What did Trump actually do when he was president?
This grotesque hagiography of Trump’s allegedly historically successful presidency is beyond parody. Even beyond the horror of his pandemic response was the endless chaos, the terrorist attacks, the massive foreign policy embarrassments, the rampant corruption. It was a shitshow from start to finish.
But apparently people have forgotten what it was like and see him as some sort of benign caretaker at worst which is stunning. He did things. And they weren’t good.
In the wake of his startling announcement that he planned to cut SS and medicare Jonathan Cohn took a look at his actual record:
Instead of imagining how he might govern, you can look at what he actually did — especially on three issues that matter a lot to most Americans.
Trump’s History On Abortion And Obamacare
One of those issues is reproductive rights, which my colleague Alanna Vagianos has covered in depth.
The issue has proved politically toxic for Republicans ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ending the federal guarantee of abortion rights. In 2022 and 2023, anger over that decision helped save the Democrats from big losses; in 2024, it could help Biden keep his job.
Trump has promised to find a position on reproductive rights that will “make people happy,” as he put it on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” But in that same interview, he also said that could mean a federal ban of “a number of weeks or months or however you want to define it.” And according to The New York Times, he has privately told advisers that he thinks a 16-week ban makes sense. Such a ban would apply even in those states that have acted through legislation or constitutional amendment to keep abortion legal.
If you are trying to figure out how Trump would actually approach reproductive rights in a second term, you can try to extrapolate from those statements. Or you could look at what he actually did the last time he was in office: He filled the executive branch and judiciary with conservatives opposed to abortion rights, including the three Supreme Court justices who made the Dobbs majority possible.
“[For] 54 years, they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it,” Trump said in January at a Fox News “town hall” event. “And I’m proud to have done it.”
A second issue is the future of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
Republican attempts to repeal the program in 2017 sparked a furious backlash, and were perhaps the single biggest reason that Democrats took back the House in 2018.
Since then, the program has become more entrenched, with the number of Americans signing up for coverage on its marketplaces at a record level and Medicaid expansion now operating in all but 10 states. Approval of the program has never been higher, according to polling.
Obamacare was a fixture of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric, and was frequently the first thing he mentioned in speeches. He has been less vocal about it this time around, though he has also said that Republicans should “never give up” on repeal and that he’s currently “looking at alternatives” to the existing program.
Here, too, you can try to discern a position or commitment in these statements. Or you can look at what Trump actually did when he was in office, when he spent nearly his first full year trying to wipe the program off the books.
Those repeal bills that provoked all the public anger? They had his full support. And despite his promises of “great health care” with “insurance for everybody,” the actual legislation he tried desperately to push through Congress would have likely left millions more uninsured and dramatically rolled back protections for people with preexisting conditions.
Trump’s History On Prescription Drug Prices
A common element between the abortion and Obamacare issues has been Trump’s deference to Republican leaders and their allies, whether it was letting the right-wing Federalist Society hand-pick court nominees or turning the details of ACA repeal over to anti-government, pro-market crusaders like then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
That’s not quite the case for a third issue: prescription drug prices.
Trump has demonstrated a real willingness to break with conservatives — and conservative orthodoxy — by attacking the drug industry. As president, he put forward a series of executive actions that many analysts thought might reduce drug prices at the margins. (His administration rushed them through the regulatory process and courts ended up blocking several.)
But Trump had a chance to do a lot more. In 2020, Democrats used their control of the House to pass a sweeping bill that would have given the federal government far more power to set drug prices. Over in the Senate, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) put together bipartisan legislation that, although weaker than the House version, could have been the basis for a House-Senate compromise on lowering prices for millions.
Their bill never got to the Senate floor, because Republicans controlled the chamber and Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Kentucky, wouldn’t allow it. Trump could have pressured GOP leadership in the Senate to relent. He didn’t. He also backed off earlier, campaign-era promises to endorse the kinds of reforms that were in the House bill.
That wasn’t the end of the story for prescription drug reform. When Biden became president and Democrats got full control of Congress for two years, they passed a version of the 2020 House bill. And it has started to take effect. The federal government is negotiating with drug manufacturers over what Medicare will pay for 10 high-cost pharmaceuticals, while seniors for the first time have protections against catastrophic out-of-pocket costs.
Biden has proposed building on those reforms — for example, by making more drugs subject to direct price negotiations. Prominent Republicans want to go in the opposite direction and are already talking about repealing the negotiation provision. They are also talking about national abortion bans, as well as changes to Medicaid and private insurance regulation that look a lot like Obamacare repeal, even if they aren’t using that name.
That’s what he did (or didn’t do) during his first term, the golden MAGA years everyone is so anxious to repeat. And they ended with a disastrous response to the once in a century threat of the COVID pandemic. Don’t forget what really happened.
By the way, guess who was totally on top of the pandemic threat?
Don’t you wish that guy had been in charge when COVID hit?