Author’s note: This is the analysis of one round of the 2024 Presidential debate between Biden and Trump. It is linked from a more comprehensive article.
Question: “What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?”
We had the GREATEST ECONOMY IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY. We had never done so well. Every – everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us.
This is the first page in Trump’s playbook, hyperbole: We had the greatest country before Democrats took charge, and they turned it to shit.
This is also a bandwagon fallacy. Everybody’s on board, so it must be true.
Whether we had the greatest economy is debatable. Especially since, for Trump, just about everything is a historic first. I think it can safely be said that Trump has claimed more historic first than any other person in history, even Baron Munchausen.
We got hit with COVID.
This is passing blame, another favorite play in Trump’s playbook. It’s no different from saying, “Poor me, I missed the job interview because my alarm clock didn’t go off.” Anything that went wrong in Trump’s term wasn’t his fault, it was COVID’s.
This is misdirection. One year before the outbreak Trump cancelled Obama’s pandemic prevention programs despite being warned from the beginning of his term that a pandemic was on the horizon.
And when we did, we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression the likes of which we had in 1929._ By the time we finished – so we did a great job_.
More hyperbole. There is no evidence to suggest COVID would have created a Great Depression any more than the influenza outbreak after World War I created the Great Depression that followed.
Except that COVID relief money added to the deficit by $3.1 trillion, about a trillion more than Biden’s inflation and infrastructure initiatives. Nor should we forget he insisted the stimulus checks included his name so people would associate him with the money in the 2020 elections. Or that much of the COVID relief money went to millionaires, including Kushner associates.
I’m not sure what the last sentence means. It’s incomplete, there’s a segue halfway through. But people noticed it with Biden because he has a stutter.
We got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for the military, and NO WARS and so many other things.
He blatantly ignores the fact he ordered missile attacks on Syria, abandoned our allies the Kurds, creating 130,000 refugees and permitting 11,000 ISIS prisoners to escape, and continued the Afghanistan war, negotiating a deal that handcuffed Biden’s plans for peaceful withdrawal.
You can’t take credit for other things you don’t name.
EVERYTHING WAS ROCKING GOOD.
More hyperbole. We’ll let that pass.
But the thing we never got the credit for, and we should have, is GETTING US OUT OF THAT COVID MESS. He (Biden) created MANDATES; THAT WAS A DISASTER FOR OUR COUNTRY.
After a blatant and wrong assertion, he rounds back to his earlier point.
This is an appeal to pity. Trump is eliciting sympathy by saying, “poor me, I never got the credit I deserve,” even though he is about to supply that credit all by himself in the very next paragraph.
This is also what’s known as a tu quoque fallacy, or trying to blame someone else rather than defending your argument.
Trump didn’t get us out of the COVID mess. He said it would go away, and equivocated on mask use. He lobbied to get a vaccine before it was ready but in time for elections, a move that caused more Americans to distrust the efficacy of the virus. And he objected to blue states that issued lockdowns, mask and social distancing guidelines and even blamed blue state restrictions for increasing death rates even though red/blue state comparisons showed blue states were doing a better job of controlling virus fatalities. Nor should we forget, Trump encouraged Americans to ingest bleach and hydroxychloroquine (which increased fatalities) even though he received an 8-drug cocktail that included steroids, Remdesivir, and Regeneron's monoclonal antibody when he contracted the disease after ignoring every one of the CDC’s guidelines.
Vague Assertion. Trump never explains how mandates were a disaster for anybody.
Biden’s only mandates were vaccination mandates for government employees and large businesses. Except the Supreme Court blocked those mandates. So they can hardly have been responsible for any disaster he credits to them.
But other than that, we had – we had given them back a – a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-COVID, and NOBODY THOUGHT THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE.
- This is the flip side of the argument to common knowledge(everybody knows).
Except, most investors did. Despite dips and lows, the value of the Stock Market always rises, and year-end returns show growth 70% of the time (to the benefit of investors wealthy enough to ride the lows out). The Dow Jones Average in June 1924 (before the Great Depression and 14 recessions) was 1,780. Last May it was 38,686. So, yes, the stock market was higher than pre-COVID when Trump left office. It is also 2,000 points higher since Biden took office. Which suggests just about everybody who understands the stock market likely thought it was possible.
The ONLY JOBS HE CREATED ARE FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS and BOUNCEBACK JOBS; they’re bounced back from the COVID.
Another tu quoque fallacy. Blame the other guy.
No one creates jobs for illegal immigrants. The demands of the food production industry create those jobs. However, low wages and poor working conditions make them unattractive to American workers.
The claim about bounce back jobs is patently false. According to the Center for American Progress, lost jobs rebounded i 2 years, about a third of the time it took for jobs to bounce back in the 2000 recession. After that, job growth increased 1.6 times as fast as pre-COVID growth under the Trump administration.
He has not done a good job. He’s done a POOR JOB. And INFLATION’S KILLING OUR COUNTRY. IT IS ABSOLUTELY KILLING US.
More hyperbole with a little of “pity me/us.”
Inflation hasn’t killed us, it hasn’t killed our economy. Inflation is down from 9 to 3 percent, but there are several factors behind the drop. Biden’s policies have curbed inflation caused by Trump’s inadequate response to the pandemic and made the cost of green energy cheaper. The full effects of Biden’s policies will be determined by whether he gets another term, or Trump and Republicans rescind the law.
In fact, he’s also done a better job as President than Trump, getting the infrastructure and inflation bills passed, working with two Republican House Speakers under threat of losing their seats to get funding bills passed, getting an immigration bill through the Senate (that Trump has stalled) and relieving student debt. Bloomberg rates him successful in every metric but immigration.