Trump wants you to think Joe Biden was president in 2020

The only question is whether the GOP and the MAGA voter base will allow it to happen.

It’s no mystery that 2020 was arguably the most difficult one-year period for Americans in the last decade. COVID, lockdowns, vaccines, the rise of American fascism, an attack on the Capitol, and a country-wide recession that saw hundreds of thousands of Americans fall into poverty.

Nearly all of this happened under the eye of Donald J. Trump, but recently he and his allies have been set on convincing the American public that Biden was actually in charge.

That’s right, the president of the United States is attempting to rewrite history that’s just 5 years old.

Trump’s nearly nonsensical post on October 11, was a stark example of disinformation that would make George Orwell pale.

Trump claimed on Truth Social that: THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6… If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies."

This is a blatant and dangerous lie meant to fool millions of Americans. There is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence stating the opposite. Firstly, Trump’s own yes-man, Kash Patel, acting as FBI director, said himself that the plainclothes agents were deployed after the riot began, to deal with the situation. This is in direct opposition to what Trump is insinuating in his post.

Plenty of Trump allies have tried to make his statement into a coherent truth, but even the experts at finding truths where there are none are struggling to justify this rambling nonsense.

This example of an attempted rewriting of history isn’t the first of its kind. A number of GOP politicians have recently claimed that the 2020 census was fraudulent and a result of Biden’s incompetence. 

The 2020 census was performed under Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.

Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana claimed on October 6 that the census was fraudulent: “The Biden admin used a shady ‘privacy’ formula that scrambled the data and miscounted 14 states.”

Vice President JD Vance has also piled on to the easily debunked statements, stating that the census had apparently undercounted red states, “they have tried to rig the game for Democrats and against Republicans.”

Somehow, even though all of this information is incredibly available, the Trump administration has made at least 5 statements implying Biden was the president in 2020.

Here’s a shortlist, with a fact check included underneath each false claim.

July 6, 2025: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – “The democratic party blew out the deficit in 2020.”

In 2020, Donald Trump had veto power over any spending, and the GOP controlled the Senate.

February 7, 2023: Lauren Boebert on the closure of schools during the pandemic – “Hey Joe, YOU CLOSED THEM!”

School closures during COVID were controlled largely by state and local officials, and the vast majority of them happened during Trump’s term.

February 28, 2023: Marjorie Taylor Greene on fentanyl deaths - “Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl,”

Once again, Joe Biden was not the president at the time of these deaths making it unlikely for him to have had control over the border.

Trump himself has consistently played into this false narrative. Last year, Trump accused Biden of suppressing the ‘Hunter Biden laptop story’ ahead of the 2020 election.

How Biden could have suppressed White House communication during the Trump presidency is a mystery to us.

In fact, in an impressively daring move, Trump actually tried to convince people Biden was responsible for violence in 2020, DURING TRUMPS OWN TERM. His office ran an ad titled “Joe Biden’s America”, where he portrayed moments of violence from summer 2020, and laid the blame on Biden’s shoulders.

It should be clear by now. Trump apparently has no respect for the intelligence of his voters. In fact, he doesn’t even think they're capable enough to remember what happened just 5 years ago.

It’s hard to see this behaviour from the president, and not draw comparisons to ‘1984’, Soviet Russia, and Communist China.

Apparently, if Trump had things his way, he would be the source of fact, fiction, and history.

The only question is whether the GOP and the MAGA voter base will allow it to happen.