Why Americans Forget Trump’s Horrors: The Science Behind Trumpnesia

There is so much that is absurd about the 2024 election. At the top of my list is the fact that a man who refused to accept the 2020 tally, schemed to overturn the legitimate results, and incited violence that threatened the constitutional order and whose mismanagement of a pandemic led to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands (if not more) is accepted by millions as a candidate for president and has a good shot of winning.

Part of this guy’s pitch is that Americans were better off four years ago than they are today. Prices are higher today (though inflation has slowed), but other economic indicators and conditions have improved. For instance, the economy isn’t cratering as it was during that first year of Covid. And we don’t have bodies piling up, while we fear for our lives and those of our loved ones. Yet so much of the current debate proceeds as if the pandemic and Trump’s atrocious response didn’t happen. Ditto for the January 6 riot and Trump’s direct assault on democracy.

How could all of this have been forgotten by so many so soon?

“We are the United States of Amnesia,” Gore Vidal wrote in 2004. “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” Of course, there’s a long history in this country of not heeding history. Slavery. The genocidal conquest of Indigenous people. The brutal suppression of the labor movement. We don’t keep track of our sins and errors. Look at how there was no accountability for George W. Bush’s misguided and greased-by-lies Iraq War, which caused the deaths of several thousand American service members and about 200,000 Iraqi civilians. It only happened two decades ago, and it’s largely gone from our national consciousness. Bush’s approval rating when he left office was 34 percent; it’s now 57 percent.

The Covid crisis and J6 are only a few years old and—poof!—they, too, have faded from the political discourse. In part, that’s because the Democrats have calculated that dwelling on these events is not the path to victory. The Harris campaign, like the Biden campaign before it, does not want to open up the barely scabbed wounds from Covid and debate lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, and related topics. Nor does it want to make Trump’s attack on democracy a lead issue. Biden tried to do that and did not gain much traction.

The old adage in politics is that elections are about the future, not the past. “Won’t go back,” Harris and her supporters shout at rallies. So let’s look ahead and not spend too much time relitigating Trump’s attempt to overturn an election or pondering the dismal days of the pandemic.

But there’s something else going on.

I was intrigued by how little the January 6 riot and the pandemic were explicitly part of campaign discussion, and I decided to query some experts on this. I contacted historians, psychiatrists, and scientists who study memory. What I found was fascinating.

I started, as one does, with Google. I searched “collective amnesia,” wondering if that is even a thing. Indeed it is, and one search result referred to a Wikipedia page for “social amnesia” that defined this phenomenon as “collective forgetting by a group of people.” That seemed close to what I was looking for. The fourth paragraph mentioned a historian named Guy Beiner, who has “opted to use the term social forgetting.” Perhaps that was even closer.

I soon learned that Beiner has focused on remembrance and forgetting in modern history, with an emphasis on Ireland. But he has also studied the so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1919. Following his work, I discovered that historians have called that health crisis—which killed 50 million worldwide and nearly 700,000 in the United States—the “forgotten” pandemic because it so quickly vanished from the national conversation. 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.”

That sounded eerily familiar.

I reached out to Dehner and Beiner. Dehner told me, “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.” He added that Trump is “counting on, and his supporters are cultivating, this tendency to compartmentalize unpleasant associations from the past.” Beiner, who edited a 2021 collection of essays called Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918-1919, pointed out 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.”

I was on to something. I emailed George Makari, a prominent psychiatrist and researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College and an old friend from college. He and Richard Friedman, another psychiatrist at Cornell Medical, had recently written a piece for the New England Journal of Medicine in which they noted 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 compared this finding to classic studies by German social psychiatrists that examined how many post–World War II­­­­­ Germans “had seemingly lost the ability to acknowledge the atrocities.” 

Makari told me that this forgetting about the pandemic was related to how our brains work. He explained that chronic trauma and stress can inhibit memory—and the pandemic gave us much of both. “In addition,” he commented, “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.”

But it was another scientist, William Hirst, a New School for Social Research psychology professor, who got into the weeds with me on this point. I had come across him in a 2023 Washington Post article headlined “Science of forgetting: Why we’re already losing our pandemic memories.” Hirst, who studies the mechanics of memory, was excited to explain what was behind this amnesia. He noted that it is wrong to think of human memory as first and foremost a data storage and retrieval system. Retaining perfect and thorough recollections is not the priority of memory. There’s a lot else going on.

“We seem to have a brain that is designed to build a collective memory around collective remembering and collective forgetting,” Hirst said. “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.” From an evolutionary biology perspective, then, it can be said that a key function of memory is to keep us part of a tribe for our survival.

Then Hirst got into the mechanics of memory. “You might think that normally if you don’t mention something, it slowly fades,” he remarked. “It’s much more dynamic than that.” Talking about other pieces of a story actively leads people to forget what is not discussed. He noted that he and colleagues have conducted numerous studies that have demonstrated this. When Trump brags about how wonderful his presidency was and doesn’t mention the horrors of Covid or the violence at the Capitol, memories of these events become suppressed. As Hirst put it, a narrative that leaves out information “induces forgetting of the unmentioned material”—but only for “in-group members” who see Trump as a legitimate conveyor of information.

This is how it works, according to Hirst. When Trump falsely says no one was killed during the January 6 riot—which he doesn’t call a riot—and refers to the insurrectionist marauders as victims and patriots, this shapes the memories of his supporters. Recollections about brutal facts of that day are shoved aside or smothered. Trump’s repetition—a cornerstone of propaganda—boosts this process. “Each time they hear his account of that day,” Hirst said, “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.”

If I understood all this correctly, that meant that not only do memories fade with time—as we’ve all experienced—but they can be crowded out (erased?) by the introduction of false information. That’s partly why propaganda and disinformation can be effective. In this case, Trump’s repeated lies about J6 (they were patriots!) and the pandemic (I did great!) supplant accurate memories of those horrific events for people who see him as a credible source. (Why does anyone view this inveterate and narcissistic liar as a credible source? Well, that’s a story for another time.)

This was all magnificent material for a magazine piece about the 2024 campaign—especially since a magazine article has a long lead time and would have to still be relevant six weeks after being written. This collective forgetting would not be disappearing anytime soon. In that story, I wrote,

Trump is in a unique position for a non-incumbent presidential candidate. He has a record as the nation’s chief executive. And to win, he needs to shape how millions of voters remember that time. Whether he realizes it or not, the human mind affords him much opportunity. How we recall the past, Hirst says, “is a real memory hole, and it can become so deep it’s difficult to get out of...It’s not a pleasant story, but it’s what we are as humans.”

We all know that philosopher George Santayana declared that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In this highly politicized and tribalized era, no national consensus has formed about the pandemic and January 6, and that’s partly because Trump and his cult relentlessly champion false narratives about each. And now millions of Americans don’t remember—which makes it possible for Trump to reclaim the White House. November will show us if we are not just Vidal’s United States of Amnesia but also the United States of Trumpnesia.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

I know, it’s been a while. I aimed to have one a month. Yet then came summer and a back operation. And now the campaign is in full throttle. So let’s set a date for our next Zoom get-together of Our Land readers: Monday, October 7, 8 p.m. ET. As always, these Zoom shindigs are only open to folks who subscribe to the premium edition of Our Land. (You can do that here.) On the day of the event, premium subscribers will receive a Zoom invitation. Click on that at the appointed hour, and our well-trained Our Land bouncers will let you in. Bring your own booze, sedative, snacks, or whatever. These conversations tend to be far-ranging, but I have a pretty good idea what will be on our minds that night.

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Day One Dictator: More Doonesbury in the Time of Trumpism, G.B. Trudeau. Garry Trudeau is a national treasure. For more than half a century, with his Doonesbury comic strip, he has served as a sharp-eyed observer of American politics and culture. A few years ago, I referred to him as an American Dostoyevsky who has been producing a never-ending novel. He has created an alternative universe so close to our own and populated it with scores of original and engaging characters, while lampooning presidents, celebrities, and other powers-that-be. A prominent target since the mid-1980s has been a fellow named Donald Trump, who Trudeau began spoofing when Trump was merely an obnoxious, attention-seeking real estate developer and a look-at-me wannabe-celebrity in the 1980s. Naturally, the hyper-thin-skinned Trump couldn’t laugh at Trudeau’s pokes and called him “a third-rate cartoonist”—only drawing more attention to Trudeau’s zingers aimed at Trump.

About a decade ago, Trudeau stopped the daily black-and-white strips, but since then has continued with his weekly large-panel and in-color Sunday offering. These works have been regularly compiled into books, including five volumes chronicling the Trump era, with the latest of those, Day One Dictator, released last week. Trudeau has never held back, as can be seen with the cover of this collection, an illustration showing Trump in jodhpurs and knee-high black boots, a la the SS. The back cover reprints a New York Times story from December 21, 1924. The headline: “Hitler Tamed by Prison.” The article begins, “Adolph Hitler, once the demi-god of the reactionary extremists, was released on parole from imprisonment at Fortress Landsberg, Bavaria, today and immediately left in an auto for Munich. He looked a much sadder and wiser man today than last Spring when he...appeared before a Munich court charged with conspiracy to overthrow the Government.” ’Nuf said.

In this book, Trudeau zeroes in on Trump’s slipping cognitive abilities. He writes in the introduction, “It’s no fun mocking someone falling apart before our eyes, but what are the alternatives, particularly given the country’s current glide path to calamity?” And he observes, “Humans, like apes, are wired to respect the bellowing of alphas, which, in Trump’s case, his followers still mistake for strength, not the hypomania it actually is.” He also wonders if even Trump’s supporters might come to fret about his decline. “Or not,” he writes. “Cult members are, by definition, resistant to reality.”

The strips, covering the past two years, highlight Trudeau’s long-established talents as an artist and satirist. One shows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a press conference announcing the banning of certain math books and the implementation in schools of “critical master race theory.” A TV news camera operator asks, “Governor, could you hug the white kid to your left?” Another follows a teen being carded as he fails to get served at a bar; he walks out telling the bartender, “You’ll be sorry.” In the last frame, the kid is in a gun store. “Gimme an assault rifle,” he says to the man at the counter. “Which one?” the fellow replies. In a strip from the 2022 midterms, the rascally Duke is now a campaign consultant, and when a Republican congressman in a tough contest calls him for assistance, Duke asks him if he would be willing to commit a federal crime. Duke explains: “We’d want to trigger an FBI investigation, blame it on the Deep State, and sweep you back into office on a wave of MAGA outrage.” The politician asks, “That’s an actual campaign strategy?” Duke responds, “Absolutely cutting edge.” In one strip, Trudeau concocts a Tucker Carlson documentary on January 6 called Meek and Orderly that shows MAGA supporters gushing over a Trumbull painting in the Capitol and telling each other to keep their voices down because Congress is in session.

As for Trump, he’s repeatedly zapped as an arrogant egomaniac, crook, misogynist, and miscreant. In a strip from earlier this year, Trump is playing golf, and an aide advises that he stop promising to be a “dictator.” Trump fires back: “Why? I strongly normalized ‘lying’ and ‘rape’ and ‘violence’ and ‘coup.’ Why can’t I normalize ‘dictator’?” During a different golf outing, this aide points out a “remarkable” poll that reported over half of Trump supporters “don’t believe you ever kept classified docs—even though you admitted it.” But, he asks the boss, why didn’t you photocopy the docs and give the originals back? There’s a beat, and then Trump says, “We were out of toner, okay.” The aide replies, “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to imply you were an idiot.” Another shows Trump in the morning, strands of wet hair hanging limply, as he applies orange makeup on his face. It’s not a pretty sight.

Trudeau knows that Trump is both a buffoon and a danger—and for almost a decade now he has been highlighting both halves of the Trump saga. His one-line author’s bio in this book reads, “G.B. Trudeau is in his thirty-sixth year of trying to make Donald Trump go away. Nothing’s worked.” Through 50-plus years, Trudeau has been jabbing at the corruptions and hypocrisies of our world via the adjacent reality he has concocted. If he hasn’t driven Trump into exile, he certainly has made living with this madness easier, and for that, he deserves our thanks.

In 2021, I did a fun podcast with Trudeau. You can hear it here.

TexiCali, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore possess some of the best voices in Americana music. Gilmore boasts a Willie Nelson-esque warble, and Alvin delivers deep, resonant, and bourbon-smooth vocals. And it’s a treat to hear them sing individually and together on their recently released album, TexiCali.

Their musical origins differ. Gilmore hails from the Texas panhandle and is an inheritor of the Hank Williams and Nelson tradition. Alvin, a native Californian, was a member of the Blasters, an influential roots rock band, and he had a brief stint with X, the punk band that epitomized the LA scene. (X recorded Alvin’s “Fourth of July,” a stellar song that he also recorded in a non-punk version.) A few years ago, Alvin was diagnosed with three different cancers and went through a grueling regimen of chemotherapy and radiation. For months he couldn’t play his guitar and feared he never would again. But he recovered, and one of his first projects when he was back in the saddle was a collaboration with his old pal Gilmore.

The result is a collection of songs about the Tex-Mex border, trains, cars, and life on the road—blending folk, country, and gritty Texas blues. “Death of the Last Stripper” is a melancholy ballad about the passing of a dancer who had no kin. “Betty and Dupree” tells the tale of an outlaw who loses his love after getting caught robbing a jewelry store for her. “Down the 285” is a beautiful and haunting piece about, I presume, US-285, a stretch of road in Texas known as the “Death Highway,” where there’s much traffic from oilfields and many accidents. Naturally, there’s an obligatory we’ve-defied-death-so-far anthem, “We’re Still Here.” With these two legends dueting on familiar ground, there’s good reason to be glad they are here and still recording.