Apparently, most Americans think so In September of 2020, 200,000 Americans had just died of COVID. There was no vaccine, unemployment was at 8%. The whole world had just been shut down and was only slowly coming back to life. Donald Trump was pushing snake oil cures and pretending the whole thing wasn’t much of a problem. And yet 55 percent of Americans believed they were better off than they’d been four years ago. And only 39 percent believe that now. WTF?