How Trump is benefiting from the limits of our memory.

by David Corn

November+December 2024 Issue

One of the most oft-quoted sentences ever penned by a philosopher is George Santayana’s observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 2024, this aphorism is practically a campaign slogan. Donald Trump, seeking to become the first former president since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House after being voted out of the job, has waged war on remembrance. In fact, he’s depending on tens of millions of voters forgetting the recent past. This election is an experiment in how powerful a memory hole can be.

In March, Trump posted this all-caps question: “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” A realistic answer for most would be, hell yeah. Four years prior, the Covid pandemic was raging, the economy was cratering, deaths were mounting, and anxiety was at a fever pitch. Trump responded erratically, downplaying the threat, pushing conspiracy theories, and undermining scientific officials and public health recommendations. (Bleach!) In the final year of his presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died of Covid; a Lancet study concluded that 40 percent of those deaths could have been averted had Trump handled the crisis responsibly.

Yet his question—a rip-off of a line used by Ronald Reagan in 1980—assumed many voters would not recall the horror of 2020; he was encouraging them to focus on the sentiments (and high prices) of now, not the mortal dread of then. And to regain the White House, Trump needs to cover not just the pandemic but a lot else with the mists of time, including his attempt to overturn an election and his incitement of January 6’s insurrectionist attack, a trade war with China that cost the US hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in GDP, his love affairs with dictators like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, his broken vows to boost infrastructure and to replace the Affordable Care Act with a better and cheaper program, his two impeachments, and nine years of chaos, scandals, and mean-spirited, racist, and ignorant remarks.

That’s a lot of forgetting to rely upon, and the fact that Trump still has a good shot at victory is a sign that he can successfully stuff much of this history into the mental recesses of the electorate. Fortunately for him, the nature of human memory plays to Trump’s favor—even, perhaps especially, when it comes to a pandemic.

Historians have long observed how quickly the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50 million worldwide and nearly 700,000 in the United States, vanished from public conversation. As George Dehner, an environmental historian at Wichita State University, observed in his book Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health Response, “the most notable historical aspect of Spanish flu is how little it was discussed,” resulting in “a curious, public silence.”

“Humans are really good at compartmentalizing things in the past, and Americans appear to be especially good at that. That’s a nicer way of saying we don’t keep track of history very well,” Dehner tells me, explaining Trump is “counting on, and his supporters are cultivating, this tendency to compartmentalize unpleasant associations from the past.”

Guy Beiner, a professor of history at Boston College who edited a 2021 collection of essays called Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918-1919, notes that today “there is plenty of social forgetting generated in regards to Trump’s presidential term, in particular the mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic. It could be argued that such forgetting is typical of post-­pandemic societies.”

In August, Weill Cornell Medical College psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman argued in the New England Journal of Medicine that a “collective inability among many people in the United States to remember and mourn what was endured during the pandemic” could help explain why, in early 2024, half of Americans told pollsters they were no better off than they had been “at the height of the deadliest epidemic in the country’s history.” They likened the finding to classic studies by German social psychiatrists that explored how many post–World War II­­­­­ Germans “had seemingly lost the ability to acknowledge the atrocities.” Makari points out that chronic trauma and stress can inhibit memory—and the pandemic yielded much of both. “In addition,” he says, “psychologically this loss of memory is compounded by defenses against helplessness. Finally, socially this is all made worse by collective amnesia. No one wants to remember how terrifying that first year was, before tests, before vaccines. I can barely recall…So from biological, psychological, and social points of views, we grow hazy.”

In a way, this is a mechanical issue. The basic function of memory allows for—or even facilitates—such forgetting, says William Hirst, a New School for Social Research psychology professor. “When you recall the past, you do so selectively,” he explains. “Trump people do that selectively with his agenda in mind.” As Hirst puts it, a narrative that leaves out information “induces forgetting of the unmentioned material.”

“You might think that normally if you don’t mention something, it slowly fades,” he says. “It’s much more dynamic than that.” Talking about other parts of the story actively leads people to forget what is not discussed. So when Trump brags about how wonderful his presidency was and, of course, doesn’t mention the horrors of Covid or the violence at the Capitol, memories of these events become suppressed—but only, Hirst adds, for “in-group members” who see Trump as a legitimate conveyor of information.

“We seem to have a brain that is designed to build a collective memory around collective remembering and collective forgetting,” he explains. “Why? It’s adaptive. We’re social creatures oriented toward our in-group and away from out-groups. Memory is designed to reinforce our in-group membership.”

When Trump falsely says no one was killed during the January 6 riot—which he doesn’t call a riot—and calls the marauders victims and patriots, this shapes the memories of his supporters, according to Hirst, and recollections about brutal facts of that day are smothered. Trump’s repetition—a cornerstone of propaganda—boosts this process. “Each time they hear his account of that day,” Hirst remarks, “the negative part—the breaking-in, the broken windows, the violence—becomes less accessible. And once you suppress the memory image of people breaking in, it’s easier to impose the false memory of protesters having been invited in. There’s no longer a competing memory. So Trump creates this collective forgetting to establish the groundwork for another narrative that is not accurate.”