It’s easy to conclude that American voters don’t care about reality these days. As the economy gets better, Joe Biden’s job approval numbers get worse. As his legal losses pile up, Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party tightens. Each side’s base is more motivated by fear of the other side (“negative partisanship,” political scientists call it) than by their own candidate’s record. The “low information” swing voters who will likely determine the 2024 presidential winner aren’t paying attention, and it’s not clear they will between now and November. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro famously wrote. For most voters, something like the opposite is true: Their feelings don’t care about the facts. 

But some voters surely do care, including—indeed, especially—the readers of the Washington Monthly. That’s why we have devoted the feature well of the April/May/June print issue to an accounting of Trump’s and Biden’s presidential records of accomplishment. 

Such an assessment is valuable in any presidential year, especially this one. A typical presidential reelection contest features an incumbent and a challenger who holds a not-quite-equivalent office—a senator, say, or a governor. This November’s race pits against each other two presidents from the major parties who served consecutively. That hasn’t happened since 1892, when Democrat Grover Cleveland challenged (and defeated) Republican Benjamin Harrison, to whom he’d lost four years earlier. The Trump-Biden comparison is even more apt—and potentially revealing—because neither president has more cause to blame Congress for their failings. The party of each all-but-certain nominee controlled both chambers during his first two years in the Oval Office, then only the Senate (by a minuscule majority) in his second two years. 

Our editors spent months digging into the records of both presidents, beginning with the accomplishments each administration touts. We eliminated their least important and reliable claims and wrote short descriptions of the remaining ones by subject area in a back-to-back fashion for easy comparison. (See the index here.) We also asked 10 journalists to investigate both presidents’ records in a specific realm—the courts, national security, antitrust, etc.—and report on who got more of their respective agendas done and how.

Though the Washington Monthly is a center-left magazine, we didn’t judge the presidents’ achievements by whether we personally approve of them. Instead, we looked at what the presidents themselves wanted to accomplish. For example, Biden aimed to use federal regulations to advance his liberal agenda, whereas Trump vowed to ax regulations. So, the fair metric in that case is whether Biden has been an effective regulator and Trump a successful deregulator. 

How, then, do Trump’s and Biden’s records in office stack up? Read the list and the essays and decide for yourself. We think you’ll find some surprises. 

But after considering both the number and importance of each president’s achievements, here’s our takeaway (see chart).

Trump was the more successful at advancing his agenda in a few areas. That includes the courts, in part by serendipity—he was handed the opportunity to appoint three Supreme Court justices to Biden’s one, and the pattern was similar for lower court appointments, as Caroline Fredrickson explains. On taxes, Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is his biggest legislative success; Biden had a major win with the expanded child tax credit, but he couldn’t get the policy extended beyond one year. On social issues, Trump’s appointment of a conservative Supreme Court supermajority that overturned Roe v. Wade and affirmative action was a bigger deal than Biden’s expansion of LGBTQ and other civil rights protections. 

In a handful of other areas, the two presidents tied. On immigration, for instance, Trump was politically punished for his cruelty at the border, while Biden’s gentler approach hasn’t fared much better, as Marc Novicoff reports.

In most areas of governance, however, Biden got more done than Trump—in many cases, vastly more. Trump signed $6 billion in new infrastructure spending, Biden $1.2 trillion. Trump’s national security achievements are dwarfed by Biden’s biggest success: leading the international alliance against Russia to support Ukraine and his related strengthening and expanding of NATO. 

What’s behind Biden’s lapping of Trump in attainment? Partly, it’s the difference in party ambition: Democrats want to use government to advance their agenda, whereas Republicans want to block the Democrats’ agenda. Mostly, the difference in achievement reflects the character of the two men. As Bill Scher observes, Biden, a skilled and patient veteran lawmaker, worked more productively with members of the opposite party and thereby signed more—and more consequential—bills than Trump, an imperious hothead. Trump hired inexperienced ideologues to run his regulatory agencies, and when their proposals were challenged in court, they were overturned 77.5 percent of the time. The average for all presidents is 30 percent, as Rob Wolfe notes. 

We’re under no illusion that most voters, whether hyper-partisan or deeply disillusioned, will make careful decisions in November based on thoughtful assessments of the candidates’ records. But we still think this exercise is worthwhile, for several reasons. 

First, what a president did or did not accomplish in his first term tells you a lot about what they’ll try to do in a second term—and our essayists deliver their thoughts on that. 

Second, “most” voters aren’t going to determine the outcome of this presidential election. The race will likely be decided in six or seven swing states based on the campaigns’ ability to persuade or motivate a relatively small number of voters in specific demographics. Which messages will work best on which voters months from now is still unclear. It’s not unreasonable to suspect that by the fall, some aspects of the candidates’ governing records could wind up being decisive. 

Third, and relatedly, as the race progresses, the candidates’ records will be increasingly trumpeted—in ads, news coverage, and, perhaps, formal debates. As Election Day approaches, political journalists, campaign operatives, and engaged citizens could use a reliable guide to weigh braggadocio against the truth. So, keep this print issue at the ready or bookmark the URL. Our scorecard will come in handy.

The post Introduction: Who Got More Done? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This November’s race is shaping up to be a contest between two presidents who served consecutively and faced similar partisan advantages in Congress. These historically rare circumstances allow for a one-to-one comparison of their achievements in office.

Our editors spent months digging into the records of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden to create our Presidential Accomplishment Index (below).

How do the two administrations stack up? Read the list, which tracks 149 major accomplishments across 21 categories, and decide for yourself. We think you’ll find some surprises.

We also asked 10 journalists to investigate both presidents’ records in a specific realm and report on who got more of their respective agendas done and how. Read those essays here, and the introduction to the package here.

Click on the categories below to read the rest of the index.

The post The Monthly’s Presidential Accomplishment Index appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Click here for the Monthly’s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

If the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump were decided based on who enacted more of their legislative agenda, the race would already be over. 

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump listed his top 10 legislative priorities as part of his “Contract with the American Voter,” which included repeal of the Affordable Care Act, infrastructure investment, harsher prison sentences for immigration violations, and full funding of a border wall to be reimbursed by Mexico. None of that reached his desk. The only wish list items that did were a military spending bill and a tax cut bill, the latter of which incorporated a part of a third item, an expanded child tax credit. 

Biden fared much better with his core agenda. In July 2020, as he campaigned for the presidency, he laid out a vision for rebuilding the middle class through investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, and clean energy. In November 2021, he signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Then, in August 2022, he signed the CHIPS bill, which invests $280 billion in semiconductor manufacturing. Days later, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests $370 billion in clean energy and related infrastructure, along with provisions designed to reduce health care costs. 

Both Biden and Trump had two-year periods when their respective parties held majorities in both congressional chambers, yet Biden got more accomplished. How?

Biden took bipartisanship seriously. Trump did not.

Most of what Biden has accomplished—not just on his economic agenda but also on gun safety, Postal Service reform, same-sex marriage rights, and hate crimes, as well as banning Chinese goods produced by forced labor and avoiding catastrophic debt default—would not have happened without deep engagement with Republican congressional leaders to secure the necessary votes. Trump, in stark contrast, had a volatile and erratic relationship with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The 45th president often resorted to petulant bullying without recognizing that he lacked the leverage for such combative tactics.

There are exceptions. Biden signed two historic pieces of legislation without Republican help, using the filibuster-proof yet procedurally complex budget reconciliation process: the American Rescue Plan Act and the aforementioned Inflation Reduction Act. In the latter’s case, Republicans had no interest in finding a middle ground, but Biden let the Senate’s most conservative Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, dictate the terms. 

The American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill signed early in Biden’s presidency, is the sole case of the Democratic president successfully snubbing an available bipartisan option. Ten Republican senators offered a $618 billion version and suggested that they were open to negotiating a larger amount, just not as high as Democrats were eyeing. Biden sensed that he didn’t need Republican votes and accepted the argument that the risk of going too big in an economic crisis was less than going too small. 

Yet the partisan decision that began Biden’s presidency did not set the tone for the rest of his presidency. That is partly because Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, then a Democrat and now an independent, refused to abolish or weaken the filibuster despite progressive pressure to ram through a voting rights bill over Republican opposition.

Biden’s long-standing belief in bipartisanship comes naturally to someone who entered the Senate in 1973 when party differences were more muted. Way back in 2006, as he was gearing up for his second presidential campaign, Biden told GQ’s Robert Draper, “I can think of nothing worse than being locked in that gilded cage of the Oval Office, occasionally hearing ‘Hail to the Chief,’ and knowing everything you do requires a consensus, and you don’t have anything beyond a 51 percent solution. You can’t do it! I give you my word. My word. I do not want to be president under those circumstances.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Nevertheless, as president, Biden’s transition from a partisan to a bipartisan posture was awkwardly protracted. Through the summer and fall of 2021, Biden and House Democrats delayed passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, hoping it would be effectively linked to passage of the partisan Build Back Better mega-bill. When Democrats lost the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, the Democratic holdup was often blamed. Biden changed tack and told House Democrats to de-link the bills. After the infrastructure package passed, Build Back Better was spiked by Manchin. Every other Democrat was livid, but Biden got over it. By the summer of 2022, Biden had inked his bipartisan wins, including the CHIPS bill. Manchin resurrected, resized, and reshaped Build Back Better for what became known as the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The experienced Biden didn’t succumb to setbacks. Trump was more quickly knocked off course.

Our only president never to have held prior elected, appointed, or military office, Trump had no deeply held governing philosophies. Yet the real estate mogul had long styled himself as the consummate dealmaker, and his electoral success owed little to his party’s leadership. More than most presidents, Trump entered office with wide latitude to build potentially powerful and unorthodox legislative coalitions. 

After he took the oath of office in 2017, Trump squandered nearly every opportunity to be a bipartisan president.

One of his first major acts was a travel ban imposed on several Muslim-majority countries by executive order, stoking outrage among Democrats. Despite his stated interest in a big infrastructure bill, which was met with overtures from leading Democrats at the beginning of his presidency, Trump’s first legislative pursuit of any consequence was a repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Though he pursued it through budget reconciliation, he suffered a humiliating failure when three Senate Republicans broke ranks, including John McCain.

No lessons were learned. Trump did manage at the end of 2017 to pass a different partisan reconciliation bill—a package of tax cuts disproportionately helping the wealthiest Americans. But to begin 2018, he turned down a Democratic offer of $25 billion to fund his signature campaign pledge: a border wall. Trump couldn’t swallow the trade-off—codifying Obama’s program legalizing the status of immigrant children brought to America by undocumented parents. He instead adopted the bizarre strategy of rejecting government spending bills until $5.7 billion in border wall funding was included, provoking a government shutdown. After a 35-day standoff with Democrats, Trump blinked, settling for a bill with just $1.4 billion for border fencing. 

(Trump proceeded to divert billions more from the Pentagon budget into his southern border project, which mostly repaired or replaced old barriers and failed to achieve his promised border-long wall. The spending without Congress’s approval was ruled illegal by an appellate-level federal court in September 2020, though most of the funds were not recoverable. Mexico did not chip in.)

If a border wall was Trump’s highest domestic priority, a national infrastructure program ran a close second. “We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow,” he said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. In the campaign’s final days, he announced an agenda for his first 100 days that included an infrastructure bill spurring $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years. In his victory speech, he pledged to build an infrastructure system that would be “second to none.”

This was not rote campaign rhetoric but a dramatic break with a Republican orthodoxy that used to shun big government spending. Steve Bannon, the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign, said soon after his victory, 

Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement. It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything … It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.

It was the greatest missed opportunity. Anonymous Trump administration officials told The Washington Post that infrastructure was never seriously considered a top legislative priority, and the issue was sidelined in the first year. In February 2018, Trump sent a $200 billion plan to Congress, but he undercut it by grousing about the plan’s reliance on public-private partnerships. Repeated claims of “Infrastructure Week” focuses become running jokes. By May, the White House press secretary conceded, “In terms of a specific piece of legislation, I’m not aware that that will happen by the end of the year.”

After Democrats took control of the House in 2019, Trump finally sat down with Democratic congressional leaders to discuss infrastructure and, by April, agreed on a topline figure of $2 trillion, with many details left to negotiate. But around that same time, the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference released its final report, and at least 14 House committees were investigating Trump’s administration, political operations, and business dealings. In May, Trump stormed out of a meeting on infrastructure with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, demanding an end to the investigations and any threat of impeachment. The demand misread the political dynamics. Withholding an infrastructure bill didn’t hurt the opposition party; it hurt his reelection prospects. Democrats saw no need to bow, and the bipartisan talks died. 

Trump was not without bipartisan successes, but for the most part, they did not regard issues central to his long-range agenda and materialized without major effort on his part. 

The most consequential bills to reach Trump’s desk were the pandemic relief bills passed in the spring of 2020 that helped Americans stay afloat in a throttled economy. Trump tapped Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to represent the White House in negotiations, which Mnuchin did ably, and the president himself did not obstruct them. (It was a different story in December 2020, when Trump threatened to veto another round of bipartisan pandemic relief, complaining about wasteful “pork” but also demanding bigger relief checks. Then he backed down and signed the bill.)

Another example is the First Step criminal justice reform act, which scaled back mandatory sentencing and made the provisions in the 2010 sentencing reform law—reducing the discrepancy in penalties between powder and crack cocaine offenses—apply retroactively. (Yes, Trump signed a bill built on the work of Obama.) Trump, however, was skittish about the sentencing reform provisions during the legislative process but was successfully cajoled by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the celebrity-activist Kim Kardashian. Trump then tried to exploit passage of the bill to woo African American voters away from Democrats, to little avail. 

More integral to Trump’s agenda was his revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a Bill Clinton–era deal he routinely flayed. The balkier-named United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement passed the House on December 19, with the support of the vast majority of the Democratic caucus, one day after the House voted to impeach Trump (showing that legislation and investigation can happen on parallel tracks) and soon after sailed through the Senate. But the new trade deal wasn’t the game-changer Trump had promised during the campaign. CNN reported that the old and new agreements “are far more alike than they are different,” and the new one wasn’t expected to have much impact on economic growth. 

Bipartisanship is often frustrating and does not always produce efficacious policies. Yet nearly every president pursues bipartisanship and its inevitable compromises. Presumably, they do so mainly because legislative math requires it, but it also usually helps notch lasting achievements. 

Obama needed Senate Republican votes to break filibusters and pass his economic stimulus and Wall Street regulations, ending the Great Recession and helping prevent another market crash. George W. Bush worked with Senator Ted Kennedy to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Bill Clinton stitched together an anti-crime bill that, while maligned today by many progressives for its harsh sentencing rules, established the Violence Against Women program and, for 10 years at least, saved lives with bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And while his attempt at universal health care fell prey to partisanship, he created the Children’s Health Insurance Program with GOP support, which remains in place today and covers about 7 million kids.

George H. W. Bush may have sacrificed his presidency by forging a bipartisan deficit reduction package that raised some taxes, breaking his “No New Taxes” campaign promise. But the elder Bush’s dedication to bipartisanship also created the transformative Americans with Disabilities Act and tackled the acid rain problem with the 1990 Clean Air Act.

As a political amateur, Trump failed to appreciate how bipartisanship can strengthen a presidency. Biden, who was a senator for 36 years and closed deals as vice president for another eight, understood this essential truth about accumulating and exercising power in Washington. The proof is in the bill signings.  

The post Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done on Legislation? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Click here for the Monthly‘s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

In March 1990, Playboy magazine ran a lengthy interview with a 43-year-old Manhattan real estate mogul who was about to open the most expensive casino ever built, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He bragged about his outsized ego as essential to his business success, but it was his statements about foreign affairs that proved truly eye-popping. Instead of rejoicing that communism was coming to an end, he denounced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for infirmity of purpose—“not a firm enough hand.” It was the Chinese dictatorship, by contrast, that captured his admiration. It had shown at Tiananmen Square how a great nation should react when confronted with internal dissent: “They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world.”

This is the credo, or at any rate instinct, that guided Donald Trump during his presidency and continues to animate his rhetoric. Trump admires, even fetishizes, strength. In his eyes, dictatorships are strong, unless their leaders don’t have the guts to utilize their inherent power. Trump also disdains weakness, and to him, democracies are weak, unless their leaders grab extra-democratic powers. Weaker still are alliances of democracies, in which smaller nations inevitably bilk and constrain the larger. Weakest of all are impoverished (see “shithole”) countries and the stateless (refugees, Palestinians). His idea of smart foreign policy is for the United States to build better relationships based on mutual interests with strong (dictatorial) countries and impose its will on weak ones—or ignore them altogether. 

In his presidency, Joe Biden has been guided by an entirely different set of principles: the liberal realism of Harry Truman’s administration, which sought to create a preponderance of power for America after World War II. This tradition presumes that democracies have inherent strengths over dictatorships, that alliances with other democracies are force multipliers, and that wise statecraft involves making not only cold-blooded decisions to protect U.S. interests but also generous ones that alleviate the plight of the weak, lest their problems become ours. 

Trump’s pro-authoritarian views are linked to an old strain of U.S. conservative thinking, as I explain in my new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Influential figures in this tradition, from H. L. Mencken to Charles Lindbergh to Patrick J. Buchanan, were drawn to what they saw as the strength of foreign autocrats (Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin) as a model of how to fight against the supposed flabbiness and decadence of liberal democracy. 

But the national security and foreign policy advisers Trump brought into his administration did not generally share, nor even fully grasp, his pro-authoritarian views, being more Reaganite in their orientation. Trump was therefore constantly doing battle with those around him when trying to advance his agenda. This led to herky-jerky decision-making—made worse by Trump’s natural impetuosity and ignorance. Few presidents have had as many critical books written about them by people who served in their administration as Trump, and a disproportionate number of those were penned by key members of his foreign policy team. 

This pattern expressed itself most fully in the administration’s relations with Russia. As has been well documented, Putin’s regime went to great lengths to help Trump get elected, and Trump returned the favor repeatedly while in office. On May 10, 2017, a day after firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating what Trump termed “this Russia thing,” he invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to the Oval Office, where he divulged classified information to them about the Islamic State. A little over a year later, at a summit meeting in Helsinki, Trump publicly sided with Putin over his own FBI about accusations that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump declared. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” 

Even as Trump was cozying up to Putin, his administration was inflicting numerous sanctions on Russia. But many of those sanctions were forced on Trump by U.S. law, and the president consistently bridled at imposing them. In April 2018, after the Kremlin deployed the lethal Novichok nerve agent in Great Britain against the former Russian military intelligence officer and double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Russian officials. In August 2018, after Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, the U.S. imposed a second round of sanctions. “State announced the sanctions, since no new decision was required. Trump, upon hearing the news, wanted to rescind them,” wrote former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton in his memoirs, The Room Where It Happened. Trump was enraged when the State and Treasury Departments determined in November 2018 that Russia remained in violation of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act. A fresh round of sanctions was announced that included the termination of loans to Russia other than for purchasing agricultural products. Trump balked at implementing them. Only in August 2019 did he yield to congressional pressure and slap the sanctions on Moscow. 

Even on the rare occasions when Trump willingly challenged Russia, such as his sanctioning of Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, he had other motives. The sanctions infuriated German Chancellor Angela Merkel, his biggest rival among the Western powers, and pleased then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire Trump ally whose country has an existing gas pipeline with which Nord Stream 2 would have competed. 

Then there was Trump’s handling of relations with NATO and the European Union. Trump consistently demanded that NATO members increase their defense contributions, earning praise from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. Even as its members upped their military spending, though, Trump also threatened to exit the organization. At a summit meeting in Brussels in July 2018, for example, Trump flirted with leaving NATO, prompting Bolton to recall that “it was frightening because we didn’t know what he was going to do until the last minute.” Since then, Trump has stated that Russia could do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that he deems are spending too little for their own defense.

During Trump’s first year in office, North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb and launched an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the continental United States. Trump responded with ad-libbed bravado that stunned his subordinates: More such threats, he said, “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” But after that ill-advised warning produced no change in North Korean behavior, Trump pivoted 180 degrees and tried to befriend North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. He accepted an invitation from Kim to meet in person, despite the regime’s refusal to offer concessions in advance (the reason no previous president has thought it wise to meet with a North Korean leader). After that high-pomp-and-circumstance summit, and another, Trump met with Kim again in 2019, this time in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, becoming the first U.S. president to step foot in North Korea. 

As if fawning personal visits weren’t enough, Trump also ordered the cessation of U.S. military exercises with South Korea, a staunch but vulnerable ally. All Kim offered in return was the same vague language his country had proposed for years, calling for denuclearizing the Korean peninsula—shorthand for a demand that the United States remove its missiles—and, in 2020, the Hermit Kingdom unveiled a new, larger ICBM capable of carrying multiple warheads and hitting much of the United States mainland. Trump’s diplomacy succeeded only in elevating Kim’s international stature and strengthening North Korea’s diplomatic relationships with China and Russia. But Trump remained so enamored of the young dictator that he showed off to guests a series of letters between the two men as though they were signed Derek Jeter baseball cards. He even took what he called the “love letters” with him to Mar-a-Largo, part of the hundreds of purloined government documents he is facing trial for hiding in a bathroom, among other places.

Trump takes great pride that under his command the U.S. military and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria defeated the brutal ISIS insurgency and killed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Yet seven months after driving ISIS out of the last bit of territory it held, Trump committed one of the greatest acts of double-cross in U.S. history. After an angry phone call from Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who considers the Kurdish fighters anti-Turkish terrorists, Trump agreed to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria. That left Erdoğan’s military and Turkish-backed militias free to strafe and bomb America’s onetime Kurdish allies with impunity. 

Trump’s proclivity for catering to the powerful and selling out the weak also showed itself in his dealings with Israel. Previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, had held off formally recognizing Jerusalem as that nation’s capital and moving the American embassy there as an inducement to Israel to negotiate peace with the Palestinians. Trump granted these two long-standing Israeli requests with no strings attached. Similarly, his administration negotiated the Abraham Accords, which raised by four the number of Arab nations that formally recognized Israel but bypassed the Palestinians in the process. This emboldened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex more territory in the West Bank and left Hamas, Netanyahu’s frenemy, even more isolated. The terrorist group’s brutal October 7 attack represented in part an attempt to break that isolation and disrupt the growing partnership between Israel and the Arab world. 

A similar dynamic guided Trump policy toward Afghanistan. His administration brokered a peace deal with the Taliban without including the weak but democratically elected Afghan government in the talks. Trump’s negotiators were hoping that this would pressure the Afghan government to share power with the Taliban. Instead, the agreement signaled to the Afghan military that it was on its own and that surrendering to the Taliban was safer than continuing to fight. Trump amplified that message when, soon after losing the 2020 presidential election, he ordered a precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan—an order Pentagon officials, knowing it would lead to chaos, refused to carry out on the grounds that it had not gone through proper legal channels. (The collapse of the Afghan military a year later when Biden pulled troops out, in keeping with the Trump deal, came as a shock, but, in retrospect, shouldn’t have.)

When Joe Biden became president, he brought with him not only a more traditional foreign policy vision but also a far deeper knowledge of the mechanics of Washington’s foreign policy and military apparatus. Though not a prisoner of this so-called “blob”—as his bold decision to leave Afghanistan despite an outcry from the elite media and the State and Defense Departments indicates—neither has he been at constant war with it as was Trump. Rather, Biden has managed the national security bureaucracies with a deft touch in the face of challenges much more dire than those that occurred on Trump’s watch.

Exhibit A is Ukraine. In late 2021, the Biden administration started publicly releasing U.S. intelligence findings that the Russian military was on the verge of a massive invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin denied it, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders didn’t believe it. But the prediction turned out to be accurate, and it bought Biden extra credibility as he rallied the American public and the world community to Ukraine’s defense. Since Putin invaded on February 24, 2022, the United States and 46 other countries have poured $243 billion in weapons and other aid into Ukraine. With that international support, the doughty Ukrainians have transformed what most experts thought would be a quick Russian victory into a bloody two-year stalemate in which Russia has lost nearly 90 percent of the active-duty troops and two-thirds of the tanks it had prior to the war. And while Putin had hoped to fracture NATO, Biden has leveraged the Russian invasion to revive the alliance and expand its membership by including Sweden and Finland. NATO has never been stronger or more effective.

Biden has been similarly skillful in his dealings with China. Trump combined lavish praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping with tariffs on Chinese imports that wound up increasing America’s overall trade deficit. Biden, who has known Xi for more than a decade, has been more effective, at least so far, in checking China’s economic and military threats. He has restricted the sale of advanced microchips to China, which have critical military uses; begun finding other sources of key materials, like rare earth metals, that China controls; banned goods made by Uyghur slave labor; and created or strengthened defense partnerships with Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. At the same time, he has convinced China to curb the export of chemicals used to make the dangerous opioid fentanyl, to refrain from resupplying Russia with weapons, and to join the U.S. in tackling climate change by ramping up renewable energy sources. 

As with Russia and China, Biden has managed the chaotic Middle East adroitly, though at significant cost to himself politically. His early embrace of and steady supply of weaponry to Israel after the October 7 Hamas massacre, plus his carefully calibrated U.S. military actions—such as a precision missile strike that killed an Iraqi militant commander responsible for the deaths of three U.S. soldiers, rather than direct engagement with Iran, as U.S. hawks have demanded—have so far achieved the administration’s main objective, which is keeping the Gaza catastrophe from morphing into a regional war. As it stands, he is toughening his stance toward Netanyahu over prolonging and escalating the war. Whether he can alleviate the ongoing human devastation in Gaza and turn the calamity into a diplomatic process that leads to a two-state solution—his larger goal—is an open question. 

Any hope for that, of course, will require that he win reelection, and the contrast between Biden and Trump could hardly be starker. Trump has made it plain that he wants to create a kind of illiberal international. He would likely eviscerate NATO by declaring Article V, which commits its members to a common defense, null and void. He continues to praise Putin as a great leader and the Russian military as “a war machine.” He met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago in March and praised him as “the boss.” As Biden imposed new sanctions on Russia after the murder of Alexei Navalny, Trump likened himself to Navalny. Were Trump to abandon Ukraine and encourage Putin to reestablish dominance over eastern Europe, it would be the end of the Western alliance. At the same time, Trump might well jettison the alliances America enjoys with Japan and South Korea, while imposing tariffs in excess of 60 percent on Chinese goods. The result would be turbulence, if not chaos, abroad.

By contrast, Biden has made clear, in his rhetoric and actions, that his paramount aim is to preserve and strengthen the existing liberal international order. In standing for democracy and cooperation with allies, Biden is adhering to the traditions of every previous administration since World War II, Trump’s notwithstanding. These traditions have formed the basis of American prosperity and liberty. Abandoning them would not be a strategic and moral mistake. It would be a calamity.

The post Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done on Foreign Policy? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Click here for the Monthly’s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

Donald Trump’s most consequential accomplishment as president, the transformation of the Supreme Court, was made possible by dumb luck and the work of others. Thanks to the machinations of Mitch McConnell, the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the 45th president was handed the opportunity to appoint three Supreme Court justices and create a conservative supermajority that is changing the very basis of American law and government. 

Joe Biden, by contrast, has had the chance to appoint only a single member of the Court, replacing one liberal justice, Stephen Breyer, with another, Ketanji Brown Jackson. The first Black woman justice has proved to be an influential addition to the Court, with her expertise in criminal justice and her brilliance in deploying textualism to undercut the conservatives. But due to circumstances outside either president’s control, Trump has had far more influence on the high court.

Many people may not realize that the same pattern applies to lower federal courts, where a president’s appointments can be as, or even more, consequential in the long run. Trump was able to place a record-breaking number of district and appellate judges, mostly because Republicans under McConnell blocked so many of Barack Obama’s nominees. (And because Obama himself didn’t get around to nominating judges to many open seats.) Biden had fewer opportunities teed up for him, but has done more with what he was given, nearly matching Trump’s record.

In a second term, either president will continue to aggressively remake the judiciary. Trump will likely name judges who are even more ideologically inclined—and loyal to him. Biden will have a chance to rebalance the circuit courts and appoint more judges with backgrounds in economic justice and labor needed to advance his agenda—if he learns from the procedural mistakes of his first term.

Let’s start with the numbers. Overall, Trump was able to fill 234 judgeships on the federal bench; Biden, less than a year from the end of his term, will need close to 60 to match that number. Of Trump’s judges, 174 were trial judges in district courts, 54 were judges in appeals courts, and three, as the world knows, were new Supreme Court justices—for a total of 226. 

One reason for Trump’s success was the number of vacancies at the end of Obama’s presidency. Under McConnell’s leadership, Republicans, then in control of the Senate, blocked most Obama nominees in his final two years, including the “stolen” seat denied to then Judge Merrick Garland on the grounds that voters deserved a say in the pick, and thus it would have to wait until after the 2016 election. From this obstruction, Trump inherited more than 100 vacancies when he took office, with 17 in the critical federal appellate courts. By 2020, Trump had filled more than one-quarter of all the appellate judgeships nationwide with his conservative picks. Another reason Trump got three Supreme Court justices is because McConnell didn’t hesitate to break his own rule in 2020, allowing Trump an appointment within weeks of the 2020 election when Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed just weeks before Trump’s defeat. 

Trump could move quickly because, with the support of Senate Republicans, he handed over selection of judges to the ultraconservative Federalist Society, which had a list of pre-vetted nominees prepared before Election Day. This is an advantage the GOP has over Democrats, who have wasted much time in the past three years squabbling over identities and procedures. (Speaking to the conservative outlet Breitbart in 2016, Trump promised, “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.”) This collaboration rendered the confirmation process speedy. Thus, the numbers don’t come close to explaining the really significant impact Trump has had on the law, since his judges (and justices) tend to be hard-right ideologues. 

According to a study done by The New York Times in 2020, more than a third of Trump judges filled seats previously occupied by Democratic appointees. As a result, in some reliably left-leaning circuits, including those serving New York, Connecticut, and San Francisco, the partisan gap in appointments has been equalized or even tipped rightward. Trump also moved two other circuits, the Third and the Eleventh, into the conservative column.

And these judges have so far remained loyal to right-wing ideology—not surprising because most of them, unlike typical judicial nominees, had been engaged in the right-wing culture war. They are more consistent in voting only for conservative outcomes, openly disagreeing more frequently with Democratic appointees than the norm. 

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is particularly notable for Trump appointees willing to bend precedent and doctrine in favor of right-wing outcomes. For instance, the Fifth has ruled against limits on gun ownership for those under domestic violence restraining orders, and against a Biden administration policy encouraging social media companies to take down election and public health misinformation. By contrast, it ruled in favor of restricting the distribution of mifepristone in medical abortion.

Litigators are seeking to take advantage of Trump’s nominees’ proclivities by bringing a geographically broad-based attack on federal regulations, with cases in the Fifth, Eighth, First, Second, and D.C. Circuits undermining the ability of government to protect health and safety and control financial fraud. Knowing that at least one of these cases would make its way to the Supreme Court, they can be assured of having the anti-regulatory justices further dismantle the administrative state.

Making his impact all the stronger, Trump’s judges are also much younger than those nominated by other presidents—on average, a full five years younger than those nominated by Obama. The law professors David Fontana and Micah Schwartzman calculated in a piece in The Washington Post that the difference in age would mean 270 more years of service for Trump judges than Obama judges. That’s a lot of decisions to be rendered and a lot of lives affected. 

Now for Biden’s record: He’s head and shoulders above most of his Democratic predecessors. After taking office, Biden’s team, headed by former Chief of Staff Ron Klain, moved quickly. As of February 2024, the Senate has confirmed 177 of Biden’s nominees to Article III judgeships (the judges who have life tenure under the Constitution). Biden has appointed 40 judges on the circuit courts of appeal and 134 on the district courts; he has 19 nominees pending. Even so, he has had many fewer opportunities to make nominations simply because Trump, benefiting from McConnell’s obstruction, had more vacancies to begin with. 

Nonetheless, this record is exceptional compared to Obama’s or Bill Clinton’s; neither of them put as much energy or focus into filling judicial slots, with the consequent losses for progressive forces in the courts. Moreover, Biden has successfully moved a diverse group of nominees: approximately two-thirds are women and two-thirds people of color. And more than half of them come from legal backgrounds outside the usual route to the bench (prosecution and corporate law), instead encompassing public interest law, civil rights, and legal aid. 

But he has come up short in advancing judicial nominees who have a background in economics and labor. Such judges could help dethrone the hard-right deregulatory ideology Republican judges have carried forward, and challenge the “consumer pricing” standard of antitrust enforcement that has allowed big corporations like Amazon and Facebook to monopolize their corners of the economy over the past 40 years. He has named progressives to government posts—like Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice—but his judicial appointments haven’t been in the same mold.

Currently, there are 57 vacancies on the federal courts. In theory, Biden could fill them all, but that’s probably not possible for a variety of reasons. First, only 19 of these have pending nominations. Second, the close partisan division in the Senate means that Biden’s nominees must suit every Democratic senator, including mavericks like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Then there is the problem of the so-called blue slip. Many judgeships are filled by agreement with individual senators from the state where the court is based—and here Democratic senators have been slow to agree, and Republican senators recalcitrant. For example, it took Senator Ben Cardin more than a year to agree to the nomination of Nicole Berner, former general counsel to the Service Employees International Union, to the Fourth Circuit. Cardin implied that he opposed Berner because she does not live in Baltimore. 

To fill the current vacancies, Biden will likely have the most success in states like Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, and California, whose senators are Democrats or caucus with Democrats, and thus presumably will furnish a blue slip to advance the nominees. Blue slip practices are determined by the current chair of the Judiciary Committee, at the moment Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. But with the example of Berner and Cardin so fresh, even in states that should cooperate with the White House we may see Democratic obstruction for parochial and nonstrategic reasons.

So far, Biden has held off nominating people who can’t get blue slips from either Republicans or Democrats, but many are calling for him to do so. Durbin is unfortunately following in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessor at the committee, retired Senator Pat Leahy, who allowed Republican senators to block Obama’s appointments. Republicans, who controlled the Senate for six years between Leahy and Durbin, made the rule significantly less stringent, which allowed Trump to advance his highly ideological nominees out of committee over the objections of home-state Democrats. 

Because of the blue slip, when Biden is able to place his judges, they are having a smaller effect on the direction of the law because they tend to replace Democratic appointees in blue states. 

Should Biden win a second term, his success in transforming the judiciary will depend on a few open questions. If Republicans win back the Senate, they will likely do to Biden what they did to Obama in his last two years: block most of his judicial nominations. If Democrats hold the chamber, their excessive self-restraint might keep them from filling as many seats as they could—unless they abolish blue slips and name a more aggressive Judiciary Committee chair. (Sheldon Whitehouse’s name was mentioned in 2020, and Elizabeth Warren would be another good choice.) And finally, assuming Democrats have the chance to confirm more Biden judges, it remains to be seen whether they’ll pick more jurists with economic justice and labor backgrounds. Biden’s choice of political appointees at the DOJ, FTC, and elsewhere in the government should give us hope. And at this point, I think the Democrats finally get it: Courts matter. 

As for Trump, we can be sure it will be more of the same—but even more so. He’s indicated that his choices will be yet more conservative and more willing to abandon accepted understandings of law and precedent to reach conservative outcomes. Indeed, he says his Supreme Court nominees have shown themselves to be too “independent.” Even though the first-term appointees were far to the right, they did typically have solid legal credentials. But in a second term, allies say Trump has vowed to move committed ideologues instead of qualified conservatives. 

As Ty Cobb, one of Trump’s White House lawyers, recently said to The Washington Post about Trump’s first-term nominees, “They were intellectually qualified for the most part to become judges. I don’t think there’s a chance that will be the case in a second term.” 

The possibility that ties to the Federalist Society may now make a nominee seem too moderate should make us fear even more from Trump’s second-term crop. Hard-right, pro-Trump judges like James Ho and Aileen Cannon are already untethered from statutory texts and precedent, and we can only imagine what judges even more unbound by law might do to tilt our system into autocracy.

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Click here for the Monthly‘s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

For decades prior to the election of 2016, the leaders of both parties differed on many issues but adhered to what came to be known as “the Washington consensus.” Elite Democrats and Republicans bought into the idea that by dropping tariffs and other regulatory constraints to global trade, America would achieve broad prosperity while also securing its geopolitical interests. Imports might dry up U.S. factory jobs, they conceded, but that would allow more Americans to realize their comparative advantage as “knowledge workers.” 

Both parties also endorsed the idea that by opening up trade with China and other developing nations, the United States could help spread democracy and secure a peaceful global order. In explaining his decision to support China in becoming a member of the World Trade Organization, President Bill Clinton remarked in 1999, “If you believe in a future of greater openness and freedom for the people of China, you ought to be for this agreement. If you believe in a future of greater prosperity for the American people, you certainly should be for this agreement.”

To be sure, there were some voices in the Republican Party, and more in the Democratic Party, who dissented from this view. They pointed, variously, to mounting U.S. trade deficits; to the hollowing-out of America’s industrial base and the downward mobility of the working class; to unfair competition from deeply subsidized, tax-evading international corporations that flouted even minimal labor and environmental standards. Some of these critics even ran for president (Pat Buchanan, Richard Gephardt, Bernie Sanders). But none were able to convince a majority of their party’s voters.

That changed in 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidency. Trump promised that by tearing up treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had been proposed by George H. W. Bush and signed by Clinton, he would help restore America to greatness. “Under a Trump presidency, the American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them,” Trump promised. “We will stand up to trade cheating. Cheating. Cheaters, that’s what they are. Cheaters. We will stand up to trade cheating anywhere and everywhere it threatens the American job.”

Four years later, Democrats, too, elected a president who broke dramatically with the old Washington census. But as President Joe Biden completes his first term, the differences between how he and Trump have used public policy to manage America’s economic place in the world could not be more stark. Trump pursued what can fairly be described as “protectionist,” or “beggar-thy-neighbor,” policies, which favored some domestic industries but hurt others while damaging relations with key allies. His administration operated on the theory that if U.S.-based companies sold more stuff to a foreign country than its corporations sold to us, all Americans, including workers, consumers, and other U.S. companies, would be winners. Meanwhile, Trump’s strategy to bring back manufacturing jobs relied mostly on the idea that a large tax cut for corporations would lead to more capital investment in American factories. 

Biden, by contrast, while keeping in place some tariffs imposed by Trump, has operated from very different principles and deployed a much wider range of policies. Biden views trade policy as about more than the narrow, mercantilist measure of whether exports with any one country or another are greater than imports. He also views trade policy as part of a much larger suite of tools that governments should use to structure markets so they serve a broad range of public proposes, ranging from national security needs to the rights of labor and environmental protection. It’s an all-of-government approach that combines large public investments in key infrastructure and domestic industries with checks on monopolistic concentrations of political economic power, whether by foreign or domestic corporations or authoritarian governments. 

Congress long ago gave to American presidents the power to impose temporary duties and other trade measures in cases that involve certified threats to national security or the vitality of U.S. industry. This power was rarely wielded in the past, but early on in his administration, Trump used it to slap tariffs on imported washing machines and solar cells as well as on steel and aluminum imports, while also walking away from the big, multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership deal negotiated by Barack Obama. The administration then used these tariffs as leverage as it renegotiated past deals, such as a replacement for NAFTA and revised bilateral agreements with Korea, Japan, and the European Union. It also provoked a full-fledged trade war with China by imposing tariffs on more than $300 billion in Chinese imports. 

Overall, these efforts did not achieve Trump’s aim of lowering the trade deficit, though, measured as a share of GDP, the deficit did decline slightly between 2017 and 2020. Many countries retaliated by imposing tariffs on products made in the United States, to the point that Trump signed off on massive subsidies to keep American farmers afloat. China did eventually commit to buying $200 billion in U.S. exports, but in the end bought none of the exports Trump’s deal had promised. Meanwhile, U.S. companies pulled some production out of China, but mostly shifted it to other Asian countries rather than returning it to the United States. During the first two years of the Trump administration, the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. increased at a rate no higher than during Obama’s last seven years in office before slowing sharply in 2019, and then collapsed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Another hallmark of Trump’s trade record was his deference to a few, highly concentrated American industries. In negotiating a replacement for NAFTA, for example, Trump did the bidding of large digital tech companies by pressing for provisions that prevent Canada and Mexico from regulating the flow of digital data across their borders. Trump also deferred to the demands of large U.S. oil companies by carrying over provisions in NAFTA that benefited their bottom lines, such as the ability to move refined petroleum products across borders tax free. In general, the Trump administration pressed for trade provisions that limited the ability of both foreign governments and our own to impose restraints on international corporations and their investors, including through enforcement of domestic content or anti-monopoly laws. In other words, while using the language of populism, Trump pursued trade policy that continued to serve elite, corporate agendas. 

Trump promises that if he is returned to office he will bring much more of the same when it comes to trade. He is proposing 10 percent across-the-board levies on imports and threatening still higher tariffs on other countries. 

President Biden’s approach, by contrast, is informed by an entirely different conception of what went wrong with the Washington consensus and how to fix it. To begin with, during his first term, Biden passed landmark legislation that took direct aim at American industrial competitiveness through public investment. To date, legislation such as the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has led to the announcement of more than $640 billion in private-sector clean energy and manufacturing investments and over $200 billion in manufacturing construction spending. 

These direct, targeted investments in key U.S. industries contrast sharply with the Trump administration’s approach to industrial policy, which mostly involved across-the-board tax cuts for corporations. The other key difference is seen in the way the two presidents have handled traditional trade negotiations between nations.

Biden and his advisers are not just concerned with how the old “free trade” regime shifted production away from the U.S. to wherever wages and regulatory standards were lowest. They are also focused on how it concentrated production geographically in ways that left supply chains vulnerable to shocks from pandemics, climate change, and armed conflict as well as to cornering by monopolistic corporations. And they are focused on making sure that trade policy not only serves the interests of American workers but also advances what Biden’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, provocatively calls a “postcolonial” phase, in which poorer nations share more high-value production and are not forced to earn their living through sweatshop labor. 

Taken together, these factors cause the Biden administration to conclude that we need policies that spread production to more places around the world, including but not limited to the United States. Unlike Trump, who focused on re-shoring production, Biden is more about what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calls “friend-shoring”—or shifting production away from excessive concentration in China and unstable, despotic countries and spreading it instead among a resilient network of allies who share our political values and market rules. 

One expression of this philosophy is Biden’s decision to suspend the 25 percent tariff Trump imposed on European steel, and to pursue instead a new “Green Steel Club.” This trading bloc would require member countries to ensure that their steel and aluminum industries meet more stringent emissions standards and place tariffs on more carbon-intensive steel and aluminum. The plan would box out Chinese producers, who have flooded the market over the past decades and account for about half of the world’s capacity. To date, however, Biden has not persuaded the Europeans to sign on. One challenge with bringing this and other multilateral deals over the finish line is fear among trading partners that their economies will be hurt as investors chase subsidies the Biden administration has put in place for green-energy technology and microchips that are made in America. 

Another example of the “friend-shoring” approach is Biden’s pursuit of a trade agreement with various Asian countries known as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. IPEF aims to create a standard for policy coordination on supply chains, clean energy, the fair economy, and trade. If enacted, the agreement will result in a club of countries with similar standards on major trade issues, and is likely to exclude China. Currently negotiations are on hold, however, to allow Congress and the administration to deal with demands by Big Tech firms for special protections. Some Democrats are also worried that the administration will not push hard enough for enforceable labor standards in the deal. The administration has managed to sign a smaller deal with Taiwan and Japan. 

Meanwhile, Biden continues to use trade policy to take a hard line on China, reflecting a new bipartisan consensus that China’s mercantilist policies, human rights violations, and increasingly aggressive geopolitical ambitions make its continued integration with the rest of the global economy increasingly dangerous. Accordingly, the administration has retained all the tariffs that the Trump White House placed on Chinese imports in 2018 and 2019. It has also taken aim at China’s ability to compete in advanced digital technology by imposing sweeping restrictions on its ability to import semiconductor chips produced with American equipment. Biden has also signed an executive order aimed at restricting U.S. investment in Chinese semiconductors, quantum information technologies, and artificial intelligence. Similarly, Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021, which restricts the import of all goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. Xinjiang produces nearly half of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, the key material in solar panels. 

As Biden stands for reelection, he can point to one of the strongest economies on record by many measures. This includes a sharp increase in manufacturing employment since 2020, even steeper increases in manufacturing investment, and a trade deficit that in 2023 contracted by the largest amount in 14 years. But many of Biden’s biggest initiatives, including the commitments for massive new spending on infrastructure and green energy, are only beginning to come online. Similarly, the profound changes in trade policy articulated by Biden and his advisers have not yet led to dramatic new trade deals, though they might if Biden gets a second term. One certain accomplishment that Biden can claim, however, and one that could define his place in history, is that he plotted a new course for America’s political economy that broke with failed policies of the past, including the neoliberal orthodoxy of the Washington consensus and Trump’s crude faux populism.  

The post Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done on Trade? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Click here for the Monthly‘s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

When it comes to federal regulations, Democratic and Republican presidents are judged by different standards. The former are expected to use federal regulations vigorously to advance liberal goals such as protecting the environment and the rights of workers. The latter are supposed to take an ax to federal regulations, especially those that burden large corporations. Neither task is especially easy. Moving a federal regulation through the complicated rulemaking process is time-consuming, and the same is true for getting rid of one. But both Donald Trump and Joe Biden played their assigned roles in their first terms, at least rhetorically. So it’s fair to assess their actual records by those partisan metrics: Was Biden an effective regulator, and Trump a successful deregulator? 

All in all, the Trump administration’s inexperience and sloppiness in rulemaking led an overwhelming number of its actions to be overturned in court. Biden, meanwhile, has had far more success promoting his agenda through regulations. 

But Biden’s accomplishments will be in jeopardy if he loses this fall, thanks to one lasting victory that Trump did achieve: appointing three justices to the Supreme Court. Since then, in a series of precedent-breaking decisions, the Court’s conservative supermajority has begun an assault on the foundations of the administrative state. Regardless of who wins the election, we can expect to see the next president pursue a similar agenda with a similar level of competence. This time, however, the playing field will be tilted to the right—unless he and his fellow Democrats in Congress take aggressive steps to curb judicial interference with regulation.

A year into his presidency, Trump proclaimed with typical bombast that he had launched the “most far-reaching regulatory reform” in U.S. history. “We have decades of excess regulation to remove,” he said in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, just before using an oversize pair of scissors to cut through red tape. “To help launch the next phase of growth, prosperity, and freedom, I am challenging my cabinet to find and remove every single outdated, unlawful, and excessive regulation currently on the books.”

Soon after taking office, Trump directed executive branch agencies to remove two regulations from the books for every one added. At the end of his term, he claimed to have zapped eight for every one. There are many ways to evaluate those benchmarks, but by any fair measure he did not reach his two-to-one goal, let alone the grandiose figure of eight.

Many of the regulations that Trump claimed to have revoked he was merely refusing to enforce, including numerous consumer protection standards. Among his administration’s attempts to actually remove regulations from the books, or add them, a staggering number—77.5 percent—were overturned in court. For comparison, other administrations lose these cases only about 30 percent of the time.

This winter, the libertarian Cato Institute attempted to measure Trump’s impact in several ways, all of which indicated that his deregulatory campaign at best kept the number of new rules level, and more likely saw a slight increase. One long-used, but imprecise, method is to count the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations, an annual register of all executive branch rules. Under Trump, the number of pages increased by 0.8 percent to 186,645—less than it increased in the Obama years, but far from the promised reduction. But tallying up pages in a book doesn’t tell you how many actual regulations were added or removed, nor how much of an effect, positive or negative, they had on the economy. A more sophisticated way of measuring regulatory burden is to count the number of restrictions implied by words such as must, required, may not, and prohibited that appear in the CFR. Trump’s first term also produced a marginal increase in that metric. 

Trump’s attempts to cut red tape were significantly hindered by his administration’s unfamiliarity with the ponderous bureaucratic processes that govern regulations. Federal rulemaking is a lengthy process that involves public comment, congressional and administrative review, and ultimately oversight from courts. To get rid of a regulation is similarly onerous, unless it happens within the 60-day time window that the Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers to block a new rule. The Trump administration often glided over steps in that process and used faulty reasoning to nix Obama-era regulations (or enact its own), which led courts to overturn a stunning 200 of 258 regulatory actions in the first Trump term. 

As the journalist Olga Khazan wrote in The Atlantic in 2021, Trump’s political appointees had little knowledge of the regulatory process, which led them to look to radical outside groups to guide their policies. Emails obtained by Khazan show that Trump officials consulted the anti-welfare think tank Foundation for Government Accountability as they crafted changes to SNAP eligibility that would have kicked 3.7 million people off food stamps during the pandemic. The administration offered little justification for the changes, other than that they would save money, and declined to weigh any potential negative consequences, as the rulemaking process usually demands. A federal judge blocked one part of that proposal in a scathing decision in late 2020, and Biden withdrew the rest the following spring.

Many of the regulatory actions Trump did undertake were openly slanted in favor of Big Business. Just to give a few examples: Trump substantially weakened Obama-era fuel economy regulations; presided over the congressional scaling back of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law; and revoked federal standards to prevent discriminatory housing practices (which the administration viewed as a mandate to subsidize low-income housing over single-family homes). 

Although these regulatory moves doubtlessly saved large companies billions of dollars, they have the potential to impose costs on others, including taxpayers who might, for instance, be on the hook for bank bailouts down the road. 

Some of the biggest losers of Trump-era regulation were women. The Trump administration worked against women’s interests in many ways—by undermining private abortion care coverage, reducing access to birth control, blocking data collection on the gender pay gap, weakening Title IX gender protections and the Title X family planning network, taking away nondiscrimination protections in health care, and lowering the overtime pay threshold for working mothers.

When he assumed the presidency in January 2021, Biden quickly went to work undoing several Trump-era regulations. That included withdrawing the aforementioned proposal to kick millions off food stamps and, with Congress’s help, repealing rules that had relaxed restrictions on predatory payday lenders. 

He then began wielding regulatory tools to implement some of his boldest policies. To shore up U.S. manufacturing and decrease the nation’s dependence on international adversaries for critical supply chain materials, Biden’s Commerce Department slapped strict controls on microchip exports to China. The rules have required updates to plug loopholes, but have proved far more effective in their potential to strangle Chinese industry than any of Trump’s bluster about trade wars. At home, Biden in summer 2021 issued his “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” a sweeping initiative that directed more than a dozen agencies to take steps like limiting noncompete clauses, allowing for over-the-counter sales of hearing aids, bringing back net neutrality (banished under Trump), and making it easier for farmers to bring claims against the monopolized meatpacking industry. As the Monthly editor Will Norris recounts, rulemaking efforts by federal agencies to promote competition have dovetailed with increased antitrust enforcement in the courts—and have already begun to weaken the grip of monopoly power over the economy.

By almost any measure, Biden has been a vigorous regulator. The number of “significant rules”—regulations impactful enough to be overseen by the Office of Management and Budget—increased by 451 in Biden’s first 18 months, as opposed to 270 in the same period for Trump. Biden also created 142 “major rules,” which have economy-wide effects, to Trump’s 81. In terms of instituting major rules, early-term Trump and Biden were comparable to their co-partisan predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. (Although, because of COVID-19, Trump actually enacted a record number of economic regulations in his last year in office.)

Biden has also made notable changes to a little-known but key chokepoint in the federal government’s regulatory machinery: the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. A subsidiary of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, OIRA vets the cost-benefit analyses of regulations proposed by executive branch agencies. For years, regulation scholars and progressive advocates have complained that OIRA puts too much weight on the supposed cost versus the potential benefits of proposed regulations, listens too much to industry lobbyists and not enough to the public, and increasingly slows the regulatory process down. Last spring, Biden issued an executive order overhauling OIRA’s procedures on all these fronts. In a second Biden term, these institutional reforms could make the promulgation of regulations much smoother. Trump, however, could withdraw the changes if he takes back the White House. 

Moreover, Biden’s institutional changes pale in comparison to one Trump achieved in his first term. By appointing three justices to the Supreme Court, Trump created a conservative supermajority that, during the Biden years, has transformed the bench’s jurisprudence in administrative law. On their own initiative, the conservative justices have launched an assault on the administrative state and the delegation of power from Congress that underpins it—potentially doing much more to deregulate than Trump himself could in his first term. 

In their 2022 ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, the conservative justices expanded a legal framework called the “major questions doctrine” that significantly narrowed what kinds of regulatory power Congress can delegate to executive branch agencies. After oral arguments this year in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Trump’s supermajority appears ready to continue its campaign against regulations, this time by undoing the so-called Chevron doctrine—long-standing precedent that gives agencies leeway in interpreting the federal laws that enable government rulemaking. Both cases threaten not just individual regulations but also the legal foundations on which all regulations are built.

If Trump wins this fall, he’ll likely be able to overturn much of what Biden accomplished in his last months. The conservative Court supermajority he appointed might also make quick work of other signature Biden regulatory reforms that would otherwise be harder for Trump to dislodge. 

But would Trump improve on his abysmal record of losing regulatory cases in lower courts? Possibly not. Many of his first-term failures stemmed from the sloppiness and inexperience of his staff. This time around, Trump seems not to have learned his lesson. He has announced plans to bring the federal bureaucracy even more under his direct control, and with the help of right-wing think tanks is compiling lists of loyalists to replace career civil servants. The likelihood of a second-term Trump regulatory agenda being advanced by sober, effective professionals is looking ever slimmer.

And at the same time, Trump may find a total dismantlement of the administrative state at odds with his stated intention to use the federal government to punish his adversaries at home and abroad. A second term would more likely see him reduce regulatory burden on selected corporations and political allies, while heaping it onto those he distrusts. 

What if Biden is the victor in November? Undoubtedly, he’ll continue to aggressively use regulations to implement new legislation, or to make policy directly in case he can’t get those bills through Congress. And thanks to his OIRA reforms, Biden will have an easier time getting new regulations through the slow-moving rulemaking process.

Looming over all of this, however, will be a Supreme Court increasingly intent on making itself the decider on regulatory authority questions. In his second term, when the Court inevitably torpedoes one of his regulations, Biden will need to find ways around its decision, just as he has in his first term. For instance, when the Court last June overturned Biden’s forgiveness of $430 billion in student loans, his Department of Education responded by expanding debt relief through the “SAVE” program, on firmer statutory ground. 

At some point, however, Biden may have to challenge the Court’s power directly. If a Court vacancy opens, he could nominate a jurist with knowledge of administrative law who firmly supports the Chevron doctrine and opposes the major questions doctrine. He would also be wise to nominate judges to lower courts who have backgrounds in economics, labor, and other subjects that would help them go toe-to-toe with their conservative anti-regulatory brethren (see Caroline Fredrickson’s essay). And if Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, they could pass, and Biden could sign, a “Congressional Review Act” for Supreme Court decisions, giving legislators a fast track through the filibuster to respond. As it stands, Congress is too sclerotic to issue clarifying legislation for each major regulatory decision, which effectively leaves the last word to the Court. 

In either president’s second term, altering the course of the slow-moving ship of state will remain a cumbersome process. For Biden, however, it’ll likely be even more so, with a hostile Supreme Court looking over his shoulder. With Trump, the same self-sabotaging patterns will probably arise. Either way, expect to see long-running tensions come to a head as both men work to finish what they started.

The post Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done on Regulation? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Click here for the Monthly’s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

Before exploring what Joe Biden or Donald Trump did or didn’t do for America’s working families, we need to start with a reality check: American families are struggling. Although there has been some progress in both the public and private sectors in recent decades—and from both the Trump and Biden administrations—the truth is we don’t support families in the United States. We make it untenable to near impossible, depending on family circumstances, for people to combine paid work and care.

By gross domestic product, the United States is the wealthiest country on Earth. Yet in terms of work and family, we are an outlier in all the worst ways: We have among the highest rates of any advanced economy of child poverty and maternal, infant, and child mortality, particularly in the Black community. We are one of the few nations that lack national paid parental or family leave, or paid sick or vacation time. We put in some of the longest work hours, while investing among the least in child care. The burden falls particularly hard on low-income households; meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained stuck at $7.25 since 2009. 

What both men have done as president, despite their rhetoric, is incremental at best, and woefully inadequate compared to the need. Trump showed some promise with early policy ideas that seemed to evince real compassion for working families, but ultimately either failed to deliver or fell back on the Republican playbook of coddling the rich, ignoring the poor, and limiting the economic options of women. Biden’s vision was much better matched to the problem, because it recognized that government is deplorably underserving working families, and that those families come in all shapes and sizes, often with women as breadwinners. And he has scored some meaningful, if sometimes not durable, accomplishments—like the expanded child tax credit, which lifted millions out of poverty only to expire at the end of 2021. But Biden couldn’t get through Congress many of his more ambitious plans, which would have gone much further toward truly addressing the problem.

In September 2016, Trump made an announcement that surprised everyone, especially Republicans. Spurred by his daughter Ivanka, the GOP presidential nominee came out in support of six weeks of paid leave, initially just for married mothers who’d given birth. He claimed that his six-week program would be funded through finding waste and fraud in an already underfunded unemployment insurance system. Though many criticized the funding mechanism as unworkable, this support for a national paid leave policy was norm-shifting for Republican candidates, and it was immensely popular: Poll after poll shows that a vast majority of Americans support a paid family leave program, as do many businesses. The announcement reinforced Trump’s image as a mold-breaking candidate who was unafraid to flout Republican orthodoxy, and who might take real steps to help working families.

Yet at the same time, Trump was making comments that warned of more traditional culture war battles to come. Earlier that year, he faced searing criticism for saying that women who seek abortions should face “some form of punishment,” which he later amended to just doctors and providers. Over the course of his first term, the latter strain in Trump’s politics won out: With a few exceptions, his promises to families went nowhere, pushed aside by the need to inflame his base.

Compared to what Trump said in the campaign, his presidency had a much narrower, and more traditionally conservative, vision of families that was geared toward heterosexual, working, and middle- and upper-class married couples. The administration sought to limit the government’s role, and instead pursued tax incentives and market-based solutions that it hoped would boost wages so families could afford care. Rather than help working families, however, several analyses have shown, Trump’s policies, including his historic 2017 tax cuts, enriched the wealthy. 

Trump expanded the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and added another $500 “family credit” for non-child dependents. But the move excluded the families most in need—about 26 million children in low- and moderate-income families who earn so little that they owe little to no federal taxes. The law also excluded the Dreamers, children born elsewhere who were brought to the United States at a young age without documents. Trump instead expanded the number of high-earning families who could claim the credit. 

Trump’s annual budgets had a similar schizophrenic quality. In his proposals, he sought to put work requirements on food and nutrition benefits and to slash programs designed to help provide families in poverty with enough for their basic needs. In 2017, he proposed a $95 million cut to Child Care and Development Block Grants, which support state subsidies for child care for families living in poverty. Congress rejected the idea, and instead raised spending by $2.37 billion, a historic one-year increase. Trump signed the legislation, which also ignored his request to eliminate federal spending on after-school programs. Today, he touts his administration’s “historic” investments in child care. 

Yet in the following year’s budget, and in multiple State of the Union addresses, Trump continued to call for paid parental leave. In 2019, Trump said he was “proud to be the first president to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave.” He continued to propose that states create their own systems with unemployment insurance funds. That proposal went nowhere. Instead, later that year, he signed compromise legislation crafted by Democrats that gave 12 weeks of paid parental leave to 2.1 million federal workers—the largest workforce in the nation. (The paid leave provision was offered as a compromise to Democratic lawmakers in exchange for their support for Trump’s new Space Force.) In 2020, Trump touted the program as a “model” for the rest of the nation. However, he later supported a paid parental leave proposal in Congress that wouldn’t actually pay parents, but instead would allow them to borrow from their future selves. It went nowhere. Meanwhile, the need for paid leave remains dire: One analysis found that, without a job-protected paid leave policy and supportive work environments, one in four new mothers in the United States returns to work within two weeks of giving birth.

And when it came to supporting the average worker’s ability to make a living wage, Trump repeatedly took a pass. Though he proclaimed to want to encourage more “Made in America” jobs, Trump sought to weaken regulations on employers that would have forced them to make these jobs good jobs. He consistently sought to undermine unions: He stacked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with corporate lawyers, and promulgated rules through the Labor Department that made it easier for companies to misclassify workers as independent contractors with fewer protections. In 2019, despite having promoted a $10 minimum wage on the campaign trail, he opposed an effort to raise it in the House, leaving the standard at the unlivable $7.25.

Women have little to thank Trump for, either. On the gender pay gap, the Trump administration sought to put an end to an Obama-era rule requiring large companies to disclose racial and gender pay data. (A federal judge later overruled the administration.) Despite having supported abortion rights before entering presidential politics, Trump takes credit for ending a 50-year legal precedent. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who were instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade. 

In the last year of Trump’s term, the pandemic spurred him and the entire nation to support front-line workers, though some parts of the response were more helpful than others. In March 2020, Trump signed emergency paid sick and caregiving leave legislation. However, he and other Republican lawmakers exempted workers at companies with more than 500 employees—meaning that most of the “essential” workers stocking shelves and making deliveries for Walmart and Amazon and others were left out, forcing them to choose between risking the deadly virus or forgoing pay. One analysis found that as many as 100 million workers were excluded from the paid sick leave legislation, which expired in December 2020. On the other hand, those days also saw Trump at his most generous: He sent stimulus checks to eligible families (albeit with his name scrawled in bold Sharpie), signed legislation to expand unemployment insurance, and put a moratorium on evictions, all of which were lifelines to many families during the worst days of the pandemic.

Throughout Biden’s presidency, he has sought ways to make life, as Vox’s Anna North wrote, “less terrible for parents.” His administration has embraced a robust role for the public sector in universal policies like paid family leave, child care, and home care. But while his heart and his ambition may be big, he has not been able to deliver big for families, because of GOP opposition and a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate. 

Biden has long been a supporter of paid family and medical leave, often talking about his own need for time to care for his young sons after his first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. During the 2020 campaign, he released a plan for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave and free universal pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds. He also called the nation’s lack of paid sick days a “national disgrace.”

Soon after taking office, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that, among many provisions, expanded the child tax credit into a monthly payment of $300 for young children and $250 for children six to 17. He also made the credit available even to the poorest families who pay little to no taxes. Almost immediately, child poverty fell to its lowest recorded level—5.2 percent. At the end of 2021, once the CTC expansion expired and Congress failed to extend it, those rates again began to spike. (As of March this year, a more modest proposal with bipartisan support was wending its way through Congress.) A similar story unfolded with ARPA’s $24 billion Child Care Stabilization Program, which helped 225,000 child care providers serving 10 million children to stay open at a time when thousands of facilities were going out of business in the pandemic. Those funds expired in September 2023, and renewal from Congress seems unlikely. Without additional support, Stanford’s RAPID survey found, as many as one-quarter of child care programs are predicted to close in the coming months, leaving more families in a desperate scramble.

But that wasn’t enough for Biden. In fall 2021, he proposed the Build Back Better Act, which, beyond funding paid family and medical leave, would have allocated an unprecedented $400 billion for affordable, high-quality child care and free universal pre-K. Along with that came further expansions to the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit for low-wage workers; living wages for child and home-based care workers; and the construction of more affordable housing—among many other provisions.

The bill was the first major recognition that America’s child care system has been broken since the early 1970s, when a bipartisan Congress passed legislation to build a universal child care system, only to have then President Richard Nixon veto it, with many conservatives likening the program to Soviet-style communism. As a result, new parents today pay expensive tuition out of pocket that can run as much as 20 percent of the family’s income per child. As one researcher told me, “Child care is not affordable anywhere.” Even so, most child care workers earn low wages—about half make so little they qualify for public benefits—and the small business and family providers who make up the majority of care facilities barely get by.

Build Back Better was hailed as historic among child care advocates, teachers, providers, and many desperate parents. After months of wrangling, the paid leave provisions were scaled back to just four weeks and were to be paid for through a tax on wealthy corporations, which led businesses to lobby heavily against it. The bill died in December 2021 with opposition from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and was resurrected later as the Inflation Reduction Act—with all care provisions stripped from it. Nevertheless, in summer 2022, Biden managed to insert a provision in the CHIPS and Science Act that any company requesting more than $150 million to construct or renovate semiconductor facilities must submit a plan to show how they plan to provide workers with child care.

Biden has been considerably more compassionate toward working women than Trump, recognizing that the conservative reverence for the 1950s-era breadwinner-homemaker family is ahistorical; that there is no one dominant arrangement for the American family; and that in fact many women are breadwinners and most women’s earnings are critical for their families’ survival. In December 2022, he signed the PUMP Act, which expands breastfeeding protections to more workers, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which provides reasonable accommodations to keep pregnant workers on the job. Despite his own internal qualms about abortion as a Catholic, Biden has sought to protect reproductive rights after the fall of Roe and has called on Congress to codify them in law. He has vowed to veto any attempts to pass a national abortion ban.

Both Biden and Trump have claimed to be on the side of workers. Biden, however, became the first president in the fall of 2023 to join workers on the picket line during the autoworkers’ strike in Detroit. (A day later, Trump spoke at a nonunion auto parts plant to the north.) And under Biden’s tenure, the NLRB has worked to shore up union power, making it easier, for instance, for workers to form unions, and for unions to fight employer intimidation during organization drives: If employers commit unfair labor practices during a union election, the NLRB will dismiss the election and order the company to recognize and bargain with the union. He has also said he supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and sought, through executive action, to raise wages at least for federal workers and contractors. When strained railroad workers threatened to strike in fall 2022 over their lack of paid sick days, Biden took heat for approving a bill to block the strike. But his administration continued to negotiate behind the scenes, and eventually the major railroads agreed to grant most workers a few days of paid sick leave.

In the past year, with a divided Congress, Biden has sought to shore up the child care system through executive action. In 2023, he issued more than 50 directives to federal agencies to expand access to affordable child care. In late February, Biden again used executive powers to lower the cost of child care for 100,000 low-income families, promising to cap child care at $10 a day, like the universal child care program in Canada. But with Republican lawmakers unwilling to fund even their own desired border policies for fear of handing victories to Biden, his hopes for transformative change through legislation must rest in a second term.

In the next four years, the prospect for Biden and Trump to do any better is decidedly mixed. Trump has leaned ever harder into Republican culture war priorities, promising to punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors, and to support legislation declaring that the federal government will only recognize two genders, male and female. In private conversations, he has floated a 16-week national abortion ban. Biden hopes to “finish the job,” as he said in his State of the Union address, and raise the minimum wage and enact some of the family-supportive policies that died with Build Back Better, like subsidized child care and paid family leave. But he will need to win more durable majorities in Congress—not an easy ask. In either case, for the American government to truly begin to support working families, its leaders will have to put aside short-term political thinking to recognize the deep and urgent nature of their need.  

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In the months before the 2016 election, corporate concentration broke through as a salient issue in Washington for the first time in decades. Building on years of work published in the Washington Monthly by Barry Lynn, Lina Khan, Phillip Longman, and others, mainstream Democrats began speaking of America’s monopoly problem, linking it to rising inequality and falling rates of entrepreneurship. That April, Barack Obama’s administration, after years of lax antitrust enforcement, published a white paper documenting the growing dominance of large firms over the economy and its baleful effects on economic opportunity. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton became the first major presidential candidate in decades to advocate tougher antitrust enforcement. 

Donald Trump, Clinton’s rival for the presidency, also spoke out on the issue that year. After AT&T announced plans to acquire Time Warner, Trump declared in October 2016 that the proposed merger would be “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” and promised to block it. Trump spoke against the monopoly power of companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Shortly after being elected, Trump’s Department of Justice moved as promised to block the AT&T/Time Warner deal, one of the government’s most ambitious merger cases in 40 years. 

Observers across the political spectrum applauded, warning that the merger would lead to fewer outlets for independent programming and too much concentrated power over the information environment. But many became critics after the judge criticized the prosecutors for resting their case on a highly technical, unprovable claim that the merger would harm consumers, and ruled in favor of the merger. 

Still more disillusioning to antitrust reformers was the question of Trump’s motives. 

Trump had a long history of criticizing CNN, which was owned by Time Warner. He had even once publicized a doctored video that depicted him body-slamming the CNN logo. After the DOJ brought its suit, a New Yorker investigation confirmed that Trump had personally told deputies to have the merger blocked as punishment for CNN’s unfavorable coverage. 

Adding to doubts about the sincerity of Trump’s opposition to monopoly, the DOJ soon afterward waved through Disney’s acquisition of the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, a deal that drastically consolidated media markets. Though Trump’s preferred network, Fox News, was left out of the deal, the sale inflated Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch’s personal fortune by billions of dollars, for which Trump offered his personal congratulations.

The favoritism bore an obvious resemblance to an infamous episode from a half century earlier: Richard Nixon’s interference in International Telephone & Telegraph’s purchase of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, at the time the biggest merger in American history. In June 1969, when the DOJ was preparing a suit to block the sale, Nixon ordered his deputy attorney general to back off. As reporters soon uncovered, ITT’s CEO was a close friend and ally of Nixon’s, and the company had secretly contributed $400,000 to his reelection campaign.

If such a scandalous quid pro quo is historically rare in antitrust enforcement, Democrats, too, sometimes exercise prosecutorial discretion. Lyndon Johnson held up the antitrust review of a bank merger until the owner of one of the banks, who also ran a newspaper, agreed to give him more flattering coverage. Despite the urging of Federal Trade Commission officials, Obama declined to take antitrust action against Google, which had forged a close partnership with his administration. Google’s employees had contributed more to his reelection campaign than almost any other company.

But the selective application of the law was endemic to Trump’s antitrust operation. Makan Delrahim, the head of the DOJ antitrust division under Trump, gestured toward populist criticisms of the long-standing antitrust status quo. But in summer 2019, when Sprint and T-Mobile were working toward a merger that would reduce the number of major cell service providers from four to three, Delrahim not only declined to intervene but actively worked to ensure that the deal went through, lobbying other regulators and members of Congress and fighting an antitrust suit brought by a group of states. His motives were apparent: Sprint is majority owned by SoftBank, and SoftBank’s chairman, Masayoshi Son, is a known ally of Trump’s. 

By contrast, shortly after Trump posted several furious tweets about an agreement Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, and Honda had made with California to set stricter emissions standards than those proposed by the White House, Delrahim opened a plainly baseless antitrust investigation into the four companies. The New York Times editorial board called it a “cruel parody of antitrust enforcement,” and the policy writer David Dayen observed that “the notion that the automakers conspired with each other to raise fuel standards in a bid to limit competition is a joke.”

As Matthew Buck and Sandeep Vaheesan of the Open Markets Institute documented, Delrahim also made a habit of helping out large corporations by involving the DOJ in antitrust lawsuits where it wasn’t a party. On several occasions in office, he issued amicus briefs defending tech giants like Apple and Comcast facing antitrust lawsuits from states and consumers. 

In June 2020, the career DOJ official John Elias revealed during congressional testimony that the department had devoted major resources to other dubious investigations. Attorney General Bill Barr, for example, ordered a series of unfounded antitrust investigations of cannabis companies. Probes into “Big Pot” accounted for 29 percent of the antitrust division’s merger investigations.

Trump’s relationship with the FTC, which has major antitrust powers, reveals a similar pattern. After Trump finally appointed someone to chair the FTC in 2018, his choice, the attorney Joseph Simons, announced that he would become far more aggressive on antitrust. But he essentially did the opposite, presiding over a largely passive period for the agency. Trump’s FTC filed about 21 total merger enforcement actions per year, only slightly more than under the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. 

Trump’s FTC won only one major decision against a monopolist in its first three years: the chipmaker Qualcomm for its dominance of critical components in cell phones. Yet after a district court ruled in favor of the FTC, this lone success was torpedoed by internecine squabbling. When Qualcomm appealed, the DOJ took the unheard-of move of intervening against the FTC, filing a motion defending Qualcomm. Delrahim, as it happens, was outside counsel for Qualcomm for many years prior to his federal service, though he officially recused himself from the case. Qualcomm won on appeal in 2020.

To their credit, during Trump’s final months in office, regulators filed two historic lawsuits against tech monopolists: one against Google for its dominance of the search engine market, and another against Facebook calling for it to divest WhatsApp and Instagram. (The Google search case went to trial in fall 2023.) Though advocates worry that those cases, like the case against Time Warner and AT&T, were imperfectly designed by a chaotic administration, they nevertheless helped reestablish a more confrontational enforcement paradigm on antitrust. 

Democrats became increasingly focused on combating monopoly during Trump’s time in office. U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren delivered soaring speeches about confronting monopolies and introduced new legislation to strengthen antitrust law. In 2019, the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee opened a sprawling investigation led by Democrat David Cicilline that documented how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google use their monopoly power to threaten free enterprise and democracy. On the campaign trail in 2020, the field of candidates competed on who had the best anti-monopoly plan. 

Biden was not at the vanguard of this movement in his party, but his campaign’s policy papers included promises to confront monopolies. Then, after he won the election, Biden committed to the cause like no other president had in modern times. He appointed one of the movement’s brightest and most aggressive reformers, Lina Khan, to run the FTC, as well as other fierce critics of corporate concentration in key posts, including Jonathan Kanter, who took over the antitrust division of the DOJ, and Tim Wu, who became a key economic adviser inside the White House. Six months after taking office, Biden issued a whole-of-government executive order that called on 17 different government agencies to take 72 actions to foster competition and protect consumers against monopolies. As a result, agencies like the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Food and Drug Administration have cracked down on public scourges like price gouging, noncompete contracts, and banking-related junk fees, and created new rules to make consolidated industries like the hearing aid market more competitive. 

Under Kanter and Khan, the DOJ and FTC have also filed far more ambitious antitrust investigations than any administration in decades. Last summer, an investigation into several food production conglomerates over wage suppression and collusion resulted in an $85 million settlement, one of several successful DOJ investigations into no-poach and wage-fixing schemes across the economy. In December, the FTC successfully blocked the medical data firm IQVIA’s attempt to monopolize the business of advertising to doctors through the purchase of an ad tech company called DeepIntent. And in January, a judge sided with the DOJ in its suit against a JetBlue-Spirit merger, the first successful prosecution of an airline merger in 40 years. 

The effect of a more aggressive posture from regulators goes beyond favorable court rulings: Under the threat of litigation, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, and the chipmaker Nvidia were some of the companies to back off multibillion-dollar acquisitions of smaller firms. Biden’s regulators filed a record 50 antitrust enforcement actions last year, and mergers dropped to a 10-year low.

Trump’s regulators, like all administrations of the past 40 years before Biden, argued cases mainly on the narrow basis of harms to consumers. But Khan and other reformers argue for reestablishing an interpretation of antitrust law that’s more expansive than this “consumer welfare standard.” Under Biden, regulators have rewritten the government’s lax merger guidelines and have often focused their legal strategy on the harms done to producers as well as consumers. For example, in October 2022, regulators secured one of the most important victories of the Biden era with a successful challenge to a merger between Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, which would have cut the number of major publishers in the U.S. from five to four. Prosecutors focused their arguments on how the industry’s consolidation hurts authors, not consumers; by winning with that argument, they established the precedent that antitrust cases can be won by proving harm to both workers and independent contractors. 

The federal judiciary is largely accustomed to ruling leniently on antitrust cases, and Biden’s regulators have also lost several important cases, including lawsuits against Meta’s acquisition of the virtual reality firm Within and Microsoft’s acquisition of the video game company Activision Blizzard. But even in losses, arguments advanced by prosecutors have helped establish useful precedent. For example, in the Within case, the FTC argued that a monopolist’s acquisition of a budding company in the industry, rather than a well-established competitor, can breach antitrust law, and that a large corporation’s investments in a market it’s not already in—virtual reality, in this case—can harm competition. In his decision, the judge acknowledged both arguments as valid in principle, marking the first instance since the 1980s that a court has endorsed such arguments.

Moving away from the consumer welfare standard will be especially important for regulating tech platforms like Google and Amazon that offer free or cheap services to consumers while gouging the businesses that have no choice but to market on their platforms. Last year, regulators announced two more long-awaited, major tech lawsuits. The first, another against Google, charges the company with maintaining a monopoly over online advertising by controlling the tools and digital auction systems companies use to place ads. Google siphons ad revenue from publishers, making the business of journalism unsustainable. The second investigates Amazon’s coercive behavior toward online merchants, including its practice of punishing businesses that sell on its Marketplace for offering lower prices elsewhere. These and other important antitrust cases—for example, the FTC’s investigations into the cartel behind hospital drug shortages, a private equity firm’s roll-up of anesthesiology providers, and Big Tech’s investments in artificial intelligence companies—will become the responsibility of whichever administration wins in November. 

Much of the business world is betting it will be Trump. After a long dip in merger activity, the monopoly researcher Matt Stoller noted the announcement of several high-value mergers this winter: Exxon made an offer to buy the shale producer Pioneer; Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines proposed combining; Chevron is buying Hess; and more. “I don’t mean to say that Trump will win,” Stoller wrote, “only that Exxon, Humana, Chevron, et al. are betting that they might find a far more favorable climate when their deal goes to trial.”

In other words, monopolists know that the self-proclaimed first businessman president was a lot more bark than bite on enforcement. Maybe that would change a second time around: Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society that are hoping to staff a Trump administration are starting to eschew the party’s market fundamentalism orthodoxy and embrace anti-monopolism. But Trump has made clear he’d use another term to punish his enemies and protect his cronies by whatever legal tools available, and there’s little to suggest that he’d staff his administration with fair-minded regulators instead of willing sycophants. 

A second term for Biden, on the other hand, would ensure the meticulous prosecution of ongoing antitrust lawsuits against Google, Amazon, Apple, Live Nation, Visa, UnitedHealth Group, Exxon Mobil, Subway, Kroger and Albertsons, and others. It would also mean the furthering of Biden’s whole-of-government effort to crack down on all forms of anticompetitive behavior. In February, the CFPB announced that it’s taking on credit card comparison websites that take kickbacks from banks to move their cards up the rankings, stifling competition, and is building its own public comparison-shopping site. In March, the FTC launched an investigation into price-fixing and collusion among landlords and property managers in the highly consolidated rental market. Proposed rules that would ban auto dealers from using bait-and-switch tactics, protect small poultry farmers from deceptive corporate distributors, break up the organ donor network monopoly, and restore net neutrality are popping up across the government. 

Ahead of the election, with satisfaction with the economy still low, Biden is doubling down in his war on shady pricing practices. In his State of the Union address, Biden railed against “deceptive pricing from food to health care to housing” and promised to crack down further on junk fees. “Snack companies think you won’t notice when they charge you just as much for the same size bag but with fewer chips in it,” he scoffed, and called on Congress to pass Senator Bob Casey’s recent anti-shrinkflation bill. In March, he issued a new executive order creating an FTC- and DOJ-led “Strike Force” to target anticompetitive practices across the economy, instituting new rules that slash credit card late fees from the current average of $32 down to $8, banning deceptive contracts in farming and ranching, and more. Whether all this momentum translates into real wins against corporate power will depend on who occupies the White House. 

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Click here for the Monthly‘s Presidential Accomplishment Index and more essays comparing Trump and Biden’s achievements in office.

Donald Trump is no policy thinker. He doesn’t write white papers or, presumably, read them. But there is perhaps no issue that Trump is more clear-eyed about than immigration. 

What’s his goal? Less of it—less illegal immigration, and less legal immigration, too. 

As president, Trump overpromised and underdelivered. For example, there’s no wall, and not just because Mexico refused to pay for it. But he still concretely shifted immigration policy, making America less welcoming by design, which his base understood and appreciated. 

But that doesn’t mean the rest of the country appreciated it. During his presidency, most people felt that Trump was too cruel, too full of mean things to say (“shithole countries”) and even meaner things to do (separating families at the border). Trump’s lawyers argued that soap for regular bathing was not technically something they had to provide to children separated from their parents. The public reacted with anger. In 2020, Gallup reported the highest support for increased immigration since they started surveying the issue in 1965. 

In the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden sought to capitalize on the rise in welcoming sentiment, promising to “immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities.” During the final presidential debate, Biden promised to propose legislation that would create “a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people” and scolded Trump for his family separation policy. Biden was elected with a mandate to make our immigration system kinder and gentler than the one Trump had engineered. 

This mandate has vanished. After more than 8.8 million migrant encounters by border agents during Biden’s presidency—with at least 2.4 million people from that surge allowed into the country, more than the population of 15 states—Americans have grown exhausted with hearing about motels, recreation centers, and parks being used to house the rush of migrants. Many of these migrants have court dates years in the future to adjudicate their claims to asylum, and many won’t show up on their appointed date anyway. Polls show public approval of Biden’s immigration record hovering around an abysmal 28 percent.

In recent months, Biden, as good a political observer as any, has shifted rightward on immigration. He promised to shut down the border if given the power to by Congress, only for Senate Republicans to tank the deal their own negotiators fought for. Now, Biden is reportedly looking into executive orders that echo Trump’s past policies but hasn’t committed to anything yet. 

We’ve had two presidents with straightforward, achievable goals, which were not diametrically opposed but rather existed on completely different axes. Trump wanted to severely restrict immigration at the risk of inflicting cruelty, while Biden wanted to prevent cruelty at the risk of inducing skyrocketing immigration. Both of them succeeded in their initial goals, and were punished for it. 

The Restrictionist

In the 2016 Republican primary, Trump easily distinguished himself, partly by breaking with conservative orthodoxy on several issues including trade, entitlements, and foreign policy. But on immigration, Trump distinguished himself as a true hard-liner, a man nobody else could one-up. Seeking to lead a party that had once been quite welcoming to immigrants under popular, conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan, Trump promised to build a wall on our southern border, conduct mass deportations, ban the entry of foreign Muslims, and limit legal immigration. It turned out to be good politics, at least in the short term. Trump assembled a new Republican coalition, one that sacrificed some suburban and educated voters while running up the score with working-class and rural voters, bringing him across the Electoral College finish line. 

On Trump’s most outlandish promises, he either failed or just stopped trying. He only built 47 miles of new border wall and 33 miles of secondary wall, and updated 372 miles of old parts of the wall. (By wall, I mean fencing, not the “concrete going very high” that he had promised.) 

Part of Trump’s failure was his own inability to communicate with Congress in any kind of consistent, coherent way. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer actually offered Trump a deal in January 2018 with $25 billion in wall funding, reversing years of heated anti-wall rhetoric, in exchange for permanent protection for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, known as “Dreamers” and given temporary legal status in Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump snubbed the offer. Then in December of that same year, after the Senate passed by voice vote a spending bill to keep the government open, Trump announced that he wouldn’t sign it unless it contained wall funding, and openly welcomed a government shutdown. Democrats called the bluff, and a 35-day government shutdown ensued. After Republicans took a pounding in the polls, Trump climbed down and accepted a bill without wall funding, while asserting the right to divert Pentagon money to wall construction. That policy was soon hit with lawsuits and made its way through the courts with varying outcomes, with the money marked for the wall partially being spent until Biden took office and shut the program down. The wall went from a seemingly ridiculous promise to a restrictionist possibility to a mostly-failure, thanks to Trump’s unwillingness to compromise and his weak understanding of legislative dynamics. 

As for Mexico paying for it? They didn’t contribute a penny. 

Though Trump was mostly talk when it came to the wall, he did substantively change American immigration policy. Almost immediately upon entering the Oval Office, he slapped a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries (though by leaving off many large nations such as Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan, the executive order was far different than the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” he pledged to impose during the campaign.) The travel ban survived court challenges and vehement criticism to become a popular law. 

Trump was also heavily influenced by his doctrinaire immigration restrictionist senior adviser, Stephen Miller, on a range of policies.

Influenced by Miller, Trump slashed the refugee ceiling by 80 percent, reducing the numbers of refugees we accept by more than 65,000 per year. (Refugees are authorized for permanent resettlement after a lengthy vetting process, whereas those seeking asylum typically arrive without advance notice and before adjudication of their claims.) He prosecuted people for immigration offenses at a record clip, nearly 100,000 in 2018 alone. Though his deportations fell far short of his lofty promises, he still managed hundreds of thousands per year. His “Remain in Mexico” policy sent 70,000 migrants back to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings. 

Trump’s biggest and most impactful immigration achievement was Title 42. Nicknamed “a Stephen Miller special” by a disgruntled aide, the policy equipped a rarely used, little-known section of a 1944 law empowering public health agencies to prohibit migration for the purposes of preventing infectious disease outbreaks. In March 2020, the Trump administration, via the CDC, invoked the policy, which was instantly used to turn away hundreds of thousands of potential migrants who otherwise could have stayed in the country while awaiting their asylum cases. Importantly, the Biden administration kept Title 42 in place as encounters at the border started to surge, and by the time the policy was finally sunsetted in May 2023, it had been responsible for 2.8 million migrant expulsions. 

Trump delivered for immigration restrictionists, but his perceived cruelty was too much for most Americans to bear. His “zero tolerance” policy at the border, also driven by Miller, announced in April 2018, separated 5,500 children from their parents. Ostensibly, children would only be separated while their parents were detained awaiting trial, but there was no process for reuniting them. (One recent report estimated that 1,000 children were still separated from their families.) 

The policy was viewed as inhumane and cruel, and it became very unpopular. One highly covered poll from June 2018 showed that 66 percent of Americans opposed the separations, even when respondents were told that the policy was meant to discourage illegal border crossings. The Trump administration, attempting to save face, first blamed it on Barack Obama before tabling the policy two months after it was announced. But the moral stain lingered into the 2020 election.

Under Trump, America became a less welcoming place, through simple measures like lowering the refugee cap, through creative means like Title 42, and through cruel moves like family separation. Restrictionist hard-liners rejoiced, and those who cared about America’s image as a friendly nation of immigrants worked furiously to unseat Trump and elect his successor, Joe Biden. 

The Optimist

Biden came into office knowing that Americans wanted a less cruel immigration system, and he acted immediately to try to grant them one. Biden instructed his Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies to eliminate the words illegal alien and assimilation and replace them with undocumented noncitizen and integration. On Day 1, he revoked Trump’s travel ban, reaffirmed America’s commitment to DACA, ended the redirection of funds toward border wall construction, and put a 100-day pause on deportations. He also created a task force to reunite families separated under the Trump administration and rescinded the order that caused family separation in the first place. He quickly suspended and then terminated “Remain in Mexico” over fears that the migrants were being mistreated and victimized while they were waiting. 

In addition, the Biden administration lifted the refugee cap from 18,000 to 125,000 and launched Welcome Corps, a program allowing small groups of Americans to sponsor refugees in their communities. Biden limited the types of crimes that lead to deportation, instructing ICE to focus only on those who pose a large risk to public safety, like those convicted of rape, murder, or gang violence. Migrants convicted of low-level drug offenses, driving under the influence, simple assault, or money laundering would not be deported. Biden rescinded Title 42 in May 2023, putting an end to the pandemic’s massive changes in asylum policy. “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS), which protects migrants from potential deportation, was expanded under Biden to include over a million migrants. 

The administration has also expanded humanitarian parole, which provides up to two years of legal status to migrants with financial sponsors. One parole program serves immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. A second focuses on Ukraine, and a third on Afghanistan. An even larger parole program was created for people who make border appointments ahead of time using an online app called CBP One. Despite the law allowing parole to be used “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” Biden has applied it to about a million migrants, and combined with DACA and the TPS expansions, 2.3 million migrants currently have temporary legal status in America and cannot be deported, yet are not on a path to permanent residency.

Partly as a result of (or at least in tandem with) Biden’s gentler immigration policies, there has been a massive surge in illegal migration to the United States. From February 2021 to January 2024 there have been 8.8 million migrant encounters by the CBP. This is completely unprecedented. No single year during Obama’s presidency saw even a million encounters, and Trump’s worst three-year period totaled about 1.7 million. 

Biden has unquestionably made the country more welcoming to migrants. But he’s been greatly punished for it. His deportation pause was blocked by the judiciary within six days. His changes to the deportation qualifications enraged rank-and-file ICE agents. His parole for the 450,000 migrants who set up CBP One appointments in advance at ports of entry has incentivized more people to make appointments, but it doesn’t seem to have taken any bite out of the millions of migrants still coming across illegally between ports of entry. 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott stoked public backlash by transporting more than 100,000 migrants to other cities, and other migrants moved to places on their own. Vast resources have been spent to house them. Recreation centers, motels, and public parks have been repurposed. Mostly progressive urbanites and their mostly progressive mayors have grown increasingly frustrated with the federal government and Biden. The media spotlight has intensified, and public opinion of Biden’s handling of immigration has tanked. Polls consistently show voters caring a great deal about immigration, and trusting Trump far more on the issue. 

In response, Biden has tried to triangulate, attempting some restrictive reforms even as he establishes new legal pathways to entry. On the eve of Title 42’s expiration, he announced plans to establish screening centers in Latin America to help stanch the flow. On the day Title 42 expired, Biden announced a change to asylum rules (called Circumvention of Lawful Pathways) that would make the vast majority of migrants (around 88 percent) ineligible for asylum. The executive order was immediately challenged by the ACLU before being struck down by a federal judge; it has been allowed to stay in effect by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals until a final ruling is issued. However, the new program has barely been used because border security resources are so strained, only being applied to around 7 percent of new migrant encounters in the first few months of the rule. 

Biden committed himself in late January to a real reversal if Congress agreed to pass the restrictive bipartisan bill Senate negotiators produced. If passed, the bill would have automatically shut down the border—anyone found crossing would be promptly removed—once the average number of border crossers surpassed 5,000 a day. (As America is already well over that threshold, the crackdown authority would have been triggered immediately.) Asylum requirements would tighten, ICE detention capacity would be increased, the CBP One parole program would end, hundreds more ICE employees would be hired, and single-adult asylum seekers would be detained rather than released with court dates. 

Biden wholeheartedly supported the deal. But even before the text of the bill was released, the bipartisan negotiators were thrown under the bus by Republican leaders, starting with Trump, who pushed Republicans not to make a deal. Next came House Speaker Mike Johnson, who declared the bill “dead on arrival.” Before we could even find out if that was true, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and almost every Senate Republican voted to filibuster the deal, which had been chiefly negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford, no centrist himself.

Less than a month after the bill was killed, news leaked that the Biden administration was considering executive orders intended to slow down the rate of illegal immigration. The most significant of these potential orders would use Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar migrants from crossing the border without using ports of entry—if they are found between ports of entry, they’ll be turned back, rather than turned loose with court dates years in the future. Since the large majority of migrants have crossed the border without using ports of entry in the past year, such an action would presumably be quite helpful, if border agencies have sufficient resources to carry it out, and if they’re able to get past lawsuits likely to come from the ACLU and other progressive groups. (Trump tried using 212[f] in 2018 to do the same thing, and it was blocked first in federal court in California, with the block being upheld in the Ninth Circuit, and then upheld again by the Supreme Court.) To be clear, though, the executive orders do not exist yet, and there’s no clarity as to when or whether they ever will. 

Biden’s zigzagging on immigration makes sense from a man who managed to stay in the political center for 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president. Trump is not undergoing any reversals, and by tanking the bipartisan border bill, he is handing Biden a golden opportunity to take up the mantle of a centrist on immigration, someone neither cruel nor willing to accept chaos. But Biden has to act fast, act decisively, and communicate effectively—and he’s running out of time. 

After three years of policy whiplash, I do not know what Biden actually thinks about immigration policy, only that he does. He keenly but clumsily observes, and so far, he seems to only get punished. 

Trump, on the other hand, acts first and observes second. Now campaigning for president, he once again talks a big game, promising to carry out the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history. He has promised to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, reinstate “Remain in Mexico,” somehow revive Title 42 without any public health emergency to justify it, and deny entry to “Marxists” and “communists.” He’ll of course be building more wall, he says. 

While Trump promises to go back to the old favorites, presumably Biden, if elected, would continue to be guided by some combination of his heart and his political calculations—right now, he’s on a political journey from the median voter of 2020 to the median voter of 2024. His problem is that he’s behind the curve and hasn’t yet convinced the voters. 

The public wants a system that is both humane and orderly, which neither Biden nor Trump has been able to deliver. If Biden is reelected by the same coalition of anti-Trump voters that elected him in the first place, he’d once again attempt bipartisanship and technocracy. If, partly because of frustration with Biden’s border management, Trump is returned to the White House, surely bringing Stephen Miller back with him, we’ll be welcoming back the real, substantive, sometimes careless immigration restrictionism of Trump’s first term. The choice is a stark one, and it is yours. 

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