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When treating a head injury, one of the questions doctors ask their patients is whether they know who is currently the president. Its 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 questionespecially 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. Theres just one tiny problem with this statement, which I wont 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 Xs AI chatbot Grok explain the answer in a caveman voice. Genuinely wild how so many people fail the Who was President in 2020 test https://t.co/CGGwQPBsDd— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) October 6, 2025 "Who was president in 2020?" remains one of the great disputed questions of American politics. https://t.co/xeytBAMi84— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 7, 2025 Banks attempted to save face later on by clarifying that President Biden had prepared the 2020 Census Report in 2021, implying hed 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. Bessent: "This Democratic Party blew out the deficit in 2020." (Trump was president in 2020.)— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-07-06T13:26:22.164Z Who is to blame for the more destructive excesses of 2020, in the immediate wake of George Floyds murder at the hands of police? As Congressman Mike Collins tells it, the Biden administration was obviously at fault. Once again: "Who was president in 2020?" Is a question so many politicians, pundits and even mainstream media have a hard time answering correctly.— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) 2025-07-15T02:56:08.769Z Even President Trump himself couldnt 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 wasnt out of character for Trump, who suggested last year that the White House pressured Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop storya 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 OReilly 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. WhoopsDon't ya just love live TV?— (@jacksimon.bsky.social) 2025-07-16T14:41:12.819Z 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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 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. Who was president in 2020?— Eric Swalwell (@ericswalwell.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T19:59:35.292Z 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 countrys 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. Its the same reality in which the Trump White House can claim to have officially crushed Bidens inflation crisis, while grocery prices are demonstrably rising. And its 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 DEIs forcible expunging. At least all of this is being captured for the record. If the people running this country dont seem to know who was president in 2020 today, imagine what they wont know about today tomorrow.
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About 40% of farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, and theyve become a focus of the Trump administrations aggressive immigration crackdown. Terrorized farm workers have been forced into hiding, and farms themselves have been left empty of their workers. Experts have long warned that Trumps promise of mass deportations would threaten industries that rely on undocumented workerslike agricultureand that it could lead to mass disruptions in our food system. Now the Trump administrations labor department seems to be admitting that itself. In a document explaining the administrations new rule cutting farmworker wages, the Department of Labor writes that the labor shortage, in part due to increased [immigration] enforcement, presents a sufficient risk of supply shock-induced food shortages . . . There is ample data showing immediate dangers to the American food supply.” The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers, per the document. Trumps One Big Beautiful Bill, which includes additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), means that threat will grow, it adds. ‘A win for corporate greed’ The Trump administration is using this risk to justify cuts to farmworker wagesand says more foreign workers are needed to alleviate the threat. Because of this crisis, employers will need to rely even more on the H-2A visa program, which allows farms to bring on temporary foreign workers when theres a shortage of U.S. workers. (Under this visa, workers also lack basic labor protections and have reported issues with worker safety; they also do not have bargaining rights.) And the Department of Labor does not believe American workers will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace the departing illegal aliens. In theory, a worker shortage should lead to higher wages. But the visa program comes with high costs that have become burdensome, per the DOL, and so additional labor costs, it says, threatens the viability of farming operations. The departments new rule says the program needs reform, and that guest farm worker wages need to be cut to avoid agriculture disruptions. Under H2-A rules, the Department of Labor must advertise agricultural jobs, but it says this hasn’t led to more applications from domestic workers. The American Prospect, which reported on the DOL document, says that’s not entirely accurate. “Workers who apply often do not receive jobs, and nobody is really checking to see if applications are coming in,” it writes. “The system isnt set up to prove that theres a labor shortage of U.S. workers, Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute who tracks the H-2A program, told the outlet. The move could reduce wages for all farm workers, no matter their legal status. The United Farm Workers, which represents nearly 7,000 agricultural workers, condemns the wage cuts, which it says would mean a loss of $2.46 billion annually in farmworker wages. Farm workers should be paid more, not less. This regulation is a win for corporate greed; a money grab for big agribusiness that transfers millions of dollars through wage cuts and housing deductions from workers to employers, Erica Lomeli Corcoran, UFW Foundation chief executive officer, said in a statement. The farm workers who feed us every day deserve so much more and we remain committed to ensuring that their labor and dignity is respected.
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E-Commerce
A political scientist who studies what helps people connect across differences. A novelist whose books about Native American communities in Oakland, California, sparked a passionate following. A photographer whose black and white images investigate poverty in America. Hahrie Han, Tommy Orange, and Matt Black are among the 22 fellows selected this year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and announced Wednesday. It’s a recognition often called the genius award, which comes with an $800,000 prize, paid over five years that fellows can spend however they choose. The foundation selects fellows over the course of years, considering a vast range of recommendations, largely from their peers. Each class doesnt have a theme and were not creating a cohort around a certain idea,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program. “But I think this year, we see empathy and deep engagement with community figures prominently in this class.” Through different methodologies, many of the fellows boldly and unflinchingly reflect what they see and hear from deep engagement with their communities, she said. Because fellows don’t apply or participate in any way in their selection, the award often comes as a shock and sometimes coincides with difficult moments. Nabarun Dasgupta, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, had just left a team meeting where he shared that a longtime collaborator in harm reduction work had died when he saw multiple missed calls from a Chicago number, which then called again. It was the MacArthur Foundation. They were awarding him the fellowship in recognition of his work, which includes helping to start a testing program for street drugs to identify unregulated substances and helping to overcome a shortage of naloxone, which reverses an opioid overdose. To make sense of the intense moment that mixed deep loss and recognition, Dasgupta wrote the following in a journal. We are surrounded by death every day. Sometimes, you have to give yourself a pep talk to get out of bed. Other mornings, the universe yells in your ear and tells you to keep going because what were doing is working. In an interview with The Associated Press, he added, I feel like this couldnt have been any clearer of a signal that the work has to go on. Other fellows were contacted by the foundation through email, asking to speak with them about potential projects. Tonika Lewis Johnson, a Chicago-based artist, planned to take the call in the car. The foundation representatives tried to get her to pull over before breaking the news, but she declined. They were definitely worried about my safety, she said laughing, and she did then stop driving. Johnson’s projects are rooted in her neighborhood of Englewood, located on Chicago’s South Side. She has photographed the same addresses in north and south Chicago, beautified residents’ homes and made predatory housing practices visible. All together, her work reveals the very specific people and places impacted by racial segregation. This award is validation and recognition that my neighborhood, this little Black neighborhood in Chicago that everyone gets told to, Dont go to because its dangerous, this award means there are geniuses here, Johnson said. For Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, an atmospheric scientist at the University of WisconsinMadison, the award is also a recognition of the talent and grit coming from Puerto Rico, where he is from, despite the hardships his community has endured. His research has uncovered many new findings about what drives weather patterns in the tropics, which may eventually help improve forecasting in those regions. Adames said usually one of his classes would be ending right when the foundation would publish the new class of fellows, so he was planning to end the lecture early to come back to his office. He said hes having trouble fathoming what it will be like. I am low-key expecting that a few people are just going to show up in my office, like right at 11:02 a.m. or something like that, he said. Before getting news of the award, Adames said he was anticipating having to scale down his research in the coming years as government funding for climate and weather research has been significantly cut back or changed. He said he had been questioning what was next for his career. The prize from MacArthur may allow him to pursue some new theoretical ideas that are harder to get funded, he said. I think people do care and it does matter for the general public, regardless of what the political landscape is, which right now is fairly negative on this, he said about climate and weather science. ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Thalia Beaty, Associated Press
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