When they cheer four more MAGA years, they may want to look at how 2020 ended.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's latest column, "Reminder: Trump’s Last Year in Office Was a National Nightmare" microscopes at how former President Donald Trump has turned to "portraying his entire presidency... as pure magnificence."
In a recent speech, Trump lamented his presidency being truncated just when "our country was coming together.”
ALSO READ: ‘We're wounded:’ Speaker Mike Johnson struggles to lead GOP after ‘unnecessary purging’
"Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed," writes Krugman.
So for all the happy talk of the Trump years in office, Krugman maintains that the effort is an "impressive act of revisionism" for the pandemic president.
In sum, Krugman calls the final year of Trump's presidency a scary one.
"So let’s set the record straight: 2020 — the fourth quarter, if you will, of Trump’s presidency — was a nightmare," he writes. "And part of what made it a nightmare was the fact that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis with denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness — focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good."
Krugman blames Trump for failing to prevent or take steps to do more when the pandemic landed in the homeland.
"Unfortunately, at the time, the man in charge denied, dithered and delayed at nearly every step of the way," according to Krugman.
In contrast, he suggests Biden has presided over what he termed the "immaculate disinflation" that has helped bolster his unemployment numbers and a sunny economy in his first term as POTUS.
Krugman claims that the one shot Trump had to deal with crisis showed him trumpeting "self-serving fantasies" with "utter indifference to other Americans’ lives in an effort to boost his image."
He then asked: "Are we really supposed to feel nostalgic about 2020?"