For the last four years the Trump administration has been at war with many things and many people, but one thread that’s been continuous throughout is their obsessive desire to destroy the government they failed to run. Over the last four years, the entire Republican Party has often seemed against government intervention or government anything, including government doing its job. Donald Trump has spent more time breaking the government than trying to fix it. He went to war with the Post Office, he declared COVID to be the states’ problem, and he refused to enact the Defense Production Act, which would have been an easy win for Trump.
This anti-government government has been a particularly problematic way to run a country during a pandemic when Americans desperately need the government to roll out the vaccine and get a plan together to put said vaccine in people’s arms. Luckily, the guy America just elected to replace Trump is his exact opposite.
One must look no further than Joe Biden’s love of Amtrak to know that Joe Biden believes in the federal government. Biden is after all a creature of the government: He did six terms in the Senate and served two stints as vice president. He, unlike the reality television host, understands how government works and, more importantly, he wants government to work—unlike many Republicans who seem to be in it to destroy it.
Mitch McConnell bragged about being the “Grim Reaper,” refusing to bring any of the House Democrats’ legislation to the floor. Of course, thanks to the voters of Georgia, McConnell isn’t majority leader anymore. Which is good because Biden is going to have to legislate his way out of this inherited mess of Trumpian proportions.
From minute one, the Biden presidency has been a study in opposites to the Trump presidency. Biden’s speech was heavy on the “our democratic guardrail held this time” rhetoric, including the lines, “This is America’s day. This is democracy’s day. A day of history and hope. Of renewal and resolve.” There wasn’t American carnage in Joe Biden’s speech, but there was American carnage in America’s hospitals where 4,409 people died from coronavirus in a single day, the most on record.
Joe Biden had been president for less than 24 hours before his COVID czar Jeff Zients told reporters, “What we’re inheriting from the Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined.” And one can only assume that they imagined it would be bad since the Trump administration has been “unprecedentedly hostile during the transition.”
Trump spent a lot of time bloviating about the incredible success of Operation Warp Speed and his private-public partnership. And one could argue that Warp Speed was the one good thing he did. But please note the high irony, people. The one good thing Trump did was a total Big Government thing—the federal government paying a pharmaceutical company to develop a vaccine! But then, when it came down to delivery time, the Trump administration skimped on the distribution, using the Pentagon’s Tiberius system, which “provided false projections on how many doses they would be receiving once the Pfizer vaccine became available.” It’s not a surprising turn of events.
Trump promoted himself as a businessman who could fix the federal government, saying things like, “If we could run our country the way I’ve run my company, we would have a country that you would be so proud of.” But Republicans were never really interested in fixing the federal government, and Trump didn’t fix the federal government (of course he wasn’t a successful businessman either). If anything, he broke the parts of it that still worked. In 2018, under the leadership of John Enormous Mustache Bolton, he dismantled “a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.” That pandemic directorate could have been useful. Biden has already said he's reinstating it.
Now of course, there is no guarantee that Biden’s half-a-lifetime of experience in government means he’s going to get everything right. He’s set some pretty high goals for himself, starting with those 100 million vaccines and opening up schools. If he pulls an Obama on healthcare.gov, his passion for using government for good won’t mean much. And of course there’s always Mitch and the Senate to grapple with. They’ll have something to say about all this.
But still. It’s so refreshing to see. The idea that Republicans have always dreamed about drowning the government in a bathtub is nothing new, but never has the federal government been so needed by so many. The entire early ethos of Trumpism, when Trumpism still had an ethos, before it just devolved into an old guy playing golf and screaming at his television, was Steve Bannon’s kind of crony Leninism, which, though Bannon was fired early on, he was still able to accomplish. “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
If Democrats were cunning or just awake, they could message that the pandemic and Trump’s woeful mishandling of it provide real tangible evidence that the federal government is good and necessary and that it can, if used correctly, save lives and help people.
