Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The good ol' days

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with Cameron Joseph of Columbia Journalism Review and the problem with what the New York Times called “collective amnesia” about the shoe salesman’s time in executive office.

Part of the problem is that many voters, especially the crucial bloc of younger ones, simply don’t remember Trump that well. Those turning eighteen and eligible to vote for the first time this fall were just ten years old and in grade school when Trump won the presidency, in 2016; the January 6 Capitol riots happened back when most of them were just starting high school. The rest of us don’t have memories that are as sharp and reliable as we’d like to think—it’s not just Joe Biden and Donald Trump who regularly get names wrong or forget in what year things occurred.

And the past eight years have been particularly intense. I barely remembered a few of Trump’s quotes tested in the Garin poll, and I cover this for a living. We’ve all just grown numb, overwhelmed by the chaos—something that’s often reflected in our coverage and in how voters respond. The first time Trump ventures into new rhetorical territory, it’s still news. The second or third time he says something that once would have been far outside the pale of political rhetoric, it doesn’t even rate a mention.

Case in point: When Trump launched his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” it dominated the news and became one of the most-remembered lines of the campaign. His recent claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” generated headlines but didn’t dominate coverage. On Thursday, he declared in his State of the Union “prebuttal” that Biden is “keeping the hordes of illegal migrants and illegal aliens pouring into the country,” and claimed that “many come from mental institutions, many come from prisons, they’re terrorists.” Few major news organizations wrote stories focusing on the comments.