How Biden and Trump’s first 100 days compare

Amidst all the hot takes on President Biden’s historic first 100 days it should be noted that the competitive bar was set unfairly low four years ago. Former President Trump’s first 100 days were a sad joke played on a distracted nation. I should know, I was there.

Regardless of whether you favor the more progressive agenda shouldered forward by Biden or the anti-government, racist politics of Donald Trump, the comparison comes down to one question — did the president move the needle in the first 100 days?

Biden has surrounded himself with sharp policy experts, hit the ground running, established a clear and aggressive agenda and changed the tone of political discourse in Washington, D.C. and nationwide. With his address to Congress Wednesday he anchored his 100-day efforts in civility and the ability of the nation to overcome adversity.

Trump’s team likely never expected to win the election, and the first 100 days showed it. Despite tweets and full-throated rhetoric about bringing America back to its glory days of whiteness and privilege, Trump’s governing strategy was missing in action, and his early hires were a who’s who of ideologues and policy novices. Veteran, good-faith conservatives were passed over in favor of sycophants.

The only order of the day was straight out of Marvel comic books — Hulk, smash. When your governing principle states that government is bad and must be dismantled, and your sapling-green crew is trained only in misinformation, your eye is not exactly on the public service ball.  

From where I sat at the Interior Department in 2017 the first 100 days was a period of ominous quiet as we waited for Trump’s skeletal transition team to blossom into a workforce of busy, white lobbyists rushing around to find threads to pull on. They did not materialize.

Not to say the Trump team wasn’t comprised of white lobbyists, it was, but there just weren’t very many of them. A handful of older, male veterans of the Bush administrations were staffed by a handful of eager white campaign staff who had no idea what the Interior Department does. The career staff, 70,000 strong, stood by awaiting direction and was left to wonder if the Trump rhetoric was just too toxic for the experienced conservatives to come work for him, or if the ideologues barred them from entry. Either way, for the first 100 days, the political team bent on hobbling the agency was itself hobbled by the same lack of expertise seen elsewhere in the administration.

Given four years with the keys to the stadium, even this clumsy crew was able to do considerable damage to the field of play. Even an American League pitcher hits the ball from time to time. With the goal of deleting every Obama administration action they swung the bat wildly — with particular vigor if the ball had the green patina of climate change or the environment.

In the end, however, they whiffed most of the time. Much of the Trump deregulation agenda cracked up on the shoals of the American judicial system, while other actions were hobbled by their own disregard for public process and a dangerous lack of transparency.

Over the course of four years they did manage to marginalize experts and scientists and absolutely detonate morale at the agencies, but did they move the needle in the first 100 days? Not in the least.

The Biden team could have simply shown up for a few good practice swings and would still have drawn a murmur of approval from the crowd. It was simply unfair to the last guy that Biden rose to the moment, in a time of multiple national crises, and hit it out of the park.

Joel Clement is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a senior fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Prior to joining UCS and the Belfer Center, Clement served as an executive for seven years at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Since resigning from public service in 2017, he has received multiple awards for ethics, courage, and his dedication to the role of science in public policy. Follow him on Twitter: @jclementmaine.