Get Ready for Trump to Take Credit for Biden's Successes
Donald Trump is going to take credit for Biden's accomplishments, just like he did Obama's--then he'll crash the economy and blame Biden.
There are currently 66,000 ongoing infrastructure improvement projects across the United States.
196,000 miles of roads and 11,400 bridges are being repaired.
367,000 lead pipes are being replaced.
Airports and seaports are undergoing modernization.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson explained:
The Biden-Harris administration today [Thursday] released numbers revealing that over the past four years, their policies have kick-started a boom in the creation of small businesses across the country. Since the administration took office, entrepreneurs have filed more than 20 million applications for new businesses, the most of any presidential term in history. This averages to more than 440,000 applications a month, a rate more than 90% faster than averages before the pandemic. Black business ownership has doubled, and Hispanic business ownership is up by 40% since before the pandemic.
The administration encouraged that growth with targeted loans, tax credits, federal contracts, and support services. Small businesses are major job creators and employ about 47% of all private sector employees.
On Friday, the Biden administration announced an additional $1.5 billion investment in railroad upgrades along the Northeast Corridor.
All of this is being brought to us compliments of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act President Biden signed three years ago.
The Economist published a story last month announcing “America’s economy is bigger and better than ever”, and another boasting “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust”.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained at the Council for Foreign Relations:
Our Administration has driven a historic economic recovery. U.S. GDP growth is strong, our unemployment rate is near historic lows, and inflation has declined significantly.
President Biden is the first national executive to take on the neo-liberal “trickle-down” economic policies started during the Reagan administration. The Inflation Reduction Act requires companies reporting more than $1 billion in profits to pay a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and wealthy shareholders to pay a 1% tax on stock buybacks. It also requires Americans making over $400,000 to pay a little more in taxes.
13 million families covered under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) are seeing health insurance costs decrease by an average of $800 a year, and three million more Americans are now insured.
Most “surprise billing” medical charges from out-of-network insurance providers are now banned under the “No Surprises Act”.
Medicare is negotiating for more affordable pharmaceutical drugs.
Insulin costs are capped at $35 per month for almost four million diabetic seniors on Medicare, and lower out-of-pocket cost of inhalers for tens of millions is in the works.
So why isn’t the Biden administration getting credit for it?
Why don’t more know about it?
Despite all this Roosevelt-esque progress, Donald Trump is going to get the credit.
Secy. Buttigieg: Pres. Biden 'deserves the credit' for infrastructure successes
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joins MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss the "pipeline of good…www.msnbc.com
Administrations taking credit for their predecessors’ achievements is nothing new. Administrations do not reset on January 20th every four to eight years, but continue on, hopefully without too much upset. That’s the concept behind the peaceful transition of power Trump was the first president to destroy in 2021 when he incited the January 6 attempted coup to keep himself in power.
If the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution limiting presidents to two terms had existed during President Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure, he never would have seen much of the progress his New Deal programs produced. War was also raging in Europe by the 1940 election, and FDR made a convincing case for why it was imprudent to change leaders at such a precarious time. By 1941, the first year of FDR’s third term, unemployment fell below 10 percent for the first time in a decade. And, lest we forget, that is also the year Japan dragged us into World War Two.
June 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, directing Black Americans be accepted into defense plant job-training programs and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). It was Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, however, who is known for desegregating the US military.
President John Kennedy proposed a civil rights bill in 1963, but was unable to get it through Congress. When he was assassinated later that year, the responsibility of advancing the bill fell to his successor Lyndon Johnson, who signed it in June 1964. He gets the credit for it.
President Ronald Reagan proposed a “free-trade” deal with Mexico in the 1980s, the majority of the negotiation of which fell to his successor, George H.W. Bush. Bush lost re-election to Bill Clinton in 1992, and it was Clinton who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law.
Remember all the sturm and drang over “Obama’s horrible economy” when he took office? That’s because he inherited the economic crash of 2008 President George W. Bush handed him, leading to Obama spending virtually his entire presidency pulling us out of the hole. By the time he handed the reins to Donald Trump in 2017, the economy was humming along again.
Of course Trump took credit for it.
As soon as he took office, we started hearing him clucking every day about the “greatest economy in the history of the world”.
As Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told PolitiFact:
While Trump can take some credit, I see it like the relief pitcher who comes in during the 9th inning with a seven-run lead, then boasts about winning the game. It’s fine to get some credit for holding the lead, but this is much more an Obama story than a Trump story.
By the time the failed businessman and realty-TV slumlord (reluctantly) left in 2021 — after violently trying to hold onto power and stealing classified documents — the economy was again in the toilet, in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic Trump saw coming and ignored.
As President Biden prepares to exit quietly into retirement and the United States inexplicably welcomes the arsonist back into the house he burned down, we need to be ready for a profit-driven media to fail to explain to a country that neither remembers nor particularly cares about its past that when Donald Trump inevitably crows about the strong economy he will preside over, for the first two years, it will actually be Biden’s economy, just like it was Obama’s the first time. Most of the Biden administration’s progress will not be evident for at least a year or two — right in the middle of the second Trump administration.
As Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explained:
Some of these projects can be done quickly, but many of them, by their very nature, are projects that take the better part of a decade. So it will be a long time before ribbons are cut.
President Biden and his surrogates should have been spending the past four years reiterating their accomplishments as much as Donald Trump reiterated his lies about accomplishments when he was in office. Trump was lying through his teeth, but because he was screaming about “the best economy in history” and held “Infrastructure Week” each month without actually investing in any infrastructure, the media picked up on it and amplified it.
Republican lawmakers that voted against Biden’s infrastructure initiatives have had no qualms about taking credit for the jobs and money coming into their districts. It helps when their constituents have no idea their republican lawmakers voted against those jobs and money for purely political purposes.
So get ready for the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist to start on January 20 touting the “record” economy he spent the past three years trashing to point where people actually believe, in spite of every reliable metric, the economy is worse than it was under him.
Republicans have mastered the fine art of projection. They really want people to believe they are the stewards of the economy, the “fiscally responsible” party, despite facts to the contrary.
The corporate media doesn’t help with its relentless obsession with trying to find for Democrats something comparable to the irresponsibility and undemocratic positions of today’s republican party. As a result, we’re fed constant sound bytes about “inflation,” but next to nothing about the corporate price gouging imposed during the pandemic that never returned to pre-pandemic levels.
There’s also virtually nothing about how the economy is actually doing in spite of the greed behind corporations’ record profits causing too many to have to dip deeper into their pockets, leaving a door open to blame the current administration, and republicans’ promises to return America to where it was…when?
The Biden administration, however, isn’t just rolling over until the end of its term, even if its accomplishments will likely fall on deaf ears.
On Friday, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg announced over $3.4 billion in grants to improve passenger rail service, help U.S. ports, reduce highway fatalities, and support domestic sustainable transportation materials’ manufacturing, explaining:
We are investing in better transportation systems that touch every corner of the country and in the workers who will manufacture materials and build projects. Communities are going to see safer commutes, cleaner air and stronger supply chains that we all count on.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just announced oil and gas companies will be required for the first time to pay a fee to the federal government if they allow methane emissions above certain levels.
The administration is also speeding up steps to relieve federal student loan interest debt for an additional eight million borrowers.
This matters, but does it if Trump is going to take credit for it?
Donald Trump is going to take credit for Biden’s accomplishments, just like he did Obama’s — then he’ll crash the economy and blame Biden.