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Biden’s coming Trump stump- POLITICO

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Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice.

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If you’ve followed any number of Democratic operatives on Twitter in recent days, you’ve likely come across a particular genre of bragging. it it goes something like this.

Within a year, President JOE BIDEN managed to achieve the main goals of the policy that DONALD TRUMP pursued at various times but never realized.

The basis of the claim is that Trump talked about passing infrastructure reform, lowering the cost of prescription drug prices, increasing US competition with China and even pursuing modest gun regulation. Biden, after signing the major health and climate bill last week, has done away with all that and more.

But the boast, echoed by the White House, isn’t really an attempt to co-opt Trump’s policy legacy. No one at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. don’t believe that Trump had some kind of youthful, whimsical enthusiasm for these ideas. They don’t give him any credit for them either. Many of these have been standard pursuits and democratic foundations for decades. The novelty of Trump was that he was the Republican president who triangulated around them.

But the boast is still notable because it further illustrates the favorable political climate in which the White House believes it is now. Not only does the party — and Biden specifically — have the legislative track record to run, it has ready rebuttals to its critics. We are not in the era of hostile town hall meetings like those that faced Democrats in the summer of 2009.

“Obamacare was immediately underwater and unpopular,” he said JOHN ANZALONE, one of Biden’s top pollsters, who helped with the poll BARACK OBAMA’health care initiative on its tortuous path to passage.

“There was at least a quarter of a billion spent against it,” he speculated about opposition to the Affordable Care Act. “The fact is that Biden’s agenda… every component of it was popular in the high 60s and low 70s. Americans can digest it. The ACA was a complicated concept and easy to demonize.”

The current White House certainly feels that way. Already, the contours of their counterattack have taken shape.

  • The billions of dollars the Inflation Reduction Act is sending to the IRS? This is law enforcement support.
  • The $370 billion it offers for climate change? Tax credits and technological innovation are alternatives to government mandated climate regulations, which Republicans have rejected.
  • Feds negotiating the price of a handful of prescription drugs? This is what Trump himself wanted. Here is a video clip to prove it.

In the end, these arguments—alongside the larger debate over the Inflation Reduction Act—may be largely immaterial to the medium-term landscape. Inflation remains the core of Republican opposition to Biden. And, if anything, there is evidence to suggest that any recent uptick in the president’s standing is due to falling gas prices rather than a public reaction to legislative momentum.