MaddowBlog-Even now, Republicans are still struggling to remember who was president in 2020

[LetMyPeopleVote]

One professor joked, “‘Who was president in 2020?’ is the question of our time.” The number of Republicans who can’t answer the question correctly is amazing.

The “Republicans keep forgetting who was president in 2020” problem clearly isn’t going away.

It’s not a new problem — there are even examples from 2021 — but it’s arguably getting worse. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-10-08T15:29:05.213Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/even-now-republicans-are-still-struggling-remember-was-president-2020-rcna236386

As part of the Republican Party’s scramble to gerrymander new district maps, a great many GOP officials have complained that the 2020 Census wasn’t good enough. To that end, Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana issued this press release on Monday afternoon:

Banks sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate and correct significant errors from the 2020 Census that may have improperly shifted congressional representation and Electoral College votes to Democrats and illegal aliens. Senator Banks warned that, among other problems, the Biden administration used a controversial statistical method called differential privacy ... to interpret and publicize Census data.

In his correspondence to the Cabinet secretary, the GOP senator specifically noted that the 2020 Census — a project that Banks condemned as a “fraud” — was “prepared by the Biden administration.”

Around the same time, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama appeared on Fox News and insisted that Democrats had “rigged” the 2020 Census.

There’s one rather important flaw in this partisan case: There was no Biden administration in 2020. At the time, Donald Trump was president......

In an especially amusing example, in 2021 — just one year after 2020, when memories about the previous year should’ve been fresh — former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany pointed to crime data from 2020 to blame Biden for the U.S. murder rate, apparently unaware that it was her former boss who was president at the time.

Georgetown University professor Renee DiResta joked this week, “‘Who was president in 2020?’ is the question of our time.” The number of Republicans who continue to struggle with the question is amazing.