There is a saying in Washington to the effect of “credit has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” It’s not uncommon to hear politicians from across the political spectrum try to take credit for something they may not have been necessarily apart. With respect to giving and taking credit, it’s been interesting to see how Democrats, like Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have come forward to try to claim credit for some of President Trump’s accomplishments.
We begin with President-elect Biden’s pledge to administer 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots in his first 100 days in office, which comes down to 1 million shots per day. When that goal was reached last month, Biden took a victory lap and doubled down on increasing that number in the weeks ahead. However, what Biden left out was that it was President Trump, whose administration is responsible – but never given credit – for the speedy development of those vaccines, who himself pledged that America would be administering 1 million vaccine doses per day once FDA approval was given and manufacturing began. Trump himself laughed at Biden for stealing his talking point. But it wouldn’t be the last time Biden took credit for Trump’s prescient accomplishments.
On national security, one month into his Presidency, the Biden State Department tried to take credit for a series of moves by the Trump administration to obstruct, delay, and ultimately prevent Russia from completing their Nordstream 2 pipeline that would bring Russian natural gas to Europe. State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters in late February that Biden White House policies together with the Democrat-controlled Congress had been “working in good effect” to curtail the project after 18 companies had scaled back their participation in the pipeline’s construction. In response, Associated Press reporter Matt Lee pointedly asked if the Biden administration was taking credit for this development, knowing well that the Trump administration had slapped sanctions on Nordstream 2 back in December 2020, warned those same European companies in early January that they would be sanctioned if they continued involvement in the project, and then slapped additional sanctions on a Russian cargo ship the day before Biden was sworn in as President. Two thumbs up for another Team Biden win.
Then there’s former President Obama, who seeing the economy roaring, tried to take credit for Trump’s economic boom despite the former’s dismal record of job creation, record-high unemployment, a molasses-paced economic recovery, and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. On February 17, 2020, Obama claimed that his signing of the Recovery Act ten years prior was responsible for the economic success of President Trump, three years into his administration. To put things into proper context, Texas Public Policy Foundation VP Chuck DeVore wrote in Forbes that “in the last 30 months of President Obama’s term, manufacturing employment grew by 185,000 or 1.5%. In President Trump’s first 30 months, manufacturers added 499,000 jobs, expanding by 4.0%. In the same 30-month time span during the mature, post-recovery phase of the business cycle, some 314,000 more manufacturing jobs were added under Trump than under Obama, a 170% advantage.”
Clearly, the Democrats’ job-killing socialist agenda hasn’t worked, so they look to Republican accomplishments to pad their resumes thinking Americans are none the wiser. But they aren’t fooling all Americans. Especially those who can filter out the noise and see clearly that President Trump’s economic success belongs to him and Republicans in Congress who passed one of the largest tax reform laws in over 30 years, the Biden administration’s virus response was largely a continuation of Trump-era policies, and President Trump’s foreign policy has put the administration in a commanding position that the new administration must appreciate. And we will keep reminding Americans of those facts in the months ahead.
Bob Carlstrom is President of AMAC Action