Trump was worst president for workers in modern history
And Biden/Harris has the best record for both jobs and labor. It's bizarre this just doesn't get mentioned.
The fact checkers have tied themselves into Gummy Pretzels to try to disprove a fact that Bill Clinton noted in his speech at the DNC, “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times, even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans 1.”
Their best rejoinders are, “What about Reagan?!” or “You can’t blame Trump for the pandemic he did nothing to prevent and everything to make worse!”
Ok, let’s give Republicans the 16 million jobs created under Reagan and the 6.4 million created under Trump before helped drive us into our homes to Zoom our aunts and watch Tiger King for two years, and you’re still at about:
Democrats 50, Republicans 23.4 million.
Still more two-to-one. A responsible parent would still invoke the T-ball mercy rule.
You can claim that presidents don’t directly create jobs, and this entire metric is shady. That’s like saying, “The coach doesn’t win the game!” Sure, that’s technically accurate. But why else did you hire the coach? And you’d blame the coach if he lost or the president if the country lost a ton of jobs, the same way Fox blames the president if the Saudis hike gas prices or a non-white person commits a mass shooting.
Donald Trump doesn’t get blamed for his horrendous jobs record for numerous reasons. Psychologically, as Melissa Ryan noted, we long for our last normal week and have blocked out as much as 2020 and 2021 as possible. There’s no coordinated left-leaning media that functions as a nonstop Super PAC attacking Trump. And even if there were, his never-ending “Gish Gallop” of lies, dog whistles, and cognitive irresponsibility make it challenging to focus on any single aspect of his horribleness.
But the most pernicious argument is that everything was all good before 2020, and Trump bumbled us into the worst pandemic of the century with the worst response in the world. As Josh Bivens at EPI noted in October 2020 that ignores the harm Trump did as the first president of this century to enter office without a recession to manage:
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration was squandering the pockets of strength in the American economy it had inherited.
Broad-based prosperity requires strength on the supply, demand, and distributive sides of the economy, and Trump administration policies were either weak or outright damaging on these fronts.
Demand: Most of the Trump tax cuts went to already-rich corporations and households, who tend to save rather than spend most of any extra dollar they’re given.
Supply: Business investment plummeted under the Trump administration, despite their lavishing tax cuts on corporate business.
Distribution: The Trump administration undercut labor standards and rules that can buttress workers’ bargaining power.
As bad as Trump was on jobs, he was even worse on workers.
The litany of attacks he leveled at labor in the country has largely been swept away like the memories of hunting neighbors for their toilet paper. And his Supreme Court picks, with their Gilded Age antipathy for workers’ rights, will be doing damage to our families and paychecks for generations.
In contrast, the Biden/Harris administration has been the best at creating jobs in modern American history, a story that seldom gets told anywhere but on Biden’s social media accounts.
Even more importantly, Biden/Harris has been the best since FDR at doing something everyone agrees the executive branch has the power and prerogative to do: Expanding worker power.
The combination of elevating workers while taking on the abuses of concentrated corporate power, which is at the core of what we should call The Quiet New Deal, had led us to the best job market of our lifetime and worried capital so much that they were trying to engineer an ouster of Joe Biden of the ticket that would have pushed Kamala Harris off the ticket as well. That’s how good they’ve been for workers.
We’ve got the best administration for jobs and workers versus the worst president for jobs and workers ever.
Put whatever asterisk you need on that. Just be sure to point it out.
