Former President Donald Trump was quick to call out his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, during Thursday’s presidential debate with President Joe Biden.
Trump wasted no time in bringing up Reagan, a favorite of nearly all old-school Republicans and others, seemingly to make his point on abortion. A more important review of “Morning in America” is the former president’s succinct and unsurprising overview of his economic agenda.
The economy, and inflation in particular, was the first topic raised in the debate by CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. In his opening remarks to the showdown, Trump repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden’s economy and called on viewers to recall his pre-pandemic tenure and push him back into office.
Inflation and tax cuts
Trump has repeatedly called his first term “the greatest economy in the history of our country” and recalled low inflation, but that was before the pandemic. Trump said his administration spent the necessary money to prevent the economy from slipping into another recession reminiscent of the Great Depression.
When Biden pressed him on the lopsided nature of the 2017 tax cuts, Trump responded, after suggesting it was the only thing Biden had said right so far: “I also gave you the biggest tax cut, which was for the richest A small number of people bring huge savings.”
Biden, on the other hand, has stressed that Trump brought his economy back to normal after it was in “free fall” – and, of course, Trump countered that Biden inherited little to no inflation. (Americans have long cited inflation as the top issue facing the country. Inflation concerns have also recently driven optimism among business owners to its lowest point in a decade.)
Trump’s second-term agenda closely mirrors his first: more tax cuts, widespread deregulation and increased energy production. During his first term, Trump’s plans, while adding more than $8 trillion to the U.S. debt, ultimately resulted in low unemployment and decent wage growth, as well as the low unemployment rates the U.S. has enjoyed since the 1990s. Inflation. Trump used the final moments of the debate to once again appeal to Americans’ wallets, painting Biden as a tax-raising bureaucrat.
“He wants to quadruple your taxes. He wants to quadruple everyone’s taxes,” Trump said, adding, “When we cut taxes … we have all these companies bringing money back to our Country,” again this is an exaggeration.
Reagan: The original MAGA
Compared with Bidenomics, which relies on multiple levers to “build the economy from the bottom up,” Trump’s proposal may benefit from its radical simplicity. Demands for tax cuts tapped into Americans’ widespread aversion to taxes and bureaucracy, traits that the original celebrity president, Ronald Reagan, exploited brilliantly during his two terms. By naming Ronald Reagan, who coined the slogan “Make America Great Again,” Trump not only softened the slogan, but also aligned himself with one of the most popular presidents in American history.
Reagan came to power in the wake of severe inflation, unleashing a trickle-down economic agenda that would influence the Republican Party for the next three decades, dismantling the New Deal framework that had shaped much of the 20th century. Reagan pushed through the largest tax cuts in U.S. history while boosting economic growth, accelerating growing inequality, and setting the country on a path to ever-widening peacetime deficits.
In his closing arguments, Biden emphasized the need for a fair tax system and said he would continue to fight inflation. Trump ended the debate by returning to the war, suggesting that it would not have happened if he were president, while once again touting his policies of tax cuts and regulations that would make everything great again if he were re-elected.
