Today, Explained - Trump of the Year

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

On the cusp of a big election year, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias reviews President Trump’s accomplishments thus far. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the eve of his impeachment, President Donald Trump sent Nancy Pelosi a six-page letter. Maybe you heard about it? There's a big fat paragraph right in the middle of it where he lays out what he sees as his accomplishments thus far as president. They are, in order, the economy, what he calls a rebuilt military, what he calls a reformed VA, more than 170 new federal judges and two on the Supreme Court, tax cuts, regulation cuts, the elimination of the individual mandate, the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century, Space Force, protecting the Second Amendment, criminal justice reform,

less ISIS in the world, a different NAFTA for the continent, something-something on trade with China, new trade deals with Japan and South Korea, withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, ditto for the Paris Climate Accord, becoming the world's top energy producer, throwing all sorts of bones to Israel, reducing illegal border crossings, ending what he calls

catch and release, and building what he calls the wall. Before the president published this list, Matthew Iglesias at Vox made his own. So we thought we'd close out the year with a conversation about the president's first three years in office and where his accomplishments in those three years leave us in this ever forthcoming election in 2020. You know, I think it's useful when you try to think about Trump and actual policymaking to sort of distinguish. One thing is in the short term, the economic situation, which is so central to his politics and politics in general. And then the other is what are changes he's made that have had a kind of a more lasting impact. He's really left his mark on the judiciary, on immigration, on environmental policy. But sort of in the day

to day, I mean, the stuff he talks about, the stuff people talk about is the state of the economy. President Trump, of course, ran at least in part on the economy, as many Republican candidates do. The White House clearly considers it his big accomplishment. How has the economy fared under the Trump presidency? Let's start there. The economy has been doing well. There are definitely problems, but we've seen steady job growth, steady reduction in the unemployment rate.

We've seen wages start to go up. We've seen the stock market do very well. We've seen a continuity with the kind of economic improvements that characterize Barack Obama's second term in office, except that we've reached a much better level than we were at three or four years ago. And I always wonder about this, and I think we maybe even talked about it before, but like how much credit does the president actually deserve for an economy that is continuing to grow? It depends how you want to look at it, right? I mean, if you compare Trump to what Trump promised, he said his policies were going to give us 4% economic growth annually. I see no reason why we don't go to 4, 5 and even 6%. They haven't come even close to that.

That was a ridiculous thing to promise. At the same time, if you looked at his Democratic critics, Hillary Clinton was saying Trump was going to derail the recovery. We were going to have a new recession thanks to the catastrophic trade wars he was going to unleash. We can't let him bankrupt America like we are one of his failed casinos. That hasn't happened either, right? So whether you want to consider that Trump deserves credit for not screwing things up or not, I think it's going to have a lot to do with just how you think about Donald Trump as a social and cultural phenomenon. He has not led to any huge disruptions. He's appointed Federal Reserve governors who've kept the recovery on track. He has increased the budget

deficit, which is what a lot of Democrats were saying we needed to do to boost growth when Obama was president. So there's an element of partisan hypocrisy to that, but also substantively, it has been good. And, you know, it's leading to good results for a lot of people. Let's talk about some of the agreements and disagreements he's had internationally when it comes to the economy. You mentioned policies that may not have affected most Americans. One trade war with China, which a lot of us perhaps never felt directly, but certainly impacted a lot of people across the world. How did that all shake out? You know, this trade war with China has been a big concern in financial markets. It's been a tendency for stocks to go up and down. We begin with breaking news in our money lead, a huge loss on Wall Street today.

The Dow closing in just a moment down. You hear the bell there. Down around 750 points amid an escalation in the U.S.-China trade war. It now looks like we are headed toward at least a preliminary settlement. It seems like not that much is going to change. If you've looked at the history of trade conflicts, it's pretty typical for both sides to eventually back down and agree to small changes to the status quo. That's where Trump and the Chinese seem to be headed. At the end of the day, I think this

whole trade war with China is going to have just not amounted to that much. What about his trade agreements and negotiations closer to home, the updated NAFTA or USMCA. I mean, this is an extremely small change to the NAFTA agreement that we knew. The big trade deal, the great trade deal, one of the greatest trade deals ever made for our country. Mexico and Canada are going to change their copyright law in a way that is a little bit more advantageous to American content companies. Canada is going to make it a little bit easier for Americans to sell dairy products. And we're going to put some restrictions on imports of car parts. So that should make cars a little bit more expensive, but it will be good for auto workers. At the end of the day, I mean, unless you specifically work in the dairy or auto parts manufacturing industry, it's just not that big of a deal. And it goes to show

that a lot of what's dominated political discussion under Trump has been kind of smoke and mirrors and not that closely related to changes he's made that have really big impacts. I imagine business leaders in the United States are also very happy about what President Trump would consider one of his greatest accomplishments. It's the largest, I always say the most massive, but it's the largest tax cut in the history of our country and reform, but tax cut. Middle class people got a sort of small tax cut from Trump and business owners and business executives got a huge tax cut. You know, Trump does talk about the tax bill, but in contrast to trade, he doesn't talk

in a detailed, specific way about it because it cuts so hard against the populist narratives he's been shaping. You know, if you are a major shareholder in Apple Computer, this has been great for you. If you were the founder of Google, this has been incredibly great for you. If you're a normal person, the economy in general is doing fine. It's doing well. And you're probably glad that your taxes went down a few hundred bucks. But the real focus of tax policy in the Trump administration has been on making life easier for business owners. And I guess we're sort of transitioning into lasting impact

conversations about President Trump's tax bill. I also wonder how he's been on financial regulation. Yeah, I mean, this is another aspect of economic policy is that Trump has really eased up on a lot of the new financial regulations that were put in place in the wake of the financial crisis there. He has reduced the number of financial institutions who are subject to the highest level of regulatory scrutiny. He's cut back on the funding for the sort of basic research functions of the regulatory agencies. So we have fewer watchdogs, less aggressive enforcement, laxer rules. In the short term, it hasn't had any harms because the nature of financial crises is

they just don't happen that often. But if you switch from like there's a one in a thousand chance of a crisis happening to a one in a hundred chance, that's actually really bad. The long-term implications of this for the country are pretty scary. He has built back more risk into the financial system that we had hoped to get rid of after a very, very painful recession was touched off. It just sounds like when you take into consideration the tax reform and the deregulation and something that we haven't talked about, the shrinking social safety net and government

assistance programs and the way people can qualify for those programs getting more and more restricted, that life is getting much better if you have money in the United States and a little scarier and even harder if you don't. Right. I mean, life has gotten much easier for people who, you know, wealthy business owners, investors, executives, and made it harder to get nutritional assistance, harder to get Medicaid, harder to get other kinds of targeted assistance for low-income people. And that's, again, that's not something you hear the president bragging about a lot. Like, I've helped Arkansas throw a lot of people off their health care program.

That's been a really notable change, and it's made a huge difference in the lives of a minority of people. But obviously, like, it transforms your life if you lose health insurance and you lose your food stamps. Thanks to Trump. Let's talk about other ways the president has successfully changed this country with lasting effect that you mentioned at the top of the show. Immigration, the environment, and the judiciary. Let's start with immigration. Yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about the wall and the sort of metaphysics of whether we're building a new wall or repairing old fences. There are definitely

construction projects happening on the southern border. I would say more significantly, he has completely revamped how asylum works in the United States. This took them a while to get at, but they have created a situation in which it is now extremely difficult, borderline impossible, for people to show up at the southern border and claim asylum in the United States. That's an important policy objective of his. He's made it very clear that he doesn't want people from quote unquote shithole countries to be able to move to the United States. But it's part of a larger trend, which is that he's changed legal immigration policy in some kind of surprisingly drastic ways, given that Congress hasn't

passed any new immigration laws. He has really cut refugee resettlement down to almost nothing. And that's something that he had executive discretion to do. But it used to be that the United States was the world's leading country in terms of taking in refugees who were in camps around the world, resettling them here. We're not doing that anymore. He's made it more difficult to get H-1B visas, which are for technical specialists. He has a new regulation going through the rulemaking process that would say that you are going to qualify as a quote-unquote public charge if you need subsidized health insurance.

And so that's going to make it much, much more difficult for people from poor countries in general to be able to come here and immigrate legally. Basically, every kind of dial of discretion that exists in the immigration process, he has turned it down. When it comes to the way President Trump talks about immigration, it's like this super hard cut, right, from President Obama to President Trump. They are night and day and they're also night and day on the environment. Yeah, absolutely. Trump, as a candidate, he drew a clear distinction on climate change. But he said he was interested in protecting clean air and clean water.

You know, we have the cleanest air in the world in the United States, and it's gotten better since I'm president. We have the cleanest water. It's crystal clean. And I always say I want crystal clean water and air. In office, that has really not been the case. We've seen for the first time in decades the sort of air pollution metrics get worse. People who look at this, researchers say thousands of additional people die per year as a result of this increased air pollution.

That's mostly little particles of soot, also some kinds of gases that come out. On the waterfront, I mean, his EPA has gone and reversed rules that were designed to make it harder for farmers and other people to dump toxins and stuff into fresh waters. And he has moved in a sort of a full bore way to open up public lands, to more natural resource extraction, to reduce oversight of basically everything you can think of. And he has successfully pushed oil and gas production up to much, much higher levels than they were at. And Trump has been a big cheerleader for these industries.

We will probably be a net exporter of petroleum products next year. But it is having a marked impact on Americans' health and the quality of the air we breathe. And there's no question that that will be felt for years, as well as the president's impact on the judiciary, right? I mean, and this is something he's constantly bragging about. Yeah, I mean, he talks all the time about the quantity of judges he has appointed, in part that's because he has legitimately set a record here. We'll have close to 180 federal judges, including appellate division judges. Trump doesn't talk a lot about who the judges are or what they believe. He's mostly interested

in the fact that he's setting records. But these are people who, if you talk to experts, they are very conservative. They are extremely skeptical of the government's use of regulatory authority, quite friendly to the idea that police and other law enforcement officers should be able to do whatever they want. And even if he loses in 2020, they will have an enduring impact. And how different is this from previous presidents apart from just sheer quantity? I mean, you heard a lot of stories of like these really unqualified sounding judges being nominated by the president. Is that something new? You know, it is a continuation of an earlier trend. We have under President Trump a clear determination to rely on the sort of federalist society as a vetting institution. Basically, this is a conservative judicial organization that vets people formally and

informally to decide that you should have a career in the conservative legal movement. And Trump has put forward a lot of people who are on the young side, don't have a ton of professional experience, but who people in the movement believe in and they like them. And Trump has been willing to put those names forward and Senate Republicans have been eager to confirm them. And there just has not been any real checks on that in the way that has existed in the past. Ms. Bidlick, have you ever argued a motion in a state trial court? No, sir, I have not. Have you ever argued a motion in a federal trial court? No, sir, I have not. Have you ever argued a motion in a federal trial court? No, again, my practice has focused very much on briefing complex legal questions. Have you ever chosen a jury? So I have worked on things like jury questionnaires and- I'm speaking about

courtroom experience choosing a jury. No, I have not conducted voir dire myself. There's no more filibustering of judicial nominees, so Trump doesn't need to worry about finding people who are bland or finding people who have stellar resumes. He just needs to find people who his core supporters are enthusiastic about. This is probably the most influential thing he's done. He has signed fewer major pieces of legislation than most recent presidents, but he has appointed more judges. Is this part of why the Republican Party has so faithfully stuck by him? Is it the things that he's getting done behind the scenes more than

the things that he's going out and saying, look what I just signed, like tax reform? It's both of the things. It's both where we ended on judges and where we started on the economy, right? That if you come to Trump with the presumption that he's bad, you get confirmation every day from his tweets and other antics that like, yeah, this is a bad guy. But if you are sympathetic to him and to conservative politics, he has managed the economy well. People are doing OK in their jobs and their careers. And he is putting conservative movement people in lots of influential positions in the regulatory agencies and on the judiciary.

And fundamentally, that's what a political movement wants from a leader is to sort of keep faith with it and with its own personnel. And Trump, for all his eccentricity, has been very down the line with those appointments. And those kinds of accomplishments, what, supersede things like bullying a teenage environmental activist or saying they're good people on both sides or even being impeached by the House? You see a lot of different views that Republicans express privately about some of this Trump stuff. But I do think that what it comes down to at the end of the day is that politics is about acquiring and wielding power. And in most respects, Trump has helped the conservative movement obtain and wield power on the issues that they really care about.

Appointments to regulatory agencies, appointments to judges, the tax code, he has moved the ball forward in the ways that conservatives want. Some of them are enthusiastic about him, some of them feel stuck with him, but all of them agree that they are glad he's in the White House. Let's just say, hypothetically,

he ends up being a one-term president, and we are really judging his presidency on the three years that we have thus far. Is he more of a George-term president. And we are really judging his presidency on the three years that we have thus far. Is he more of a George H.W. Bush, more of a Jimmy Carter? Where does he fall in terms of accomplishments and impact on this country? I think if you limit it to one term, he has had less impact than most recent presidents, that these regulatory changes are consequential and they impact people's lives, but they are also not that hard to reverse.

The tax changes are important, but the tax code is always changing. They're always passing new tax laws. He has not effectuated any big structural legislative changes in the way that President Obama did, President Bush did, President Clinton did, President Reagan did, is more similar to George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, who all left behind fairly thin resumes. And so far, I mean, for all the emotional energy that has been expended on Trump, he has not had as big a policy impact as most recent presidents. If you're an undecided voter in the next year and you're doing well financially,

do you think Trump has a strong argument, even considering impeachment and any other of the social flaws that you may see in him as a candidate for president in 2020? If it becomes an election that's about economic management, then Trump has a very, very strong position. But if it becomes an argument that's about, you know, is this the kind of leadership that speaks to Americans' highest aspirations, you know, then it's not. And in particular, if it becomes an argument about healthcare policy, that has been very bad for Republicans historically. In 2018, there was a lot of focus on health.

Democrats have a lot of trust on that issue. Republicans have very little. Trump has not done anything to help people with their problems there. And that's what Democrats are hoping. They would like to have an election that's about the tangible ways in which the government can help you with your healthcare costs, your higher education, other problems like that. Trump would like to make it about very big picture, the economy and culture. Well, I look forward to discussing it with you over and over again in the new year, Matthew. Over and over again.

It will never end. Thank you. Matthew Iglesias, a.k.a. Mateo Church, hosts a podcast at Vox called The Weeds. It's where he really lets his Dietz flag fly. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Our executive producer was Irene Noguchi. Irene is moving on up and moving on out. She was the very first person to join me in an empty corner

of this Vox office here in Washington, D.C. We together hired a team, dreamt up a show, and she has been leading the show and the team ever since. Her work has been tireless from day one. And along with Afim and Noam, Amina, Halima, Bridget, and Breakmaster, I will be thanking her forever for her work. That is facts. Olivia said so.

Thank you, Irene. We wish you all the best. This is also the last time I will tell you that our show is produced in association with Stitcher. In the new year, we are doubling down on the Vox Media Podcast Network and amicably ending our co-production partnership with Stitcher. Bottomless thanks to all of our friends at Stitcher

who helped bring our show into existence and supported it for two years. How much do we owe you? In the words of 21 Savage, a lot. Your favorite all-killer, no-filler news explainer is back on the 2nd of January, 2020. Shoutouts to Barbara Walters. Thank you for listening to Today Explained. Have a very happy and healthy new year.