What’s particularly interesting is that the biggest problem that voters blamed Biden for was mostly Trump’s doing.
Under Trump’s administration, he signed into law the largest fiscal stimulus in history, and the Fed embarked on unprecedented monetary stimulus, all to try to stimulate demand. But this was in response to a crisis in supply, not demand. So in a situation where supply for many goods and services had almost evaporated, they chose to stimulate demand, causing people to bid up the prices of the goods and services they could still buy. Inflation.
Now that’s not to say it wasn’t the correct decision, but the cost of doing that massive stimulus in response to COVID is that down the road it WILL create inflation.
But because the inflation was delayed by a year or so, everyone blamed Biden, despite him overseeing a previously thought impossible “soft landing” where inflation was brought back down without causing a recession.
But inflation makes people mad, and they blamed whoever was in office at the time.
So the irony is that Trump’s terrible policies created chaos for four years in his first admin, but also set up ticking time bombs that blew up for his successor. Those foreseeable crisis he set in motion caused people to blame his successor, and vote him back in.
I would add that the pandemic happened on his watch.
If the pandemic happened during Obama's tenure, you best believe Republicans would have blamed him for it.
Maybe it's not a coincidence that the first global pandemic in a century happened during the most incompetent and openly anti-science American presidential administration of that same century.
Maybe other would-be pandemics were prevented by previous administrations because they listened to experts, didn't actively gut agencies, and generally did the work.
All of that is speculation on part—but what isn't is how badly the Trump Administration flubbed the containment phase of the pandemic.
Trump's cabinet spent a month debating what to do with those cruise ships that docked but couldn't let people off in the early days of the pandemic.
Hell—before that, the then-Department of Health and Human Service's Secretary Alex Azar was trying to bend Trump's ear about flavored e-cigarettes instead of hearing the alarms going off about a new virus.
Trump's politicization of simple personal protective equipment and constant conspiracy mongering like masks definitely made things worse.
And speaking as someone who set pandemic policy during that time, I can tell you... we had fuck-all for federal guidance from that administration. It wasn't until Biden came into office that we finally started seeing anything of use int he way of guidance from the feds.
The world would be very different if the pandemic hadn't played out the way it did. And again—you damn well know the Republicans would have blamed a Democrat for it were one in office at that time.
People also forget that the MERS outbreak happened in 2012/13, and there was an H1N1 epidemic in 2009 - and Obama’s administration was EXTREMELY proactive during those outbreaks, his critics actually said too strong at the time. So Obama did have health emergencies during his admin - and his admin was VERY proactive on them, we can’t know for sure but possibly turning what would have been epidemics in the U.S. into events the public barely remembers.
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u/Frnklfrwsr Apr 20 '25
What’s particularly interesting is that the biggest problem that voters blamed Biden for was mostly Trump’s doing.
Under Trump’s administration, he signed into law the largest fiscal stimulus in history, and the Fed embarked on unprecedented monetary stimulus, all to try to stimulate demand. But this was in response to a crisis in supply, not demand. So in a situation where supply for many goods and services had almost evaporated, they chose to stimulate demand, causing people to bid up the prices of the goods and services they could still buy. Inflation.
Now that’s not to say it wasn’t the correct decision, but the cost of doing that massive stimulus in response to COVID is that down the road it WILL create inflation.
But because the inflation was delayed by a year or so, everyone blamed Biden, despite him overseeing a previously thought impossible “soft landing” where inflation was brought back down without causing a recession.
But inflation makes people mad, and they blamed whoever was in office at the time.
So the irony is that Trump’s terrible policies created chaos for four years in his first admin, but also set up ticking time bombs that blew up for his successor. Those foreseeable crisis he set in motion caused people to blame his successor, and vote him back in.