domingo, febrero 9

Reviews | Don’t think of it as a competition between Biden and Trump

It’s official, we have a rematch.

This week, Joe Biden and Donald Trump officially secured the delegates needed to win re-election in their respective primaries. This will be the first contest since the 1892 race between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland where a former challenger, now incumbent, faces a former incumbent, now challenger, for a second term in the White House. Cleveland won its challenge, but that doesn’t tell us anything about our situation.

Truth be told, there is a pervasive feeling around this election that there is nothing new to discuss – that there is nothing new to learn about Biden and certainly nothing new to learn about Trump .

But while it’s fair to say that we already know a lot about both men – their strengths and weaknesses, their perspectives and opinions, the character of their administrations and their records during their terms in office – there is still much more to be said on which they intend to settle for four more years in the White House.

Both Trump and Biden have far-reaching plans for the country, either of which would transform the United States. Of course, one of these transformations would be for the worse, the other for the better.

Let’s start with the worst. We already know that Donald Trump’s main targets for his second term are American democracy and the American constitutional order. For Trump, the foundations of American governance – separation of powers, independent civil service and popular selection of elected officials – are a direct obstacle to his desire to protect himself, enrich himself and extend as far as possible his personalized power over the country. .

My colleague Carlos Lozada has already taken an in-depth look at Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s plan for a second Trump term. The thrust of “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is an authoritarian overhaul of executive power, designed around Trump. “This calls for a relentless politicization of the federal government, with presidential appointees crushing career civil servants at every turn and agencies and offices abolished for overtly ideological reasons,” writes Lozada, who also notes that the vision of the heritage “depicts the president as the personal embodiment of the federal government. of popular will and treats the law as an obstacle to conservative governance.

In practice, this would mean, among other things, that Trump would be empowered to use the Justice Department to investigate his political enemies, or to use the Internal Revenue Service to harass them through audits and other forms of increased scrutiny.

But a second Trump term wouldn’t just be about abuses of power, the erosion of checks and balances, and the elevation of various hackers and apparatchiks to positions of real authority. It would also be a concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.

Trump and congressional Republicans want to extend the 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $3.3 trillion, the vast majority of which would benefit people with the highest incomes. Trump also hopes to cut the corporate tax rate, reducing government revenue by an additional $522 billion. To pay for this, Trump and Republicans would almost certainly attack the social safety net, targeting Medicaid, food stamps and other programs aimed at low-income and working Americans. Trump has even said he is willing to cut Medicare and Social Security, a move that could be necessary if Republicans succeed in stripping the federal government of nearly $4 trillion in taxes.

We should also expect a second Trump administration to resume its efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and also attempt to disentangle climate spending from the Inflation Reduction Act as much as possible.

Biden wants something very different for the country. Its first goal, to begin with, is to preserve and defend the American constitutional order. He would not overthrow American democracy to become a strongman like Viktor Orban, who recently met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

What Biden would try to do, if his budget proposal is anything to go by, is reinvigorate the welfare state. His proposal, released Monday, calls for about $5 trillion in new taxes on businesses and the wealthy over the next decade. It would fund, among other things: a plan to expand Medicare’s fiscal solvency, a plan to restore the expanded child tax credit passed as part of the American Rescue Plan early in his administration, a plan to guarantee early and low-cost financing. child care for most families and a plan to expand health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In short, Biden hopes to follow through on long-standing Democratic priorities.

There is a more important point that arises from this capsule summary of each candidate’s priorities. Americans are accustomed to viewing their presidential elections as a battle of personalities, a framing that is only encouraged by the candidate-centered nature of the American political system as well as the way our media reports elections. Even the way most Americans view their country’s history, always so intently focused on who occupies the White House at any given moment, helps reinforce the idea that presidential elections are primarily about people and personalities. involved.

Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of what’s really at stake in an election, to think of the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups and different communities, who want very different – ​​sometimes incompatible – things for the country.

The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government aid for workers, federal support for the inclusion of the most marginalized Americans.

As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire to reduce taxes on the nation’s financial interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump is less about politics, somehow, and more about getting back at his detractors. He is only interested in the mechanisms of government insofar as they are tools for punishing his enemies.

And if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the real goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to govern others.