How Republicans will retcon the past to try to reelect Trump

How Republicans will retcon the past to try to reelect Trump

Former president Donald Trump. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

By Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 12:43 p.m. ESTWhen you’re in the midst of a difficult period — as we are now with omicron raging, inflation disturbingly high and President Biden’s domestic agenda hanging by a fraying thread — it can be difficult to imagine a future in which present problems have worked themselves out and everything is looking positive.

But you know who has imagined that different future? Republicans. And they’re already putting the pieces in place for a gigantic retconning project, in which the history of the pandemic and the U.S. economy will be rewritten to justify the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

This may be the best way to understand the former president’s newfound enthusiasm for touting coronavirus vaccines, which has shocked some of his most loyal supporters.

“I came up with a vaccine,” Trump boasted in an interview released Wednesday to right-wing media personality Candace Owens. Despite Owens’s disagreement, Trump insisted that “if you take the vaccine, you’re protected” and “people aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”

Trump has also been publicly encouraging people to get booster shots. He’s practically sounded like Anthony S. Fauci.

At the same time, Republicans continue working to make the pandemic longer and deeper. The Supreme Court will soon hear a pair of cases, brought by GOP-controlled states, which the court could use to strike down either the administration’s vaccine mandate for private businesses or its mandate for health-care workers, or both.

What does this all have to do with the retconning project?

“Retcon” is short for “retroactive continuity,” in which existing stories are retroactively rewritten to accord with a new and contradictory story someone wants to tell. In an early famous case, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, then after fans demanded more stories, decided that Holmes had only faked his death. Retcons are particularly common in soap operas (Last season was all a dream!) and comics (That other stuff happened in a parallel universe!).

Now consider this: It’s 2024, and while Republican control of the House has stopped real legislating, things are going quite well. Supply chain problems and inflation have eased, and GDP and job growth are strong. Despite some very dark days — including the United States passing its 1 millionth death from covid — through the spread of vaccinations and tens of millions of people contracting the disease and recovering, the pandemic has receded and no longer impinges on daily life.

Biden would then be in a position to make the following case: When I took office, we faced an economic crisis and a deadly pandemic. Under my leadership, we defeated them both.

That would be a pretty compelling argument for reelection — which would require Republicans to rewrite the past so that everything good that happened could be attributed not to Biden but to Trump. Here are the elements of this upcoming retcon:

The economy under Trump was glorious and perfect.

Trump’s handling of the pandemic was also without flaw; in particular, he is personally responsible for the development of the vaccines that eventually helped defeat it.

All those unpleasant public health measures — mask-wearing, lockdowns, anything else you didn’t like — were both useless and the fault of Democrats. All covid-related deaths and suffering occurred as a result of Biden’s mishandling of the pandemic.

Credit for every good bit of economic news should be given not to Biden but to Trump.

Republicans are more than capable of dishing out this kind of ludicrous revisionist history. When Barack Obama was president, it was common to hear them attribute strong economic performance to the tax cuts Ronald Reagan signed thirty years before.

Likewise, Republicans will say that every increase in growth or good jobs report is happening because Trump’s economic genius was so remarkable that even Biden’s attempts to destroy the economy cannot overcome it. In fact, that’s what they already say.

At the moment, some conservatives will boo Trump himself for promoting vaccines, so convinced are they of their satanic nature. But once the retconning project matures, those voices will grow quieter. Don’t be surprised if some of the same conservative media figures now discouraging their audiences from getting vaccinated change their tune once the pandemic has faded.

All this will require is a shift in emphasis. In two years, the Fox News host who today tells you vaccines are killing people will say, “Whatever you think about vaccines, Trump was brilliant in getting them produced so quickly. Even Biden couldn’t screw that up. And the same is true of Trump’s economy.”

It will be a message aimed not at the fervid Trump supporters watching Newsmax and OAN, whose loyalty isn’t in question. Its target will be the middle of the electorate, where voters might be willing to give credit to any president who presides over good times. And it will be part of a larger project of revising the history of the Trump years, covering everything from Jan. 6 to the Ukraine scandal.

Of course, nothing is ensured. The course of the pandemic is unpredictable. In 2024, we could still be mired in this public health nightmare, or the economy may have slipped into a new recession.

But if not, Republicans will need to retcon the past. They’ll be ready.