Several months ago, Harper’s Magazine’s Scott Horton observed of the looming 2026 midterm elections, “The GOP campaign this fall will depend entirely on misremembering recent history.”
The observation was persuasive when Horton presented it in April, and now five months later, its relevance lingers for a reason.
With just seven weeks before Election Day 2026, Republicans aren’t just trying to sell Americans on the idea that transgender Muslim immigrants are desperate to destroy the United States from within, they’re also scrambling to impose outlandish counternarratives about recent events on American voters.
President Donald Trump and his allies are taking steps to rewrite what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. And what happened during the pandemic. And what happened on Jan. 6. And what happened in the 2020 presidential election.
“Mr. Trump is not so much a student of history as a rewriter of it,” a New York Times analysis noted last month.
Perhaps most important of all is the GOP’s emphasis on the economy, given its overriding importance to most voters. House Speaker Mike Johnson explained the pitch he and his allies intend to bring to the electorate as voters start to make up their minds.
Mike Johnson: “We reminded voters of the disastrous effects of the years under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, what we inherited when we took this over last January. We had a country on the brink of ruin.”
When Republicans took control of the levers of federal power early last year, the Louisiana congressman declared Tuesday, “we had a country on the brink of ruin.”
This again?
In the last full month of his presidency, Joe Biden took a bow of sorts in a published piece for The American Prospect. “It is worth reviewing the facts on the U.S. economy that I am handing off to my successor,” the retiring Democrat wrote. “Unemployment has been at the lowest average rate of any administration in 50 years. We have created over 16 million new jobs, and more than 1.5 million of those are in manufacturing and construction. Inflation has been brought down close to 2 percent, the same level as right before the pandemic.”
“Incomes are up by nearly $4,000 adjusted for inflation, and unions have won wage increases from 25 percent to 60 percent in industries like autos, ports, aerospace, and trucking,” Biden said. “We’ve seen 20 million applications to start small businesses. Our economy has grown 3 percent per year on average the last four years — faster than any other advanced economy. Domestic energy production is at a record high, and gas prices are around $3 per gallon.”
Biden wasn’t the only one who had noticed. Around this time two years ago, a Wall Street Journal analysis described the state of the Biden-era economy as “remarkable,” which coincided with a Bloomberg analysis that said, “The nation is experiencing a dream combination of strong growth and low inflation.”
There was more where that came from. A month before Election Day 2024, the New York Times reported that the U.S. job market was “as healthy as it has ever been” — as in, in the history of the U.S. — and described economic growth as “robust.” A few days later, The Washington Post’s Heather Long explained in a column, “We are living through one of the best economic years of many people’s lifetimes.” The same day, Politico described the then-status quo as “a dream economy.”
The Economist, a leading British publication, also described the U.S. economy as “the envy of the world,” adding that the American economy “has left other rich countries in the dust.”
It reached the point that in the days leading up to Election Day 2024, Trump actually started telling the electorate that he wanted credit for all the good economic news, despite the fact that he hadn’t been in office for nearly four years. (His reasoning at the time was that the economy was only healthy because so many were looking forward to his return to the White House.)
Put another way, when the hapless House speaker declared the nation was “on the brink of ruin” when Biden left office, he was either brazenly lying or terribly confused.
Either way, the integrity of the recent past should remain intact, and that Republicans are counting on voters to forget their own recent life experiences speaks volumes about the degree to which the party has spent the last 21 months failing in spectacular fashion.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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