What if Joe Biden was the architect of Donald Trump’s return with great fanfare in 2024? By clinging to his candidacy despite the pleas of his own camp which urged him to withdraw from the race, by failing to curb galloping inflation – since the start of his mandate, prices have increased by an average of 20% in the States -United – and by languishing in tackling the migration crisis – which is among the top concerns of Americans – the Democratic president could well have paved the Republican billionaire’s path to the White House.
Especially since the former real estate tycoon has built a reputation for “doing what he says”. And when what he “says” is not “done”, Donald Trump shifts the blame to the so-called bureaucratic mille-feuille which is ossifying the administration across the Atlantic. Based on the results of his first mandate, Lauric Henneton, lecturer at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin and author of the work The American dream put to the test by Donald Trump (ed. Vendémiaire, 2020) looks ahead to the next four years during which the MAGA champion (Make America Great Again) could give free rein to his instinct much more.
L’Express: Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump hammered home the idea that he was the only one to “do what he says”. Were his campaign promises fulfilled during his first term (2017-2021)?
Lauric Henneton: I would rather say that he says he does what he says. The reality is actually less flattering. The most symbolic example of his first mandate is this famous wall on the border with Mexico that he was never able to build. He was able to patch up portions that had been built by his predecessors, but he did not “build the wall” as he promised. Simply because he did not have the necessary preparation at the start, and then he no longer had a House of Representatives with a Republican majority (after the 2018 midterms) and Nancy Pelosi made sure to defeat him on this. point. On the other hand, he made historic tax cuts, he tried as best he could to regulate immigration by decree (but many were overturned by the federal courts) and he turned the table on the relationship with China. This is its main victory, since the Biden administration has not touched its customs barriers and has not been more conciliatory with Beijing. His diplomacy was also quite erratic, but to his credit we must credit the Abraham Accords, which outlined a complete overhaul of relations in the Middle East.
Has he implemented his program more than Joe Biden has done over the past four years?
We can’t really compare. Certainly, both began their mandate with a majority in the House and the Senate, but Donald Trump in a context of economic growth inherited from the Obama years, Biden in a context of a rare economic and health crisis magnitude. Joe Biden obtained some major bipartisan texts, and could have added one, on immigration, if Donald Trump had not opposed them. This is the main difference: Biden has done more to produce bipartisan texts, supposed to enact a post-Trump national reconciliation.
Wouldn’t the lack of performance from the Democratic camp under Joe Biden’s mandate ultimately be one of the primary reasons for Donald Trump’s return to the White House? The New Yorker headline Wednesday November 6: “Donald Trump’s Second Term is Joe Biden’s real Legacy” (in French, “The second term of Donald Trump is the true legacy of Joe Biden”)…
It’s cruel but it’s a way of looking at things. Indeed, we can remember from the Biden administration that it is the one which pulled the United States out of the zone of Covid turbulence, but it is also the one which was neither able nor able to lower prices at their pre-Covid level. The consequence is this magical thinking among many voters: by voting Trump, they think they are starting the time machine in order to lower prices.
During his first term, Donald Trump regularly complained of being hampered in his actions by too much bureaucracy. During his 2024 campaign, he reiterated that he wanted to get rid of it. Can he really?
What is very clear this time is that there will only be people around him united by their absolute loyalty to the man and the Trumpist project. And behind the scenes, Donald Trump wants to put in place zealous civil servants to prevent any internal dissent. If he succeeds, we could then see what we did not see during the first term, namely a chemically pure version of Trumpism. And there will be no “adults in the room” as they say in English, to reason with him, especially internationally. The safeguards will no longer be there, and neither will the checks and balances (Congress, Supreme Court). Congress could oppose certain foreign policy decisions, however, including Republicans, but overall it will be able to give free rein to its instincts.
On the international level, he claims to be able to resolve the two conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East in a few days. What is its real room for maneuver?
The international is its reserved domain in two respects: diplomacy and commercial policy, therefore customs barriers. He’s very transactional, so he picks up the phone and makes deals. However, he must be a winner, or at least appear to be a winner, otherwise he looks weak. And he hates that. So he can make proposals to the different parties, in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine, but his means of persuasion and deterrence must still work. And on this point there remain quite a few question marks.
Can this obsession with immediate results which serves as the basis for his populist discourse be interpreted as the legacy of his career as a businessman?
That’s what he wants us to think, of course. And perceptions are essential. But the reality of his record as an entrepreneur is quite uneven. His various advisors talked a lot about his very short attention span.
A Trump-Musk duo in government is, in a way, the arrival at the head of the White House of the business world. Should we be worried about it?
We can especially be concerned about the disappearance of counter-powers: if the Trump-infused Republicans control the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court, and the federal agencies are also largely Trump-infused, then Musk or others will no longer have the safeguards that we expect in a rule of law. Conflicts of interest could multiply and an Elon Musk associated with power could use the levers of this power to harm his competitors. The main problem we see is this possible disappearance of barriers within the system.
Elon Musk has already announced that he has identified 2 trillion cuts in public spending. Is this feasible without drying up public services?
This is a considerable sum, and one wonders how he was able to carry out this audit, or if it is a bluff. We can estimate that cuts of this dizzying magnitude would go well beyond the defatting of the mammoth. And it would become a political problem if federal programs, which Trump voters also perceive, are cut. Elon Musk must therefore keep in mind that he must not harm the interests of his “boss”, even if he can no longer be re-elected.
Does Donald Trump embody the locomotive of populism even more than in 2016?
In 2016 he was the improbable kick in the anthill of the system, without much hope of an election. In 2024, it is more confirmation that a certain form of populism, correctly embodied, can establish itself lastingly in the political landscape. But for this you need both a favorable context, particularly a clear one, and an extraordinary personality. Because others Trumpists-who-aren’t-Trump failed quite miserably in 2022 and 2024, in states like Pennsylvania with Doug Mastriano and North Carolina with Mark Robinson. Trumpism without Trump is not attractive. Trump’s victory is therefore paradoxically a mixed victory for the populists, because it is not necessarily replicable elsewhere. And it is also very largely a defeat for the Democrats, who are losing a lot of voters, while the Republicans are making very little progress in absolute terms, which no one really pays attention to.
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