“who Was President In 2020?” Is More Than A Viral Meme

When treating a head injury, one of the questions doctors ask their patients is whether they know who is currently the president. It’s part of a standard neurological exam for assessing alertness and cognitive function after a jolt to the brain.

In the absence of any preceding head trauma, though, it does not seem to bode well when hundreds of perplexed X denizens ask an elected official a similar question—especially when such inquisitory swarms have become a well-established pattern online in 2025.

On Monday, U.S. Senator Jim Banks sent a fiery letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, urging him to investigate “errors” from the 2020 census. Banks shared the letter with his 174k followers on X, in a post excoriating the Biden administration for its approach to the census, which supposedly “included illegal immigrants and handed Democrats extra seats.”

There’s just one tiny problem with this statement, which I won’t insult readers’ cognitive function by spelling out here. Thousands of X users made sure Banks was aware of it, however, by asking him who was president in 2020. One of those asking even made X’s AI chatbot Grok explain the answer in a caveman voice.

Banks attempted to save face later on by clarifying that President Biden had “prepared” the 2020 Census Report in 2021, implying he’d manipulated the good, clean census data Trump had gathered as president. (As evidence, he retweeted a post from the president of something called Election Watch, Inc., who has apparently blown the doors off this incredible conspiracy.)

Still, even assuming Banks’ excuse absolves him, what explains all the other pundits, politicians and officials within the Trump administration who seem confused about the year 2020? So many of them have made this same mistake that asking the obvious follow-up question is now a meme.

According to current Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for instance, it was the Democratic Party who “blew out the deficit in 2020,” leading Bluesky users to seek a minor clarification.

Who is to blame for the more destructive excesses of 2020, in the immediate wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police? As Congressman Mike Collins tells it, the Biden administration was obviously at fault.

Even President Trump himself couldn’t seem to remember under whose leadership the recently resolved antitrust lawsuit against Google originated. (The Department of Justice filed its case in October 2020.) Of course, this lapse wasn’t out of character for Trump, who suggested last year that the White House pressured Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story—a story that broke while Trump himself occupied the White House.

Some pundits have attempted to inject ambiguity into the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices as that story gained fresh traction this year. Newsmax talking head Greg Kelly, for instance, implied back in August that “the Biden DOJ” had prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, despite the fact that she was both charged and arrested in 2020. When Bill O’Reilly falsely claimed on NewsNation in July that Epstein had been convicted during “the Biden administration,” however, host Leland Vittert sheepishly corrected him in real time.

Mostly, though, much of the foggy memory that leads to so much questioning online over who was president in 2020 seems centered around COVID.

Rep. Buddy Carter claimed on CNN in August that the COVID vaccine eroded trust in the Center for Disease Control, leading host Kate Bedingfield to ask The Question on air. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy deflected blame for recent airline problems by suggesting, on live TV, that someone dropped the ball by not addressing those problems during the COVID lockdown. And just last month, Human Health Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. attempted to score points against Democratic Senators by claiming that the U.S. “did worse in COVID than any country in the world,” apparently forgetting who was at the helm of our COVID response.

It has become unavoidably clear that the events of 2020 caused a seismic trauma for Americans, and that its aftershocks will be felt for decades. The chaos of a (hopefully!) once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, combined with a social movement that briefly made folks question the role of police and whether racism is embedded in the very fabric of U.S. society, appear to have severely rattled the country’s collective brains. As with any head injury, some confusion is inevitable.

Whether it is in fact confusion, or rather a product of deliberate misremembering, this pattern of forgetting who was in charge of the country during some of its darker hours encapsulates the state of vibes-based unreality that many currently choose to live in.

The hypothetical America where everything that went wrong in 2020 can be blamed on the Biden administration is the same one in which major U.S. cities can be considered “war-ravaged” simply because the President seems to think so.

It’s the same reality in which the Trump White House can claim to have officially “crushed Biden’s inflation crisis,” while grocery prices are demonstrably rising.

And it’s the same reality in which an administration stocked with inexperienced podcasters and Fox News’ b-squad counts as merit-based hiring in the wake of DEI’s forcible expunging.

At least all of this is being captured for the record. If the people running this country don’t seem to know who was president in 2020 today, imagine what they won’t know about today tomorrow.