Why Biden Is Succeeding Where Trump Failed

 Why Biden Is Succeeding Where Trump Failed

The infrastructure deal that eluded the former president is now within reach. Give credit to a new Congress.

Progress.

Progress.

Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty

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The two-track infrastructure deal that advanced this week has a long way to go before any White House signing ceremony, and there are plenty of ways it could still collapse. But its supporters have good reason to be optimistic at this point — and we’re already getting some explanations for why these bills may well pass while former President Donald Trump’s infrastructure initiative never got anywhere.

In the New York Times, Jim Tankersley has an early analysis that I suspect will become conventional wisdom. He’s certainly correct that one big difference between Trump and President Joe Biden is that Biden stayed focused on his legislative goals, while Trump was easily distracted. It’s also true that Biden’s long experience mattered.

But I want to push back some against president-based explanations. The biggest difference, after all, between 2017 and 2021 is that Trump was attempting to advance a policy that many Republicans opposed, and even those who supported it generally ranked it low on their priority list. Republicans come to Washington, if they care about policy, to pass tax cuts, reduce government spending, slash regulations limiting business and achieve the party’s agenda on social issues. Democrats, on the other hand, have wanted to pass the items in the two infrastructure bills for many years, and almost all of them have at least one high-priority policy in the package.

That’s not all. People mock Democrats for having unusually old leaders in Congress, especially in the House, but no one should doubt the competence of Speaker Nancy Pelosi in particular and of House and Senate Democrats as a group. The leadership team has experience passing complex legislation that Republican Speaker Paul Ryan and his team simply didn’t have. The same goes for key committee posts. And while both parties have trouble keeping their various factions working together, there’s no Democratic equivalent to the nihilism of the House Freedom Caucus. Ideological outliers such as Senator Bernie Sanders, or even “Squad” leaders Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, have strong pragmatic streaks and are almost certainly prepared to compromise on behalf of their goals.

None of that has anything to do with Biden or Trump. Congress matters; parties matter. And presidents must play the hands they’re dealt when it comes to both, with only a very limited ability to do much about it.

Even when it comes to the executive branch, presidents share the presidency with many others. Biden, to his credit, has built a competent team of professionals from the chief of staff down, where Trump was unusually bad at personnel decisions. But Biden had one large advantage over Trump: Democrats had only been out of the White House for four years, and the previous president from their party was generally competent and professional. They were ready to govern. Trump could’ve done a lot better, but he was stocking the first Republican presidency since George W. Bush’s economic and foreign-policy misadventures. (It didn’t help that many Republican governing professionals didn’t want anything to do with Trump.) 

As for Biden’s willingness to work with Republicans? White House spin would have us believe this was his secret sauce learned from years of effective legislating in the Senate. I’m sure that’s helping, but the truth is that the choice of a bipartisan approach had nothing to do with the president; it was Senator Joe Manchin’s price for supporting this bill. The real credit goes to the people at the White House or on Capitol Hill who sold the Democrats on the very clever two-bill solution to a tricky legislative problem.

None of this is intended to knock Biden, who I think has handled infrastructure well so far, or to make excuses for Trump. It’s just to push back against overstating the role of the president in legislating — and, really, in governing.

1. Dave Hopkins on the importance of party-aligned media for Republicans.

2. Robert Manduca, Nic Johnson and Chris Hong at the Monkey Cage on the historical roots of the infrastructure bills.

3. Mark Z. Barabak talks with political scientist Tom Mann.

4. Patrick Svitek on the House special election in Texas this week.

5. Anne Applebaum on Mike Lindell.

6. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Bill Dudley on Biden’s potential choices for the Federal Reserve.

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