are still freaked out about it.
The standard capsule summary is: Trump had a strong economy and Biden had a strong economy, but Biden’s strong economy created inflation. Thus, Heather Long and Aden Barton, comparing Trump’s economic record to Biden’s, wrote last June in The Washington Post, “Aside from the pandemic, Biden and Trump both oversaw stellar growth.” Come again? To say that Trump oversaw stellar growth is equivalent to saying, on the basis of Woodrow Wilson’s first four years in office, that he kept America out of war. That’s true only if you ignore that during Wilson’s second term the United States lost 53,000 soldiers in battle.
Or perhaps ignoring Trump’s Covid year is like asking Mrs. Lincoln whether, apart from John Wilkes Booth’s interpolation, she enjoyed Our American Cousin. Yes, the Covid pandemic was going to happen—it was, after all, global. But on Trump’s watch the United States mortality rate rose well above that of other comparable nations. As of February 2021, Covid deaths were 40 percent higher in the United States than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, according to a commission established by the British medical journal The Lancet. Dollars and cents shouldn’t be our primary consideration, but these excess deaths, and the panic they created, had dire consequences for the economy. As the Georgetown economist Harry Holzer observed in 2020, “both U.S. employment and health outcomes during the pandemic [were] worse than what we find in virtually all other high-income countries around the world.”
Was that Trump’s fault? In his 2021 Covid book The Premonition, Michael Lewis argues, persuasively, that much of America’s exceptionally high Covid morbidity can be blamed on an ass-covering Centers for Disease Control concluding, from the 1976 swine flu scare, that it’s inadvisable ever to address a pandemic risk until it rages out of control (by which time countless lives will be lost needlessly). So yes, institutional forces were at work. But the CDC is an agency of the executive branch, and therefore the responsibility of the president of the United States. Since the Reagan administration, the president has appointed the CDC’s director. Trump appointed Robert Redfield, who recently put his sycophancy on public display by seconding Trump’s enlistment of the vaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help formulate health policy in the event of a second term.
The Trump White House, of course, was even less willing to acknowledge the crisis than the Trump CDC. One of the disease experts profiled in Lewis’s book put it bluntly: “Trump was a comorbidity.” This is one of those truths that was glaringly obvious at the time (it probably lost Trump the election) but was largely forgotten after, not only by the public (which, repeating a pattern that followed the 1918 influenza outbreak, dropped the episode down the memory hole) but, more exasperatingly, by the press. To the extent we remember Covid at all, it as an act of a vengeful God. It somehow isn’t cricket to recall that by the time Trump left office Covid had claimed more than 100,000 lives that might have been saved with better presidential leadership; that there were 2.7 million fewer jobs than when Trump started; and that (as a result of Covid lockdowns) murders had spiked to their highest level since the crime-ridden 1990s.
We certainly can’t excuse Trump from any Covid responsibility if we’re going to hold Biden (and Harris) responsible for the inflation spike, as Trump does. That inflation run-up was caused almost entirely by Covid disruptions of the international supply chain. Even if you want to attribute the inflation spike to excessive stimulus spending in Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Act (the consensus is that it played at best a small role), that measure was also necessitated by Covid—and besides, Trump passed two gigantic stimulus bills of his own. Biden had no more influence over inflation policy than Trump did; both were dependent on an independent Federal Reserve (whose chair was appointed by Trump!).
Yet when Harris was asked, in her debate against Trump, whether Americans were better off than they were four years earlier, she couldn’t bring herself to knock that softball out of the park. Are you crazy? she should have said. Four years ago, morgues were stacking corpses in the street and unemployment shot up to 14.7 percent! Even after that spike, this clown left office with unemployment at 6.3 percent, nearly two percentage points higher than it is today! You’re goddamned right Americans are better off today. Ask me something hard!
Harris was mostly paralyzed by the fear that she’d seem insensitive to voters still enraged by the inflation spike. But I would guess she also held back out of a sense that evoking the horrors of Covid times would seem like blaming Trump for an earthquake or an avalanche. I won’t belabor the point here because I vented my frustration about Harris’s missed opportunity at the time.
I call this sanewashing because letting Trump off the hook for Covid is, well, insane. I get why Trump wants everyone to forget Covid. What I can’t figure out is why the rest of us are so ready to oblige him.
