Today, Explained - The Trump Years: Deregulator in chief

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

In the first of our five-part series, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias explains why President Donald Trump seldom boasts about his biggest accomplishment. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear. That I will faithfully execute. That I will faithfully execute. The office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God. So help me God.

Congratulations, Mr. President. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Ferrum. Four years ago, Donald Trump from reality TV won the presidency, and our shared reality hasn't been the same since. The relentless pace of headlines, controversies, and tweets has rendered the country divided at present and unable to fully recollect the past. I've seen the tweet about tapes. Lordy, I hope there are tapes.

We struggle to remember what this president said or did last month, let alone in 2017. This October, leading up to the 2020 election, we're going to help you remember. In the coming weeks, we're bringing you The Trump Years, a series that looks back on what Donald Trump did during his four years as president of the United States and what it means for the future of the American political experiment.

On today's show, the deregulator-in-chief. Matthew Iglesias, host of The Weeds podcast from Vox. There's always a lot of focus on an American president's first hundred days. Of course, with Donald Trump, no one really knew what to expect. What did we learn about this reality TV president in the first three or so months? We learned really two things. One is that there was going to be a tremendous emphasis on somewhat under-the-radar changes in regulatory policy. If you have a regulation you want, number one, we're not going to approve it because it's already been approved

probably in 17 different forms. But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there's a new regulation, they have to knock out two. That's a lot of what he did in the first 100 days. And looking back on the whole first term, that's a lot of what he's accomplished. The other thing we learned is that a lot of these things did not get much attention because there is so much going on. It feels like there's been a constant din of news, and relatively little of that news has been about the Administrative Procedure Act. But if you want to know how Trump has impacted people's lives, how he's really changed things in the country, regulatory changes are just a really huge share of that. Well, let's give it some attention. Where do we start? So he confirmed

Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. I want to thank the president for nominating me. Which people do know about. But Gorsuch is a very significant figure in regulatory law, a very deregulatory justice. But then he also used the Congressional Review Act to undo Obama-era regulations at an unprecedented pace. Over the last several weeks, we've been using the Congressional Review Act, or what is known as CRAs, to take action on the explosion of Obamacare regulations. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of regulations that we've seen hurting families, destroying jobs all across the country. It's a relatively new law, but it was used very rapidly by Trump and Congress. And he set the wheels in motion on things like the Muslim ban,

on withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but also really a big move to sort of reverse a lot of regulation in the environmental sphere and of the financial regulation that the Obama administration had done. Before I came into office, American workers were smothered by merciless avalanche of wasteful and expensive and intrusive federal regulation. These oppressive, burdensome mandates were a stealth tax on our people, slashing take-home pay, suppressing innovation, surging the cost of goods, and shipping millions of American jobs overseas. Millions and millions and millions. It never ended. Obviously, whenever a Republican is replaced by a Democrat or vice versa, there's a certain amount of, you know, back and forth and ping-ponging.

George W. Bush had what was commonly called the anything-but-Clinton policy, and Ronald Reagan removed those solar panels from the White House Jimmy Carter had installed. But with Trump, there was a pretty unusual amount. I mean, the Congressional Review Act volume was unprecedented. There's just been an incredible scope of changes. He's reversed over 100 separate environmental rules. We could do a whole show just probably rattling off their names. But some of the big ones are fuel efficiency in cars and toxins in fertilizer,

something called the Waters of the United States Act, which would have sort of expanded the scope of, you know, clean drinking water type regulation. And is one of the rules most strongly opposed by farmers, ranchers, and agricultural workers all across our land. It's prohibiting them from being allowed to do what they're supposed to be doing. It's been a disaster. A really important thing is that they've changed how cost-benefit analysis is done around air pollution. A lot of science has been piling up to show that air pollution is more harmful

than we had previously realized. What is this pollution from power plants that we have heard so much about? They basically don't want that whole genre of research to count. They've also moved regulations that are supposed to reduce the levels of carcinogenic, potentially brain-damaging toxins that are being discharged into American waterways and lakes. There was very early on, there was a decision not to move forward with a rule against some kind of fertilizer that scientists think is harmful to people's brains. And most of this has gotten very little attention. Some of it, of course, relates to climate change,

but a lot of it is not directly focused on climate. And there hasn't been antics around this kind of thing. Scott Pruitt was involved in a fair number of scandals, and so he got attention. Trying to use his position to get his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise, trying to get a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel, using staff to run errands to buy lotion. But the sort of ongoing regulatory shift that started in the first 100 days very intensely and has continued, you know, through to fall of 2020, has been a really big substantive change and not a huge media focus. How did the deregulation from

Donald Trump and his administration at the federal level affect what was going on at the state level? So California was trying to enact stricter emission standards than the federal standard. This is something they've done before. They essentially used the large size of the California market to try to be a lever to drive change nationally. And Trump has moved to stop that. Car manufacturers even said, like, they would comply with the California standards. They kind of wanted peace in the regulatory infighting so that they could make plans and do some kind of cars. The Trump administration hasn't done that. And he's also sort of put a halt on the idea of moving forward. He's made it clear, like, they don't want to hear from anyone,

any scientists, any lawyers, about new rules or new things that need to be regulated. You mentioned financial deregulation as well. Trump promised to repeal Dodd-Frank. Did he get that done? He did not. The legislation I'm signing today rolls back the crippling Dodd-Frank regulations that are crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide. They were in such trouble.

In 2018, he signed a law that kept the whole structure of the Dodd-Frank law in place, but it really narrowed the number of institutions that it applies to. So a lot of sort of big regional banks got out from under these rules. And he's also done new regulatory interpretations. He's revised, it was called the Volcker Rule, which was supposed to make banks take less risks. He revised something else called the Supplementary Leverage Rule. After the financial crisis, people thought banks should not make so many risky bets because we've learned that when the bets go bad, the taxpayers are left holding the bag. And Trump has really let risky banking come back while leaving some of the big structure

of Dodd-Frank in place. Is it worth asking what his motivations were here on environmental and financial deregulation? You know, I mean, I don't want to say I can read Donald Trump's mind, but fundamentally, you know, despite a lot of populist rhetoric, this is a rich businessman. He knows a lot of other rich businessmen. He owns golf clubs where rich businessmen are the members, and were really upset with the Obama administration. They did not like these regulations. They really wanted them done away with. And it's just been a huge priority of the Trump administration's. Is it too soon to talk about the long-term impacts of the deregulation or, you know, positive or negative? You know, so when you let people pollute more, the pollution happens right away. The health impacts of that sometimes only show up over the longer term, although sometimes, you know, you see it quite quickly. The financial deregulation is tougher, right? Because

in any given year, it's unlikely that you'll see a financial crisis. But if you go from a sort of one in a thousand odds to one in a hundred odds, you've actually made the economy much more unstable. But nobody's going to know until it all blows up. And and to me, as somebody who covered the financial crisis and covered the Dodd-Frank debates, it's really kind of shocking how much we just all stopped paying attention to this once Trump became president. It used to be that people rightly felt it was very important to have a regulated banking sector. Trump came in, he's allowed a lot more risk in the financial system, and there just hasn't been much talk about it. After the break, we move past all the stuff Trump undid and talk about the one big thing he, you know, did. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp.

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1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Matthew, we talked about what he undid. What did he did? The tax cuts, huh?

That was the biggie? The 2017 tax bill is clearly the biggest single policy achievement of the Trump administration. On January 1, Americans are going to wake up with a new tax code. In February, they're going to see withhold with a new tax code. In February, they're going to see withholdings go down, so they see bigger paychecks. And April 15th will be the last day they have to comply with the old bad system. What they did is they created a big reduction in the corporate income tax rate. They partially offset that by closing some loopholes. They did some cuts in the individual taxes. For example, if you stand to inherit a fortune that is worth tens of millions of dollars.

I don't. But if you are among that lucky group, Trump delivered a really significant cut in the taxes you'll pay. Then he made some changes to the deductibility of state and local taxes, to how mortgage loans are treated in taxes. He increased the size of the child tax credit, and a big cut in the taxes owed by multinational corporations that have lots of foreign profits. Is this like trickle-down economics or something, or did he have another name for it? I would say the theory of it is that taxing corporations reduces investment. And so that if you do a big corporate tax cut, you're going to see much more business investment in the United States. And then because of all this investment, we're all going to end up better off. It means jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

So it's going to be really a very special period of time. We're in a very special period of time, and it's going to be even more so. There of time. We're in a very special period of time, and it's going to be even more so. There has not been a ton of evidence that that actually occurred. The economy grew until coronavirus struck, but it grew at basically the same pace it had been growing with Obama. There was no, like, obvious inflection point. What actually happened is that companies became much more profitable. The tax cuts weren't beloved by Democrats. Might a Biden presidency mean the reversal of these tax cuts or a sort of about-face on them?

I think we're going to see the sort of traditional policy dialogue. So when Obama was president, he raised taxes, particularly on the wealthy. This is not class warfare. It's math. Trump cut taxes, particularly on the wealthy, but he didn class warfare. It's math. Trump cut taxes, particularly on the wealthy, but he didn't exactly reverse what Obama had done. And if Biden comes in, if he becomes president, taxes on the rich will go up again. But the corporate tax rate won't go all the way up to where it was before Trump's presidency, because they're going to keep some

of the loophole closings that Trump did. Similarly, on the individual front, Democrats disagree a little bit about exactly how they want to proceed here. But directionally, Democrats will reverse the spirit of cutting taxes on the rich, but they're not going to exactly undo what it is Trump did because, frankly, they agree with parts of it, particularly on the corporate side, right? So what Trump did was he closed a lot of tax loopholes that Democrats thought should be closed. And then he just cut the rate way, way, way, way, way down. So Democrats are going to keep those loopholes closed, and then they're going to raise the rate back up. But they're not going to put it all the way back up to where it was before. And what about the rest of the picture, the deregulation environmentally,

financially? It doesn't seem like Biden wants to undo Trump's undoes. It seems like he wants to do even more. Yeah, particularly on the environmental front, Biden's agenda, I mean, it'll depend how much support he gets in Congress for it, but is to go in a much more aggressive way. I mean, he has regulatory ideas, but Biden also has big investment commitments on the climate front. Transforming the electrical sector power to produce power without carbon pollution will be the greatest spur to job creation and economic competitiveness in the 21st century. On the financial front, I think some of Trump's deregulation may just stick because attention to

that topic has waned away a little bit and bank lobbyists are pretty powerful. And it's not obvious to me that what Trump has done is going to get undone. That's so interesting to me. He wanted to undo all this stuff and cut taxes. He was, it sounds like, pretty successful at it. Why doesn't he talk more about these accomplishments? He spends so much time spinning up conspiracy theories and dog whistling on law and order when he actually has concrete achievements. So Trump talks about deregulation in a general kind of way because his polling on, quote unquote, the economy is strong. So he'll say, you know, he deregulated

and the economy went great. Nearly four years say, you know, he deregulated and the economy went great. Nearly four years ago, we ended this regulatory assault on the American worker, and we launched the most dramatic regulatory relief campaign in American history by far. No other administration has done anywhere near. He doesn't talk a lot in specific terms. He doesn't try to position himself as somebody who finally let them make riskier investments. And he almost never talks about his tax law because it was very unpopular. I mean, everything that's happened, you know, George Floyd, pandemic, impeachment, when you go back and look at it, the low point in his approval rating was when

Congress was debating that tax bill. Nothing that has happened since then has been less popular than that tax law. So, you know, the president will talk about police or almost anything other than his single biggest legislative achievement. How rare is that for a president's single biggest legislative achievement being the thing that that president is least interested in talking about during an election year? It's definitely strange, right? I mean, presidents do things that they try to run away from to an extent, but it's a real paradox of the Trump era that the central pillar of his policymaking, this tax law, has been so absent from his political self-presentation, right? He does politics as a culture war figure, but there are trillions of

dollars at stake in federal tax policy. He did this very unpopular law, presumably because he and his team really believe in it. It's what they really want to do. They are here to make corporate America more lightly taxed. He would have a much stronger chance of winning if he did popular stuff on the tax front, but he doesn't like to talk about it. You know, I wonder, all told, you know, deregulator, tax cutter, did he end up being better at undoing what obama did or proposing new things i mean it's much more a reverser of things that annoyed some people about the obama administration trump has not been a very successful constructive policymaker. With Obama, we had Obamacare. There's no Trump anything, right? There's no compound verb. There's no equivalent of the Reagan revolution that,

like, switched our understanding of how the government and the economy and individuals will relate. He's been this very dominant figure in the news who has done a lot of stuff. It feels like a very consequential time that we're living through. But as a kind of constructive policymaker who puts new things in place and we say, okay, 50 years from now, we'll look back at Donald Trump and the creation of X, right? There's no X there. Matthew Iglesias, he writes about the economy here at Vox. He also wrote a book this year. It just came out. It's called One Billion Americans. It's a case for keeping the country strong by continuing to build up and to have lots babies, too. You can find it wherever you find your books. We're going to continue this series throughout the month of October.

You can find more on the Trump years at Vox.com slash Trump years. Next week, America first. It's Today Explained. And now, the ones we lost along the way. Kevin McAleenan resigned. John Bolton fired Rick Perry. I said, Mr. President, I know there are people that say, you know, you said you were the chosen one. And I said, you were.

resigned. Dan Coats, resigned. Alexander Acosta, resigned. Sarah Sanders. Can you state for the record which outlets that you and the president regard as the enemy of the people? I'm not going to walk through a list, but I think those individuals probably know who they are. Resigned. Kirstjen Nielsen.

Resigned. Scott Gottlieb. Resigned. John Kelly He was sort of a tough guy. By the time he got eaten up in this world, it's a different world than he was used to, he was unable to function. Bill Shine

Ryan Zinke Nikki Haley James Mattis Zinke, resigned. Nikki Haley, resigned. James Mattis. I do stand before you, as was noted here, really having achieved greatness. I mean, I'm not just an overrated general. I am the greatest, the world's most overrated. Resigned.