Republicans fume. Democrats plot.

Presidencies often begin in crisis, but Trump's didn't, and he wasted it.

Whether parliamentary, like most of the other former British colonies, or Presidential, like our country, there is a tendency amongst democracies for governments to fall during major crises. This applies regardless of whether the incumbent loses re-election, is overthrown in a revolution or a coup d’état, or is term-limited from running again and replaced by a member of the opposition. This makes perfect sense, of course: When things are going poorly, people want to make a change to improve their condition - and if they can’t do it by peaceful means, they’ll likely do it through violent, revolutionary means.

What follows, then, is that generally leaders take over during crises, not during happy-go-lucky fun times - especially if they are a member of the opposition party. This means that, while the members of their party may have grandiose goals and ambitions, those objectives generally have to be set aside (at least in the short term) for the good of the country as a whole.

For a few obvious examples of this, take a look at American history during my lifetime, or close to it. In 1980, Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis, which drew his immediate attention. While that crisis was resolved, it - along with the Democratic Congress in power throughout his time in office - stymied his goal of a conservative revolution.

His successor, Vice President George HW Bush, handled the immediate crisis of a collapsing Soviet Union very well, and led the US to victory in the Gulf War, but was unable to adequately address the recession a few years later, costing him his job against Democrat Bill Clinton. Clinton, to his credit, was able to address the economic downturn - or at least, he got lucky at any rate. Then, though, his Democrats lost control of Congress, and while he was able to work with Republicans to get some things done, there was never a sweeping liberal transformation of the nation. Indeed, the divided government era of his time in office might have been the example of the federal government at its peak functionality domestically - impeachment trial and all. Despite the scandals, he managed to work with Newt Gingrich and Congressional Republicans to enact welfare reform, balance the federal budget, and reduce crime nationwide.

All of that was quite an accomplishment, which helps explain why he remained personally popular within the Democratic Party despite all of the moral turpitude.

Then, in 2000, when George W. Bush ran for President, he was running in times of relative peace and prosperity. Since he couldn’t exactly run against his predecessor’s record - which was accomplished with the help of Republicans, lest we forget - he ran against his character, promising to restore ‘honor and dignity’ to the Oval Office. It was a good strategy, and it worked for Bush, who narrowly edged out Al Gore by a few hundred votes in Florida (remember those hanging chads?). Bush didn’t campaign much on foreign policy; few presidential candidates ever do. Back then, though, he sounded a distinctly inward-looking - if not perhaps exactly isolationist - tone, promising that the United States would retreat from trying to be the Sheriff of the world.

That was a knock on the series of failed interventions carried out by the Clinton Administration, from the former Yugoslavia to Somalia, none of which helped bring peace and prosperity to any of those places. At the time, it was a fair and reasonable approach, and when Bush said it, he probably meant it. Indeed, it’s a traditional promise made by many a presidential candidate over the years from both parties - one that they often renege upon when they come into office and start getting the daily intelligence briefing.

The fact of the matter is, it’s a dangerous world out there, and somebody has to be the sheriff; if the United States of America won’t do it, then Russia or China will, and they don’t even pretend to care about human rights.

Then, the September 11 attacks came along, and just like his father before him, George W. Bush saw his presidency consumed by an international crisis. He didn’t get to do a lot of the good conservative things he wanted to do domestically, like expand school choice or decrease many government regulations - pretty much all he managed to do was cut taxes.

Republicans manage to always slip that one in above all else, even if they can’t figure out how to pay for them.

Also like his father before him, Bush ended his presidency dealing with a domestic economic crisis and handed it off to a Democrat to fix it. History may not exactly repeat - Obama didn’t defeat Bush because of the economy, after all - but it does echo, and yet again a Bush was succeeded by a Democrat in the midst of an economic downturn. In neither case was it necessarily their fault: the housing crisis was a ticking time bomb in 2008 no matter who was president, and a recession in 1992 was equally as likely. The fact is that Presidents, for better or for worse, don’t have as much control over the economy as we like to imagine; neither does the Federal Reserve, really, and they have much more direct power.

These early crises in a presidency often consume the White House’s attention and prevent them from accomplishing other goals, to the consternation of their base. Donald Trump, when he came into office in 2016, faced no such all-consuming crisis that he had to immediately address. Instead, he came into office during what were, in the United States at least, relatively peaceful and stable times - never mind the discontent rippling all over the world, and just below the surface here at home. Despite winning without a majority of the popular vote, he managed to bring along with him a Republican House and a Republican Senate.

So, what did he mange to accomplish with this newfound trifecta of governance, the first time since 2000 that Republicans had enjoyed such an advantage?

Well, not all that much, to be honest.

Oh, sure, he got some tax cuts passed. That’s pretty much the first thing all Republican presidents go after ever, though. It’s low-hanging fruit. Virtually any of his primary rivals in 2016 would have laid out the very same thing at the top of their agenda. They might have tweaked his proposal around the edges a little bit, but at the end of the day, Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Jeb Bush (LOL, Jeb!) or even Rand Paul, would have passed a tax-cut package very similar to what Donald Trump signed into law.

Wait, you say that Donald Trump managed to get three conservative Supreme Court nominees confirmed? Well, that’s great, but one of them was practically in the bag the minute any Republican got elected, thanks to Mitch McConnell’s delaying tactics. Yes, other Republican presidents might not have stood by Brett Kavanaugh, but they would have gotten just as conservative a nominee confirmed to the Supreme Court: Kavanaugh isn’t even the most conservative of Donald Trump’s three (yep, count em’, three) confirmed nominees. Indeed, it wouldn’t be surprising if he ended up becoming, in the long run, the most ideologically unreliable of the three, given his seemingly pathological desire to be liked, which has probably (and paradoxically) only been enhanced by his bruising confirmation process. So, while it’s admirable that Trump stood by Kavanaugh in light of the unsubstantiated attacks on his character, we could have substituted Kavanaugh for any number of other qualified conservative nominees, many of whom would have been less controversial and more easily confirmed - and perhaps, ultimately, proven to have been better Justices.

Like, for instance, Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett - both of whom could have been nominated by any of his 2016 primary opponents. I realize I opened this section with Kavanaugh, rather than Gorsuch, even though he was nominated first, but Kavanaugh was the most controversial, so bear with me.

OK, maybe not Barrett, but if not she, then somebody equally as conservative. Frankly, Neil Gorsuch was far and away Trump’s best Supreme Court nominee - he could easily be Chief one day - but any of his primary opponents would have nominated him as well. If Gorsuch hadn’t been initially nominated for Scalia’s vacant seat, he would have eventually been nominated to succeed Kennedy; his rise to the Supreme Court at some point was a virtual certainty the minute there was a vacancy under a Republican president. Gorsuch is so personable that he should have run for elected office, rather than been a judge, but he’s brilliant where he is, so let’s just be glad that he’s there.

So, Trump had one home-run nominee who was waiting in the wings in Gorsuch, another who was slightly too socially conservative, but was a woman who added diversity to the court in Barrett, and another who was personally controversial in Kavanaugh. That pretty much runs the gamut for Supreme Court nominees, especially for a one-term President, but it doesn’t speak to Trump’s particular brilliance, but rather to the peculiarities of our system of government. So, while Trump is to be congratulated for having his tax cuts passed and getting his nominees confirmed - they were all good things, to be sure - they were also all pretty much typical Republican accomplishments.

He never got his big deal on investing in infrastructure; instead, Biden ended up getting that done, and in bipartisan fashion, no less. Now, before you go blaming Democrats for simply opposing Trump at every turn - which they most certainly did - keep in mind that Republicans had the majority in both the House and the Senate. That means that Trump didn’t really have to convince Democrats to go along with everything he did, he just had to convince them to not filibuster it - and it’s hard to imagine Democrats filibustering a bill that spent more money on infrastructure simply because they hated Donald Trump so much.

After all, Democrats never pass up a chance to spend more money.

No, the real problem wasn’t that Trump and Republicans couldn’t get Democrats to support an infrastructure bill, it was that they wasted too much time spinning their wheels trying to repeal ObamaCare. Yes, I know that, for Congressional Republicans, repealing ObamaCare was the centerpiece of their 2016 campaigns, and I understand that Donald Trump supported it as well - but it clearly wasn’t a top priority for him. The minute the attempt to pass the ‘Skinny’ repeal bill failed, he was more than willing to abandon the effort, and wisely so: it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to reform any social spending program in this country once it’s enacted. All you can do is tweak it around the edges, as Republicans eventually did by repealing the ObamaCare mandate through the tax cut package.

Trump, together with Congressional Republicans, took over in relatively peaceful, prosperous times, but they managed to blow it by focusing too much on repealing ObamaCare right out of the gate. That not only wasted months of valuable time that could have been spent passing an infrastructure bill, it poisoned the well for future negotiations with Democrats on virtually everything. They rightly viewed ObamaCare as their signature domestic accomplishment of the past decade and wanted to defend it at all costs. That left Trump and Republicans with their only accomplishments for his first term - first two years in office, really - as passing tax cuts and confirming judges.

No wonder they lost the midterms and he lost re-election.

Biden and the Democrats, by contrast, have stayed focused and united and gotten things done. For one, they didn’t waste any time trying to repeal Trump’s tax cuts, nor did Biden immediately undo all of his executive actions on China, either. They, unlike Republicans in 2016, recognized that immediately attacking their predecessor’s signature accomplishments was a non-starter. Instead, they first focused on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, which included another stimulus package - one that was probably largely unnecessary and helped to contribute to inflation.

Still, they got it done immediately after campaigning on it and it passed without any Republican votes, despite Biden’s pledge of bipartisanship during the campaign.

It wasn’t good policy, but it was certainly good politics.

Then they managed to actually pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill - which got almost 70 votes in the U.S. Senate. Even though it passed overwhelmingly, it was basically a thumb of the nose at his predecessor, who’d made it a central point of his 2016 campaign and his presidency. They got it passed because they left out most of the more controversial measures, which infuriated the activist left, but was enough to win the support of many Republicans.

No matter, they had a plan.

Many of the climate provisions left out of the Democrats’ infrastructure bill would later be included in their deceptively-named Inflation Reduction Act, an infrastructure bill under another name. Essentially, the Democrats passed a popular, noncontroversial bill with bipartisan support, then later took all the partisan elements of it and passed them in a different bill along a party-line vote. That’s not necessarily honest negotiating, to be sure, but it is effective. While Republicans were understandably livid, they were unable to stop the Inflation Reduction Act, in part because they had earlier failed to pass their own infrastructure bill.

All of this shows that, while Democrats might be dishonest (or at least underhanded) negotiators, they are smart and they have a plan. Republicans, meanwhile, frequently seem to be winging it, and then later complain about it after the fact.

Republicans fume.

Democrats plot.

One side manages to get a whole lot more done than the other, and often with bipartisan support. It would be nice if Republicans learned from that example for a change, instead of just complaining about it.

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