Joe Biden Continues To Succeed Where Donald Trump Failed

     Donald Trump had three major pushes during his administration: tax cuts for the rich, the repeal of Obamacare, and his COVID stimulus bills. The tax cuts for the rich and COVID stimulus bills passed, but he failed at his repeal of Obamacare. There were, of course, other promises he broke, including building a border wall with Mexico and building the Keystone XL Pipeline, both of which are now dead thanks to President Biden's executive action. 

     Compare the two successful major pushes during the entire Trump administration with the three major pushes President Biden is on track to pass in his first year in office. The American Rescue Plan Act passed and, combined with executive action to put public health over politics, helped vaccinate well over 70 percent of Americans in just 10 months and created more than 6 million jobs in the same period of time. Donald Trump, meanwhile, the "jobs president," created 6.7 million jobs in his first three years and, after COVID cost America 10 million jobs, left office having cost America 3.2 million jobs. The stock market gained 9,000 points in its first 10 months under the Biden administration, compared to 20,000 during the four years of the Trump administration. In his first nine months, President Biden created three trillion-dollar companies and is on track to create up to a dozen more, compared to five created during Trump years.

     When Donald Trump came to office, he pledged to "rebuild our roads and our bridges" and called one week a year "infrastructure week" for four years. He proposed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, and, even with full control of Congress, he couldn't get it done. President Biden did, passing the largest investment in infrastructure in American history. What happened when he passed it? Republicans, who had been running on infrastructure repair during the Trump years, called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act "socialism."

     Three more Trump campaign promises are addressed in the proposed Build Back Better Act. Trump pledged to increase funding for school lunches, and he didn't. President Biden is on track to expand the summer school lunch program created as an emergency measure during the pandemic permanently and invest billions of dollars of funding into expanding it to millions of kids, joining the ranks of Truman, Johnson, and Obama in making major expansions of America's school meal programs. Another is funding for HBCUs, TCUs, HSIs, and other MSIs. President Biden's American Rescue Plan Act and Build Back Better Act are on track to secure nearly $20 billion in funding for these majority-minority colleges, more than President Trump proposed but failed to act on. The third is actually doing the opposite of what Trump proposed. He failed to repeal and replace Obamacare and instead settled on rolling back subsidies for millions of Americans. President Biden's Build Back Better Act would fulfill a major campaign promise by restoring Obamacare and building on it by lowering the cost of premiums and providing subsidies to expand Medicaid for Americans living in states where Republicans have chosen not to do so. By doing this, he is on track to expand the Affordable Care Act to cover at least 10 million more Americans (aside from expanding Medicaid to include hearing and home care services, among other things) and put the total number of Americans covered by Obamacare at more than 40 million (compared to 25 million at the end of the Obama administration).

     Even Made-In-America is faring better under Biden than under Trump. He has proposed two major initiatives to close corporate loopholes and invest in Made-In-America products in the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. This is in addition to his proposed legislation to change the pharmaceutical tax code so that prescription production stays in the U.S. as well as an overhaul of the FTC that includes a crackdown on "Made-In-America fraud."

     In foreign policy, Trump promised to end the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For four years, he played political games and went back and forth, ultimately succeeded only in ending the U.S. troop presence in Somalia. President Biden has ended America's longest war, and our combat mission in Iraq will end in December 2021. Meanwhile, President Biden is on track to reverse Trump's "load Gitmo with bad guys" approach (which, again, was all talk that he never acted on) and close the facility by 2025. At the same time, we need to keep up the pressure to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs via legislation currently working its way through Congress and to repeal the Patriot Act; accomplishing these things would, for the most part, undo the damage that 9/11 gave George W. Bush the license to do to America's foreign and national security policy. 

     President Trump talked; President Biden is acting.