The memory hole
By 
Late last night Donald Trump posted this utterly unhinged rant:
@realDonaldTrump
WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS SAFE ON THE STREETS THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE MORE DEPRESSED AND UNHAPPY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO! I WILL FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST, AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER. WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE – AND WITH POWERFUL EXCEPTIONS, LIKE THOSE THAT RONALD REAGAN INSISTED ON, FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER – BUT NOT ALLOWING FOR DEMOCRAT DEMANDED LATE TERM ABORTION IN THE 7TH, 8TH, OR 9TH MONTH, OR EVEN EXECUTION OF A BABY AFTER BIRTH. I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!
2020 was four years ago. 2020 was a nightmarish year. The period from March 11, when NBA star Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid, the arena was evacuated five minutes after the game had started, and major professional sports around the world were immediately shut down for the next several months, until January 6th, when Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government by sending a mob to lynch the Congressional leadership, is one of the worst ten-month stretches in all of American history. (Among other things George Floyd was murdered, the economy collapsed, and all normal life was wildly disrupted by a worldwide pandemic that would kill millions of people in short order).
Donald Trump was president for this entire time, of course. That Trump was president during the nightmare that was 2020 somehow doesn’t count, and not just for the increasingly deranged Trump himself, but for the electorate that still may very well re-elect him.
We are a country with no memory — not just for things that happened centuries ago, but for events earlier in the present decade.
I haven’t been shy about pointing out that I was right about Donald Trump back in 2015, when pretty much everyone else took it all as a big joke, so let me point to something I have been completely wrong about, which is this: I assumed that, if Trump were actually elected in 2016, he would be a complete catastrophe of a president, AND that this would utterly discredit at least him and his political movement, and that the Republican party would, by 2024, be pretending that nobody in it had ever actually supported him.
Well the catastrophe part played out even more spectacularly than I would have imagined — I really didn’t have attempting to overthrow the government on my bingo card — but as for the other part, yeah that I pretty much missed by about as far as it’s possible to miss anything.
I do think that some of the current confidence among non-fascists and their fellow travelers that Harris is going to win is a product not of a cold-blooded analysis of the current state of the electorate, but of a psychological inability to accept the extremely real possibility that this creature could very well become president again, and that a second Trump presidency would almost certainly be far worse than the first, for reasons that are too obvious to elaborate to anybody but the righteous remnant of centrist pundits who still believe in Guardrails. Oh and Merrick Garland.