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CNN
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If you’re looking for consistency, you’ve come to the wrong country.
It’s a new era of whiplash in America, where presidents are settling into a multi-year cycle of correcting each other.
President Donald Trump’s first day in office set the stage for efforts to undo everything Joe Biden and his administration have done. President Trump’s most shocking actions were his mass pardons for those indicted in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his challenge to constitutional birthright citizenship. The latter is already the subject of a lawsuit from a Democratic state attorney general.
But much of what Trump has done is to replace Biden’s four years with Trump’s two, undo Biden’s immigration policies, and end government diversity programs and climate change efforts. It was specifically aimed at strengthening political control of the federal bureaucracy.
President Trump’s actions mean Biden will take office as president, calling for the reversal of several of President Trump’s immigration policies, restoring protections for government employees, expanding government diversity and inclusion programs, and reversing President Trump’s environmental policies. It’s a mirror image of the executive order signed four years ago.
What one president did, the next president is trying to undo.
The country’s highest peak should be known as Denali, the traditional Alaskan name meaning “great one,” or as Mount McKinley in honor of the assassinated Republican president of Ohio in the early 20th century. It’s like a Rorschach test. for a moment.
President Barack Obama renamed it Denali. President Donald Trump is trying to ignore Alaska’s Republican Party and change its name to Mount McKinley.
But naming the mountain seems trivial compared to other zigzag projects undertaken by the government in recent years.
Paris Climate Agreement: Inside and outside the country
► President Obama joined the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016.
► President Trump withdrew the US in 2017.
► Biden rejoined in 2021.
► Now President Trump is trying to pull the U.S. out again, arguing that the U.S. doesn’t need to do much to address global climate change.
The trend goes back even further, when President Bill Clinton’s administration agreed to join the international Kyoto Protocol, which predated the Paris climate accord but only since President George W. Bush’s administration withdrew the United States.
► President Harry Truman joined the World Health Organization in 1948. “We must, and we will, give freely of our great knowledge to liberate people around the world from the pervasive horrors of preventable disease,” President Truman said. said at the time.
► President Trump began the process of withdrawing the United States from the WHO in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, complaining that the United States was providing too much money compared to China. said.
► Biden reinstated the US into the WHO on his first day in office in 2021.
► Trump restarted the process of pulling the United States on his first day in office in 2025.
President Trump, frustrated with the “deep state” hostile to him, tried in 2020 to reclassify some federal employees involved in policy-making as “Schedule F,” making it easier to fire them.
Biden halted that process in 2021 and went a step further by signing an order that included new protections for federal employees.
President Trump is working to reinstate Schedule F, saying the bureaucracy should be more responsive to his wishes. “Every authority they have is delegated to them by the President, and they are accountable to the President, the only member of the executive branch,” Trump wrote.
CNN reports that critics argue that Trump’s efforts to instill loyalty in federal employees to him are a result of a meritocracy created just before McKinley took office to replace the corrupt spoils system. They say they are concerned that this will undermine professional civil service services.
Trump 1.0 sought to rescind President Obama’s ban on oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
Trump 2.0 will now try to reverse Biden’s ban on offshore oil drilling. The United States already produces more oil than any other country, so it’s not clear how much additional oil drilling Trump’s actions will generate.
Meanwhile, President Trump is halting Biden’s effort to eliminate land and water leases for wind energy.
And in the automotive field, President Obama sought to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, including by issuing rules to limit exhaust gas emissions.
President Trump rolled back the regulations again in 2020, and Biden took another stab at emissions and pushed for electric and hybrid vehicles. With or without the U.S. government, the auto market is already moving toward EVs, but President Trump plans to roll back these as well.
During his first administration, President Trump made a major effort to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was put into effect by President Bill Clinton.
President Trump negotiated an alternative to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, one of the successes of his first term. However, in the early stages of his second term, President Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting February 1st. These import taxes seem to jeopardize their own treaties and make things more expensive for Americans, but they do. the prospect of new concessions from Canada and Mexico;
The real news on tariffs may be that President Trump has postponed talk of broad new tariffs on all imports, especially Chinese products, for now.
For the record, Mr. Biden maintained Mr. Trump’s first-term tariffs on China, proof that not everything one president does can be undone by the next.
