Donald Trump, according to Donald Trump, is our greatest President. OK, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln (one of the few presidents from before our current era that he can actually name without a teleprompter) – and lately he’s been saying that he’s done more for Black people than Lincoln ever did.
For a more objective view, though, I recommend the latest issue of The Washington Monthly, which offers an extremely valuable comparison of the accomplishments (on their own terms) of Trump vs. Biden. The whole project is worthwhile, but Paul Glastris’ introduction provides a useful guide. The Monthly, despite its liberal leanings, gives credit to Trump where it is due. (Shifting the courts to the right is listed as an accomplishment, for example, despite the great harm it has done to the country.) But, no surprise, Biden comes out well ahead.
Credit: Chris Matthews for The Washington Monthly
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. . .
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.
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.
Will it be any different if Trump is elected again? Unfortunately, yes. Trump doesn’t have many goals beyond revenge against his enemies, but he isn’t likely to make the same mistakes again. And where he does have ambitions to change policy, they are extremely dangerous. To take just one example – foreign policy – Trump was thwarted in his ambitions by officials clinging to the shreds of the old Republican establishment. That won’t happen again, as Jacob Heilbrunn argues in a thoughtful op-ed in the New York Times.
Donald Trump may be regularly depicted as an impetuous toddler in chief, but he appears to possess genuine convictions about international relations. Ever since he gave an interview to Playboy magazine in 1990 decrying Mikhail Gorbachev for failing to hold the Soviet empire together (“not a firm enough hand”) and praising the Chinese Communist leadership for crushing the student uprising at Tiananmen Square (“they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength”), Mr. Trump has extolled authoritarian leaders as possessing the right stuff, while he has dismissed democratic ones as weak and feckless. . .
During his four years in office, Mr. Trump blustered about alliances and praised foreign dictators but never actually upended America’s foreign policy. That could change in a second Trump administration. The former president is poised to adopt a radical program centered on constructive engagement with foreign strongmen and hostility toward democratic allies; it would include abandoning NATO. It would convert America from a dominant economic and military power into what Mr. Trump purports to abhor — a global loser. . .
Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute, the two main think tanks vying to staff the next Trump administration, have been vetting potential appointees to establish a government in waiting. As Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and former Trump national security official, observed in his 2021 memoir, “War by Other Means,” “Our problem was that we did not always know who our enemies were; in some cases, they were our own political appointees.” Mr. Trump himself has loudly complained about many of the advisers he appointed, such as John Bolton.
The conservative activists around him wish to install purists who will preach America First precepts, not least the dogma that America’s security isn’t tied to Europe’s because, as Mr. Trump recently put it, “an ocean” separates the territories. . .
Rupturing America’s alliances would lead to arms races and nuclear proliferation in Asia and Europe. Nationalists like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, and Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, who is known as a “little Putin,” would be emboldened to strengthen their ties with the Kremlin and undermine European security.
And the domestic consequences could be severe. Many of Mr. Trump’s economic advisers, including the former trade chief Robert Lighthizer (a leading candidate to be the Treasury secretary under Mr. Trump), are apparently intent on pursuing the Great Depression redux — waging trade wars with Europe and Asia. They’re floating a host of other risky measures, including curbing the independence of the Federal Reserve, weakening the dollar to try to increase exports, and imposing high tariffs on goods from China and Europe. . .
Would the damage be irreversible? Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany supposedly remarked that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.” But Mr. Trump’s return might test even the Almighty’s patience.
Another irreversible consequence of a Trump restoration: His crass willingness, as reported originally by Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow in The Washington Post, to sell out the future stability of human civilization in return for a $1 billion bribe from the oil industry.
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him. . . .
The contrast between the two candidates on climate policy could not be more stark. Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” and over the last three years, his administration has finalized more than 100 new environmental regulations aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters. In comparison, Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies over four years.
Could Trump win? Absolutely. Will he? God only knows – and I don’t believe in God.
As I wrote at the beginning of the year, I’m not in the prediction game. So let me turn to two different perspectives. First, the brilliant Ezra Klein lays out the case in the NYT for why Biden is currently losing:
It’s not Joe Biden’s poll numbers that worry me, exactly. It’s the denial of what’s behind them.
Among likely voters, Biden is trailing Donald Trump by one percentage point in Wisconsin and three points in Pennsylvania. He’s ahead by a point in Michigan. Sweeping those three states is one route to re-election, and they’re within reach.
Still, Biden is losing to Trump. His path is narrowing. In 2020, Biden won not just Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also won Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Now he’s behind in those states by six points, nine points and 13 points in the latest Times/Siena/Philadelphia Inquirer poll. Have those states turned red? No. The same poll finds Democrats leading in the Arizona and Nevada Senate races. The Democrats are also leading in the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
National polls find Democrats slightly ahead of Republicans for control of Congress. The “Never Biden” vote now looks larger than the “Never Trump” vote. The electorate hasn’t turned on Democrats; a crucial group of voters has turned on Biden. . .
The optimistic take is that the bar for Biden is low and a strong debate performance or two will win him an unusual amount of support. The pessimistic take is that a lot of voters have concluded that Biden isn’t up to the job. Democrats have been telling them they’re wrong, but telling voters they’re wrong is a good way to lose an election. . .
The mistake Democrats keep making about Trump again and again is to assume that the rest of the country will see Trump as they see Trump. But Trump won in 2016, and he came scarily close in 2020; absent the pandemic, he might well have been re-elected.
What Democrats want to do in 2024 is run against the threat Trump poses to American democracy. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Biden said on Jan. 5, in the speech that kicked off his re-election campaign. But it’s not working. Or at least it’s not working well enough. . .
There are other ways to run against Trump: He cut taxes for rich people and tried to cut Medicaid for poor people. He cut funding for the police before a crime wave and got rid of the National Security Council’s pandemic preparedness group before the coronavirus hit. He told the oil companies to give him a billion dollars because they’d get preferential treatment if he’s re-elected. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, took $2 billion from Saudi Arabia to fund his private equity firm. Trump’s flagrant violations of democratic norms and basic decency often overshadow the banal ways in which he governed, or let others govern, in cruel, stupid and corrupt ways. Right now, the Biden campaign has much more money than the Trump campaign; it should be using it to redefine Trump in the ways that matter to the voters they need.
Biden is right about what he said on Jan. 5: Preserving democracy is the most urgent question of our time. But that means doing what’s necessary to beat Trump, even if it’s not what Democrats want to do to beat Trump.
What I fear Biden’s allies will do is deny the polls until Democrats wake up, as they did before, to the shocking news that Trump won. That would be a sin against the cause they claim as sacred. The first step toward winning is changing course when you’re losing.
For a different, more optimistic perspective, I suggest reading The Big Picture, a smart Substack blog with several authors that is unabashedly pro-Biden. In a recent post, Jay Kuo offers 10 reasons to be cautiously optimistic. I’ve edited them down (with no ellipses. . .), but I wanted to be sure to share the essence of each of Kuo’s 10 points so it’s still a long take. Worth your time.
I want to offer a different, “Big Picture” view of the election. In today’s piece, I lay out broader ways to think about likely electoral outcomes, ones that don’t all end up in some fascist dystopia. After walking you through my list of ten, I hope you’ll agree that, as Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg likes to say, “I’d rather be us than them.”
In place of polls, I want to offer some fundamentals, everything from electoral math to the big issues wedging the parties, to the economy and the state of the campaigns. And because there are a number of factors—I list 10 of them here—I’m not going to spend a lot of time on any single one. Rather, I’ll state my case and move on, because this is intended as a broad brush exercise.
When you’re feeling despondent about our chances, come back to these 10 ideas in your head, take a deep breath, and then get to work helping the Democrats win.
1. Biden has an easier job ahead than Trump
In 2020, Biden won both the national popular vote by seven million votes and the Electoral College by 74 votes. That’s a considerable victory by either measure. I say this to make the following point: In this rematch, the two candidates have very different jobs.
Biden’s job is to convince the people who voted for him before to vote for him again. Trump, on the other hand, must get people who didn’t vote for him before to vote for him this time around. The former task is easier than the latter, in part because the Biden Campaign knows how to reach those voters using its ground game. More on that later.
If Trump doesn’t get new voters to turn up while Biden gets his old supporters back, it becomes a repeat of 2020, which is the most likely scenario, and Biden wins.
2. Biden needs to re-win just 3 of the 5 battleground states
In 2020, Biden swept the big battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. Trump effectively has to peel at least three of those states away from Biden (or Pennsylvania and one of the other big ones) in order to pull off an Electoral College victory. And mathematically speaking, Biden has the edge here.
He also has recent history on his side. No one has a crystal ball to predict November, but we do have the 2022 midterm results and special election results from these states, and they are not strong for Trump. In fact, Trump-backed candidates did quite poorly in these swing states, while Democrats romped.
Voters in these states have soundly rejected MAGA extremism, and they’re ready to do it again in 2024.
3. The GOP is wedged on major issues
The media headlines have been all about campus protests and how Democrats are divided on the issue of Israel and Gaza. But this focus on Democratic splits over foreign policy in the Middle East ignores how much more strongly divided GOP voters are when it comes to key issues.
Most Republicans and independents favor protecting abortion rights, yet Trump is campaigning on having successfully killed Roe v. Wade. Abortion is a loser issue for the GOP but a strong motivator for pro-abortion rights women voters and younger voters. And restoring abortion rights will be a major factor in battleground states, especially Arizona where a constitutional amendment to enshrine Roe in the state’s constitution will likely be on the ballot.
(W)edge issues have the strong potential to cause moderate Republicans to refuse to cast a ballot for Trump, even if they otherwise believe in traditional Republican principles. That is precisely what happened in the 2022 election when tens of thousands of Republican voters refused to endorse Trumpism.
4. MAGA has gotten more, not less, extreme since it lost in 2022
If Republicans and Trump had learned their lessons from their poor showing in 2022, I would be more concerned than I am. But in these two years, their positions have grown even more strident, their demands for loyalty and obedience even stronger. For his part, Trump’s rhetoric has grown more dangerous and more divisive. He now speaks openly of being a Day One dictator, calls his political opponents “vermin,” promises to be his base’s “retribution,” and warns in Nazi-like fashion that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” While this may inflame and excite his core base, it does nothing to reach voters in the middle who are exhausted and alarmed by his increasingly aggressive and authoritarian tone.
5. Biden is presiding over a strong economy, not a recession
The biggest fear many Democrats held before this Election year was that we would be in a recession, one brought about by rapid hikes in interest rates meant to crush inflation. Instead, the economy continues to chug along well. Unemployment remains below 4 percent, which ties a historic record dating back 60 years. Meanwhile, inflation has come down from a scary 9 percent high to a much more manageable 3 percent.
The reality that the economy is actually doing well across the nation has not yet set in for some. Voters are often willing to state that their own personal economy, or even their own state’s economy, is fine, but have concerns over the rest of the country. In each of these critical battlegrounds, most people are saying things are getting better in their state, even if they falsely believe they are getting worse for the rest of the country. Between now and November, Democratic messaging will help bring these two concepts into alignment.
Trump has no response to the good economic news, other than to claim the government statistics are fake and that he is somehow responsible for record stock market prices.
6. The GOP is disorganized and near bankrupt in key states
In-fighting between the MAGA extremists and the “normies” within the GOP has splintered the Republican Party at a critical moment in some key states.
7. The Biden war chest is large and its ground game is impressive
In the most recent quarter, the Biden Campaign ended with $192 million cash-on-hand after collecting $187 million in donations, 96 percent of which were under $200. That money is allowing the campaign to run major ad campaigns in key states. It raised $90 million in the month of March alone.
It is also making it possible to staff up swing state offices by the score: 24 in Pennsylvania, 30 in Michigan, and 44 in Wisconsin. The job for these staffers will be to reach the same Biden voters that delivered these states for him in 2020 and to energize new voters around their candidate and against Trump.
Because margins are razor thin in some of these states, mobilizing on the ground early will help nudge the needle, even if by just a few thousand votes, which could prove decisive in November.
8. Trump is hurting for money and lacks a serious ground game
By contrast, the Trump Campaign has seen donor numbers fall well below what they saw in 2020, and it has raised far less than what the Biden Campaign has.
The Trump Campaign brought in $66 million in March compared to the $90 million raised by the Biden Campaign. It also ended March with $93 million cash on hand, a full $100 million less than the Biden Campaign. It did somewhat better in April, raising $76 million, but it still lags significantly behind, and it’s unclear how much of the money will be funneled to pay for Trump’s hefty legal bills.
The cash gap has left Trump with fewer options to expand his campaign’s footprint. For example, in the critical state of Wisconsin, Trump has yet to have any campaign infrastructure to speak of, while the Biden Campaign has over 100 full-time staff working on the ground.
9. Trump faces an uncertain legal status as a criminal defendant
Within a few weeks (days now - TR), Donald Trump may be a convicted felon. He might even be sentenced to prison, but likely will be out while that is appealed. Such a development could shift the race a few percentage points if polls are remotely correct on the question.
10. Voters have not focused on Trump yet
For those of us very up on campaign news, it can feel disconcerting to realize that a big portion of the country hasn’t seriously considered the election and how they will ultimately vote. This is reflected in the polling, which shows that likely voters are far more favorable to Biden than larger pools of registered voters or all U.S. adults.
Put another way, the more information people have and the more engaged they are, the more likely they are to vote for Biden. That also gives the Biden Campaign something to strive for between now and November.
Trump, who is not out traveling the nation as president or having to make the tough calls that come with the office, has not been scrutinized as a candidate nearly as vigorously as Biden has as the President. That is going to change come September. Along with that will come scrutiny of the third-party candidates, including RFK Jr., whose support among Democrats tends to fall the more they hear about his wacky anti-vax views and unstable behavior—two things that actually increase his appeal to lower information MAGA voters.
Once Americans realize that they must make a largely binary choice, just as they did in 2020, the same dynamics will drive much of this election. Biden isn’t perfect. He’s old. But he’s effective and things are okay to good. Meanwhile, since 2020 Trump has grown more unhinged, is also old and looking haggard, and is now threatening the end of our democracy.
And that’s a race we can win. After all, we won it before.
I believe Kuo makes a good case but there are a number of holes in his argument, too, starting with the fact that Biden is the incumbent, and many Americans, as is often the case, seem to be highly dissatisfied and in a mood for change. And, as the age-old saying goes, a lot can happen between now and November.
I’m heading off on vacation for a month. About half the time, Lisa and I will be on a National Geographic expedition ship, with our friends Jonathan and Johanna, exploring the Norwegian coast and heading above the Arctic Circle to the Svalbard Islands. I can’t imagine a better escape right now. So I won’t be offering any new posts for a while, but I hope to dig out some past Redburn Reads from the memory bank.
I may be gone, but I hope not forgotten. As always, I’d love to hear from you.