If former President Donald Trump stuns the world with a victory in November’s election, CNN fans should remember this moment.
Network commentator Chris Cillizza, who once infamously boasted of how unbiased the nation’s news reporters actually are, took to social media on Monday to comment on the results of a New York Times poll that showed President Joe Biden cutting into Trump’s lead among likely voters.
It was a poll that Democrats cheered, but there was one aspect of it that Cillizza apparently couldn’t understand.
In an X post, Cillizza wrote that he was “stunned” at Times poll results that showed 42 percent of respondents remember the Trump years as “mostly good” for the country.
Were you better off when Donald Trump was president?
That compares to only 25 percent of respondents who consider the Biden administration as “mostly good.”
Just 33 percent of respondents said the Trump years were “mostly bad.”
Cillizza was forced into some armchair psychology.
“It speaks to the power of nostalgia — and how we as humans tend to remember the good stuff and block out the bad,” he wrote.
He backed that up — if that’s the word for it — by discussing the downsides of Trump’s last year — COVID deaths and the economic problems that beset the country amid the pandemic. He likened it all to his own experiences with a college girlfriend.
How to understand it? I think of it in terms of dating. In college I dated a girl for 2 years. We broke up. For plenty of good reasons.
But a few months later, I found myself reminiscing about all the good times we had together. I couldn’t even remember why we broke up in the…
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 15, 2024
“How to understand it? I think of it in terms of dating. In college I dated a girl for 2 years. We broke up. For plenty of good reasons,” he wrote.
“But a few months later, I found myself reminiscing about all the good times we had together. I couldn’t even remember why we broke up in the first place.”
Well, leaving aside Cillizza’s romantic recollections (though a cynic might note that “we broke up” often means “she dumped me”), there’s the matter that Americans probably remember the Trump years as being “mostly good” for the country because they were “mostly good” for the country.
Despite the braying donkeys of the Democratic Party and their allies in the establishment media, it’s a matter of objective fact that the country was in a better place, economically and in terms of national security, than it is in the disaster of the Biden years.
The corrosive inflation that’s bedeviled the Biden years wasn’t turning every trip to the grocery store into the first stages of a bankruptcy proceeding, unemployment was low — historically so among the groups Democrats pretend to champion — Russia didn’t invade anybody (funny how that works), and thanks to Trump’s Abraham accords, it really looked like peace was breaking out in the Middle East.
And there wasn’t an invading army of “asylum seekers” streaming unimpeded across the southern border, bringing gangs, deadly drugs and potential terrorists among what Democrats see as simply more huddled masses yearning to breathe free (and eat free, and sleep free and go to school free).
Of course, the pandemic came, along with the leftist-led riots of the George Floyd lunacy, but judging the entirety of the Trump administration by a final year dominated by an external event like COVID and internal events led by his political enemies — what Cillizza’s network called the “mostly peaceful” riots that burned American cities — is neither responsible nor rational.
And the avalanche of responses Cillizza’s post received proved the point.
With more than 300k views as of late Tuesday morning EDT, it was difficult to find more than one or two that came close to agreeing with Cillizza’s myopic mindset.
Here’s a fair sampling:
Speaks to the power of nostalgia? What was bad about it? Be specific. Did you not like the inflation causing such high prices compared to now? Did you not like all the wars breaking out everywhere? The porous border flooding in millions of unknowns? Just what was it?
— Aldous Huxley’s Ghost™ (@AF632) April 16, 2024
LOL. Dude. No wars. Gas prices were low. No inflation.
Abraham accords. North Korea peace gestures. The Wall (which was a good idea, it turned out).
Yes mean tweets, but whatever.
Biden, on the other hand, has been mess after mess after mess.
Ukraine. Afghanistan.… pic.twitter.com/7FL17vB8bc
— Mark Jeffrey (@markjeffrey) April 15, 2024
Or … maybe it speaks to how humans recognize all the bad that’s going on *right now* (Mid-East crisis that worsens by the day, bad economy/inflation, Ukraine, border chaos, media bias, etc, etc.) That number shouldn’t be stunning at all
— Andrew Tavani (@andrewtavani) April 15, 2024
While it’s not surprising at all that you don’t understand this, it’s actually very simple: outside of COVID, Trump’s presidency was actually a rather good one, despite you and your colleagues’ best efforts to paint it otherwise.
Biden’s presidency has been more akin to a…
— Festivus96 (@Festivus96) April 16, 2024
This probably puts it best — in the simple language maybe even a CNN commentator will have trouble distorting:
It’s not that hard Chris. 3 great years, one terrible year. Most people can figure out that’s “mostly”.
— Simon (@freespeechluv) April 16, 2024
“It’s not that hard Chris,” the user wrote. “3 great years, one terrible year. Most people can figure out that’s ‘mostly’.”
What that means, of course, is that they were “great” years for normal Americans who like to live in a country at peace, where men and women willing to work can find a job and where law and order is respected as a matter of course.
For them, the Trump years were mostly great.
It was only for the hysterically hyperpartisan leftists, their representatives in Washington who veered from the unhinged, like Maxine Waters, to the simply evil like the loathsome Adam Schiff, that it was a time to engage in endless political warfare.
Them and the establishment media, which fed the four-year onslaught against the Trump White House by pretending pretty much any attack against Trump was credible (Russia collusion, quid pro quo, insurrection, what have you) and ignoring the overwhelming evidence that he was a target of machinations by a deep state deeply aligned with his political opponents.
If Trump pulls off a comeback in November, it’s going to be because the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him in 2020 are going to do it again. And because of millions more who remember — accurately — what life was like in the Trump years are going to compare it to the abyss of the Biden administration and vote accordingly.
And CNN fans — who likely never voted for Trump nor remember his tenure with any reliability, judging by where the probably get their information — are going to be even more stunned than leftists were in 2016.
But maybe Chris’s ex-girlfriend will be able to explain it to them, wherever she is.
