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.)
In 2016, Trump’s top legislative priorities included Obamacare repeal, infrastructure investment, harsher immigration sentencing, and a full border wall reimbursed by Mexico. None of that reached his desk.
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.
