For the first time in a century, the U.S. House of Representatives failed Tuesday to elect a Speaker on the first ballot—adjourning with a divided Republican Party unable to unite around Representative Kevin McCarthy as the leader of its new majority. It’s a chaotic start to a new era of divided government in America, two years into the presidency of Joe Biden. At his inauguration in 2021, Biden pledged “to restore the soul and to secure the future of America,” after Donald Trump’s tenure ended with his supporters rioting at the U.S. Capitol as the former president continued to claim that Biden had stolen the 2020 election. Since taking office, Biden has won legislation for pandemic-relief funding, infrastructure improvements, limited gun-safety measures, and support for U.S. manufacturing; but—with a Republican Party shaped by Trump back in power—how transformative has it all been?
Bill Scher is an American journalist who contributes to The Washington Monthly, RealClearPolitics, and Politico Magazine. In Scher’s view, Biden’s legislative successes haven’t been as transformative as Barack Obama’s reforms of America’s health-care and financial sectors, and most Americans probably don’t recognize the tangible effects of most of his policies, which plausibly helps explain his low approval ratings. But two years from now, Scher thinks, the president will have a story to tell voters about how he’s made government function; and it’s a story that could sound all the more compelling if, meanwhile—as early appearances suggest—the fractious Republican conference in the U.S. House of Representatives devolves into chronic dysfunction.
Graham Vyse: In thinking through what’s really changed in American political life during the Biden administration, it seems the baseline for that question is what really changed during the Trump administration. It was certainly a dramatic period culturally, but how much do you think it actually transformed public policy in the U.S.?
Bill Scher: The truth is, Trump’s administration wasn’t very effective at changing public policy. He didn’t have many legislative accomplishments, or really prioritize them, and the courts struck down much of what he tried to do through executive actions. At the same time, Trump certainly set in motion the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which ended the nationwide right to abortion in America, as a result of his appointments to the Court. And those appointments may have more significant policy implications in the future.
Some of Trump’s influence on U.S.-Mexico border policy also lingers. [The American government’s Title 42 policy, which Trump invoked in 2020 as an emergency public-health measure, has since been used more than two million times to expel migrants from the country.] The tax cuts he signed into law haven’t been reversed, though U.S. tax policy has fluctuated a lot in recent decades: George H.W. Bush raised taxes, then Bill Clinton raised taxes, then George W. Bush cut taxes, then Barack Obama raised taxes. Changes to tax policy tend not to be significant legacies for presidents—in part because those changes can be adjusted through Congress’ parliamentary procedure known as budget reconciliation.
Another notable piece of Trump’s legacy is the First Step Act, which built on the Obama administration’s criminal-justice policies and was a bipartisan, even mildly progressive accomplishment [that reformed federal prisons and sentencing laws]. If bipartisan criminal-justice reform were to continue, history might regard Trump’s law as a meaningful achievement, but reform appears to have stalled under Biden. Republicans have shifted toward a more “law and order” style of politics—accusing Democrats of being soft on crime—which diminishes bipartisan harmony on criminal-justice issues.
Vyse: Beyond policy, how do you see the Trump years having changed America’s political culture?
Scher: A lot of Trump’s behavior isn’t really unprecedented in America’s political culture. He wasn’t the first president or presidential candidate to lie. He wasn’t the first president or presidential candidate to wage a culture war or campaign in a nasty way. This isn’t the first era in American politics to be polarized or divisive.
He’s unique, however, in that he lies, wages a culture war, and campaigns in a nasty way all at the same time—and in such a blunt, brazen, and extreme fashion. Trump changed America’s political culture by elevating the nationalist and isolationist traditions in the Republican Party. Isolationism and internationalism have existed in both major U.S. political parties over the last century, but the internationalist forces have generally dominated, especially in the party holding the White House.
A lot of Trump’s behavior isn’t really unprecedented in America’s political culture. He wasn’t the first president or presidential candidate to lie. He wasn’t the first president or presidential candidate to wage a culture war or campaign in a nasty way. This isn’t the first era in American politics to be polarized or divisive.
Trump was really the first president who didn’t want to continue an internationalist foreign policy. He boosted the Republican Party’s far-right, conspiratorial factions, and he’s raised questions about the party’s essential nature. What are its defining characteristics? What are its abiding principles?
Vyse: I happened to see a tweet last week from the national Republican Party, which said, “Republicans believe in limited government.” I found it somewhat surprising, because Trump really deemphasized limited-government rhetoric in favor of his right-wing populist messaging.
Scher: It’s definitely not a settled issue in the party. Many Republicans love Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who may be a candidate for the White House in 2024, precisely because of his aggressive wielding of government power in an effort to change American culture. [DeSantis attacked the Walt Disney Company over its opposition to his Parental Rights in Education law, which critics believed to be anti-gay. He also signed a law revoking the company’s special tax status in Florida.]
Trump’s eagerness to instigate intra-party fights also greatly changed the internal culture of the Republican Party. He did away with Reagan’s “11th Commandment,” “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Reagan didn’t actually follow that commandment, but Trump abandoned it entirely. He pours gasoline on every fire.
The events of January 6th, and Trump’s role in them, were unprecedented in American history. We’ve never seen a president’s supporters rioting at the U.S. Capitol—and with his sympathy. Trump’s attempts to deny the results of the 2020 election—and his efforts to elect other election deniers—have deeply warped the politics of the Republican Party.
His efforts largely failed in important races last year, but the country now has a majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives who question or outright deny the 2020 results. Their party is still living with this toxin Trump injected into its bloodstream, even as most American voters—a coalition of Democrats, independents, and pro-democracy Republicans—reject it.
Vyse: How do you think the growing influence of social media—and Twitter in particular—affected political culture in the Trump years?
Scher: It affected Democrats as well as Republicans. Obama had been a pioneer in using blogging and then Facebook to build a grassroots movement and push his message, but Trump used Twitter in a more divisive way. Social media drags politicians away from the political center by making people with minority views seem more prominent or influential than they actually are. You’d expect political professionals to avoid being swayed by all the noise online—yet lots of Democratic candidates in 2020 thought their electorate was well to the left of where it actually was, partly because of social media. Biden didn’t make that mistake.
At the risk of doing too much armchair psychoanalysis, I believe Trump’s apparent absence of core convictions, his narcissism, and his fundamental lack of concern for the Republican Party as an institution could have liberated him to be moderate politically—which might have served him better—and yet he wasn’t.
The events of January 6th, and Trump’s role in them, were unprecedented in American history. We’ve never seen a president’s supporters rioting at the U.S. Capitol—and with his sympathy. Trump’s attempts to deny the results of the 2020 election—and his efforts to elect other election deniers—have deeply warped the politics of the Republican Party.
He encouraged a lot of hateful, bigoted voices through his use of social media—reveling in the response he got—and walked down a political path that ultimately wasn’t wise for him. He’s now been the loser of the last three election cycles in the U.S. Maybe that’s a testament to his personal bigotry triumphing over his own electoral interests or his need for social-media validation being more important to him than actually winning elections.
Vyse: How would you say the Biden administration changed U.S. public policy over the last two years?
Scher: The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman recently published a piece with the headline “Joe Biden has launched an economic policy revolution,” arguing that the president ushered in “the closest thing the United States has had to a real industrial policy in decades.” In making his case, Waldman mentions Biden’s economic stimulus through the American Rescue Plan, his bipartisan infrastructure law, his investments in semiconductor manufacturing in the CHIPS Act, and his investments in fighting climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act.
I believe Waldman may be overstating the significance of these policies, though some of them clearly move public policy in a different direction after Trump’s four years in office.
It’s striking how much Biden has done on a bipartisan basis. It was an open question whether any bipartisanship was possible in the United States in such polarized times—many thought Biden was simply naive to believe it was possible. They thought he’d be humiliated if he pursued it. I wouldn’t say that what Biden accomplished is revolutionary; U.S. industrial policy doesn’t have the scale and scope of Chinese industrial policy, for instance—but it’s helping to prevent America from being eclipsed by other nations.
Vyse: How do you see Biden’s policy accomplishments affecting Americans’ everyday lives?
Scher: It’s too soon to draw sweeping conclusions about that. I don’t expect Americans to be walking around thinking, I really feel the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act today. That’s part of why I’m reluctant to go as far as Waldman and call Biden’s accomplishments a “revolution.” None of these policies has solved a problem like climate change in any comprehensive way. The administration is making incremental improvements on a number of fronts.
It’s debatable how much Biden is to blame for the recent inflation. After all, inflation wasn’t limited to the U.S., though some analysts believe the country’s experience can be attributed to the trillions of dollars of spending in the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan. One of the most contested policy questions of Biden’s early presidency is the wisdom of expanding the Child Tax Credit. On the positive side, that decision reduced child poverty, bolstering the argument that simply giving money to poor people helps them not to be poor. On the other hand, the policy passed on a one-year temporary basis without bipartisan support and then wasn’t continued.
It’s striking how much Biden has done on a bipartisan basis. It was an open question whether any bipartisanship was possible in the United States in such polarized times—many thought Biden was simply naive to believe it was possible. They thought he’d be humiliated if he pursued it.
Among Biden’s policy accomplishments, there aren’t many the average U.S. citizen will feel very acutely. His infrastructure law will produce a lot of infrastructure improvements, but those don’t happen overnight, and Americans may not recognize that individual projects are the result of the Biden administration’s work. I live in a town where there’s an Amtrak train station as a result of Obama’s Recovery Act, but I don’t think most people connect those dots. Biden’s semiconductor law should produce more semiconductor manufacturing jobs in the U.S. than would have existed without the law, but its effects will be limited.
Will it help America compete with China? Yes. Will it mean China is no longer a competitive challenge for America? Of course not. The Inflation Reduction Act gives Americans tax credits they can use—to defray the cost of energy-efficient home improvements, for instance, or some cars fueled by clean energy. So, those are some tangible benefits people might see.
Vyse: How do Democrats’ policy accomplishments in Biden’s presidency so far compare to their accomplishments in Obama’s tenure?
Scher: You know, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, recently claimed that the past two years in Congress were either the most productive in 50 years since the Great Society or the most productive in 100 years since the New Deal. I thought it was strange that he didn’t mention the Obama years—and I don’t understand his argument.
I’d say that the biggest Obama laws—the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—are all more significant than Biden’s major laws. Obama achieved more reform of the U.S. health-care industry than Biden has, though Biden has extended and augmented Obama’s reform. Dodd–Frank marked the end of a deregulatory era for the financial industry in America and the beginning of a new regulatory era. Although Obama had more Democratic senators to work with in his early presidency than Biden has had since 2021, Obama also had more moderate senators—lawmakers restricting how progressive their governance could be.
Obama and Biden are similar characters in their ideological outlooks, with a mix of idealism and pragmatism. Both of these presidents ultimately got done as much as they could get done under the circumstances. Obama took office with a desire to make some big changes to regulation, but he faced criticism for enacting policies that Americans couldn’t immediately appreciate: His Recovery Act wasn’t big enough; he rolled out his health-care reform too slowly. Biden took a very different approach—spending a ton of money on the American Rescue Plan, some of which went directly to Americans, but it didn’t improve his political situation in the short term either.
Obama took office with a desire to make some big changes to regulation, but he faced criticism for enacting policies that Americans couldn’t immediately appreciate. Biden took a very different approach—but it didn’t improve his political situation in the short term either.
Vyse: How do you think the past two years have changed America’s political culture?
Scher: It’s complicated. Biden is obviously a calmer presence than Trump, but Trump-style politics remains very prominent in the U.S. Biden has responded to that dynamic by giving speeches about threats to democracy from Trump and Trump-style candidates. The president wants to frame an argument between his own reasonableness and Trumpism, while also showing that he can be a bipartisan figure. He’s struggled to synthesize all of that in his messaging, but he’s achieved at least some synthesis. Ahead of this past election, his message was largely about democracy and abortion, but he was also talking about his bipartisanship. Vulnerable Democrats across the country wanted to convey that they were bipartisan and their opponents were extremists.
Vyse: How do you see the country’s policymaking and political culture evolving now, with divided government in Washington, D.C., and the 2024 presidential election coming up?
Scher: There’s a lot we don’t know about 2023 and 2024. We don’t know who the next Republican nominee for president is going to be. Both Republicans and Democrats have ideological fluidity in their parties, though Democrats seem to have a fair amount of agreement in their blend of progressivism and pragmatism. The Republican divisions—between the approaches of Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example—are quite vast. There’s concern about whether this Republican House will be able to keep the U.S. government open and fulfill the country’s debt obligations. Failing to do that would be calamitous.
If there’s massive dysfunction in Congress, will Democrats be blamed even if it’s really Republicans’ fault? After all, when there’s discontent in the country, presidents usually pay a price, though Obama won re-election in 2012 after framing the election as a choice between him and Mitt Romney and not a simple referendum on his leadership. Is America’s political culture in 2023 and 2024 going to be shaped by massive public discontent and a lack of faith in failing institutions? Or will there be bipartisanship that serves as a kind of tonic—reminding Americans that they actually have a lot in common and their government can function well? Another big unknown is the future of the U.S. economy. Is inflation going to taper off without a recession being sparked by high interest rates? There are some hopeful signs right now, but we don’t know.
For now, Biden is still unpopular. He’s tied with Trump and DeSantis in early 2024 polling. He has work to do to convince Americans that he’s the reason the country hasn’t suffered more. His communication skills have been intermittent, and he needs to be sharp—and take credit for the bipartisanship he’s delivered—if he’s going to run effectively for re-election.