'Mass memory loss' is Trump's best hope of winning in 2024: columnist
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has identified former President Donald Trump's biggest asset in the 2024 presidential race: Namely, the potential amnesia of American voters.
In his latest piece, Milbank zeroes in on Trump asking Americans if they're better off now than they were four years ago, which was a time when Americans couldn't leave their houses, businesses were shut down en masse, and thousands of Americans were dying every day from a virus that Trump sought to continuously downplay as a threat to public health.
All of this suggests, argues Milbank, that Trump is simply hoping that Americans forget what actually happened during his first term.
"In a sense, Trump’s prospects for 2024 rely on Americans experiencing mass memory loss: Will we forget just how crazy things were when he was in the White House?" he contends. "And will we forget about the even crazier things he has said he would do if he gets back there?"
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Milbank then pivots to recent actions by Trump's allies at the Heritage Foundation for erasing their plans for a future Trump administration to use the Comstock Act to effectively ban abortion pills via executive action.
"About seven in 10 Americans believe the abortion pill should be legal," notes Milbank. "So it’s easy to see why Trump might wish to erase his plan to ban the pill — just as he would like to erase his calls for the repeal of Obamacare, which has the support of 6 in 10 Americans."
Milbank expresses skepticism that Trump will be really able to keep a lid on all these plans to the point where American voters forget they ever existed.
"Trump and some vulnerable congressional Republicans might wish that Americans will forget such things by November," he writes. "But it’s all there in black and white."