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Remember “Infrastructure Week”USAMAGANATOYour browser does not support the element.? Donald Trump declared it in his first year as president to build support for fulfilling his pledge to spend prodigiously to fix America’s roads and bridges. Within the political class, at least on the left, Infrastructure Week became shorthand for his haplessness as, year after year, he failed to persuade Congress to commit the funds.Where he failed President Joe Biden succeeded, securing not just $1.2trn but the very sorts of “Buy American” requirements Mr Trump envisioned. But as Mr Biden lamented recently to , he never got much credit for the law because “It didn’t have any immediate impact on people’s lives.” His administration did not spend most of the money, much less complete the projects.Now, with the legislative obstacle overcome, the only challenge facing President-elect Trump, besides cashing cheques and cutting ribbons, is one at which he excels: branding. Do not be surprised to see his name appear on signs for public works paid for by Mr Biden’s law. Do not be surprised, either, to see Mr Trump apply similar marketing savvy to Mr Biden’s other landmark legislation, tweaking his laws to invest in energy and semiconductors just enough to lay claim to them, much as Mr Trump did during his first term with the North American Free-Trade Agreement.The uncomfortable truth, for Democrats, is that there would be justice in Mr Trump’s taking some credit. Though America may seem like a runaway car bouncing between guardrails as it veers from Mr Trump to Mr Biden and back again, Mr Biden advanced priorities that Mr Trump shares and often articulated first, and always more forcefully. On trade, industrial policy, energy, foreign affairs and even the rule of law, Mr Biden’s term can be viewed less as a radical departure from Mr Trump’s than as -lite.In politics and diplomacy, style is also substance, and here the difference between the presidents is profound. Mr Trump’s instinct is to inflame where Mr Biden’s is to soothe; Mr Trump’s madman theory of everything guarantees an exhausting change from Mr Biden’s old-man execution of everything. Another caveat is that, because Mr Trump’s priorities are not ideological but opportunistic, they can change: President Biden is about to deliver on former President Trump’s executive order to ban TikTok from America or force its divestment from Chinese ownership. But President-elect Trump now sees things differently. Noting how much attention he gets there, he asked recently on his own social-media platform, Truth Social, “Why would I want to ban TikTok?”But the jarring differences of style, and Mr Trump’s volatility, belie an overlap on policy. Like Mr Trump, Mr Biden put America’s economic interest, as he saw it, at the centre of foreign policy. He signed no new free-trade deals and made no effort to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership, signed by Barack Obama, from which Mr Trump withdrew. Mr Biden kept Mr Trump’s sanctions on China and piled on more. Though Mr Biden emphasised multilateralism, he blindsided allies in what he saw as America’s interest. A French foreign minister compared him to Mr Trump “without the tweets” after Mr Biden revealed he had struck a deal to sell submarines to Australia, replacing a contract with the French.Mr Biden fulfilled Mr Trump’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, and it is hard to imagine how Mr Trump could have provided a freer hand to Israel as it waged war after the attacks of October 7th 2023. It is equally hard, of course, to imagine Mr Trump being as deft as Mr Biden in rallying support to frustrate Russia in Ukraine. Yet Mr Trump’s decisions as president to provide Ukraine with lethal aid, to resist a new Russian gas pipeline to Germany and to nag allies to increase military spending now seem consistent with Mr Biden’s eventual approach, even far-sighted.The two presidents differ on climate change, and Mr Trump says he will withdraw again from the Paris agreement to which Mr Biden recommitted America. Mr Trump has promised to do away with Mr Biden’s subsidies for electric vehicles and other environmental regulations. Yet again the appearance overwhelms the substance: Mr Biden pumped record quantities of fossil fuels, and Mr Trump is not likely to withdraw Mr Biden’s other energy tax credits, most of which are flowing to Republican districts and big oil.Despite his own promises to repeal Mr Trump’s tax cuts, Mr Biden did not touch them. He displayed Trumpian indifference to the national debt. Obviously, the two presidents are opposed in the culture wars. These increasingly define the parties, yet directly affect relatively few. Mr Trump will probably reverse Mr Biden’s reversal of his ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces, scoring political points nationally at cruel, focused cost.Together with the related issue of abortion, the two presidents’ competition over the courts differentiates them most sharply. Mr Biden managed, narrowly, to appoint more federal judges than Mr Trump. This contest, like Mr Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter and Mr Trump’s promised pardons of January 6th criminals, is persuading Americans that the courts are just another arena for politics. In that sense, Mr Biden and Mr Trump, not equally yet in tandem, have worked towards the same dismal outcome.Mr Biden is handing Mr Trump a booming economy, along with falling rates of violent crime and of opioid-overdose deaths. Thanks partly to Trump restrictions that Mr Biden belatedly restored, fewer migrants are being arrested crossing the border than at the end of Mr Trump’s first term, an implicit admission that he was right and Mr Biden was wrong—disastrously so, as a political matter—about illegal immigration. But Mr Trump owes Mr Biden thanks for more than keeping the seat warm. Far from marginalising the predecessor who is now his successor, Mr Biden has, in the end, increased his chances of transforming America.
