‘Who was president in 2020?’ Trump and GOP want you to think it was Biden

If you asked people what the worst one-year period in recent American history was, it’s a good bet that many would choose roughly between January 2020 and January 2021.

Covid and the ensuing lockdowns. The recession that followed. Civil unrest. And an historic attack on the US Capitol that shook our democracy to its core.

Nearly all of it happened on President Donald Trump’s watch. But Trump and his allies are increasingly pitching an alternate version of history, one in which this was all overseen by Joe Biden.

Trump’s social-media post late Saturday night was one of the most striking examples of this revisionism.

“THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6,” Trump claimed. “If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies.”

This is not so, for a number of reasons.

The first – which we’ve written about already – is that even Trump’s own FBI director, Kash Patel, has said these agents were dispatched after the riot began to deal with the situation. (Trump’s clear implication, which he’s stated before explicitly, is that the agents were “placed” ahead of time and spurred the riot.)

But the other big one is that, on Jan. 6, 2021, there was no such thing as the “BIDEN FBI.” Biden didn’t take over as president until two weeks later. In fact, the pro-Trump rioters were trying to ensure Biden never became president.

Plenty of Trump allies have tried to rescue his point. They’ve argued Trump was merely positing that the FBI was already in the thrall of Biden, who was set to take over. In their telling, the FBI was the “deep state,” and so was Biden. Never mind that the FBI was headed by a Trump appointee, Christopher Wray, at the time.

It’s a familiar exercise. Trump says something facially false, and his allies hunt for the supposed kernel of truth within it.

The alternate reading would be that it’s inconvenient for Trump that this supposed massive government conspiracy happened with him in charge, and he’d prefer to rewrite history so that, in his supporters’ minds, he couldn’t actually have done anything to thwart the Democrats’ supposed plot .

Backing up that reading: the fact that this keeps happening.

Trump and his allies have so frequently treated the events of 2020 as happening under Biden that it has increasingly spurred cheeky social-media responses from critics asking, “Who was president in 2020?”

Recently, a number of Republicans have taken to blaming the Biden administration for the results of the 2020 census, despite it having been conducted under Trump.

“The 2020 Census was a fraud,” Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana said last week. “The Biden admin used a shady ‘privacy’ formula that scrambled the data and miscounted 14 states.”

Vice President JD Vance and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have also cried foul about the census, noting how it appeared to undercount red states and overcount blue states. “They have tried to rig the game for Democrats and against Republicans,” Vance said in August.

Banks responded to the critics’ noting Trump was president when the census was conducted by noting that the Biden administration ultimately “prepared and published the 2020 Census report in 2021.” This is true. But there is no evidence it monkeyed with the numbers. And decisions on the statistical methods used were made during the Trump administration.

Going back further, Republicans have suggested a number of other events of 2020 happened on Biden’s watch.

During a July appearance on CNN, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that the “Democratic Party blew out the deficit in 2020.” (Trump had veto power over any spending at the time, and Republicans controlled the Senate.)

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in May that “during covid, when people weren’t flying, that was a perfect time to fix these (Federal Aviation Administration) problems.” The months when people were flying by far the least because of covid came during the Trump administration.

Republicans like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado have repeatedly blamed Biden for covid school closures – “Hey Joe, YOU CLOSED THEM!” she said in 2023 – despite these closures, which were driven by state and local officials, having happened overwhelmingly under Trump, when covid was at its deadly peak.

Around the same time, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia blamed the Biden administration for fentanyl deaths that happened in July 2020, when Biden wasn’t yet president.

And Trump has repeatedly gotten in on the act.

Last year, Trump claimed that new evidence showed that “the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY” ahead of the 2020 election. Then-Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said much the same thing in 2023: “This is a Biden White House that was meeting with social media companies, dictating what they put on their platforms before the 2020 election.”

Again, the White House at this time was the Trump White House.

Perhaps the most frequent use of this rhetorical trick, though, regards the Black Lives Matter protests and violence in 2020.

In July, Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia made a strong case that the Biden administration had failed the country at this crucial juncture.

“Then you fast-forward to the Biden administration, who, they put this on steroids and actually allowed the public to take part in this game,” Collins said at a press conference. “Example? ‘Summer of love,’ where rioters were out there burning police stations, assaulting officers, taking over our cities, where they were advocating to defund the men and women in blue who protect us.”

Which brings us to the key point. This actually isn’t a new development, nor was it in 2023.

Even as the George Floyd protests were actually happening in 2020, Trump and his team often talked about the issue as if Biden were already president. They suggested Biden had actual power to do something about the scenes. They ran an ad titled, “This is Joe Biden’s America.”

All of it despite Trump’s promises to solve nearly all of America’s problems if Americans just gave him the power to do so.

Five years later, the effort to pin all the bad things of that year on Biden continue apace.