How Trump's ruthless first year erased the Biden presidency
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President Trump has spent his first year in office treating Joe Biden's presidency as a historical aberration — not just undoing his policies, but casting his entire term as illegitimate.
Why it matters: Presidencies usually fade. But in just one year, Biden's has been reduced to a footnote by a successor committed to dismantling every pillar of Washington's old liberal order.
1. Democracy: Biden built his presidency around the idea that American democracy had been assaulted by Trump 1.0 — that Jan. 6 was a defining national trauma requiring accountability and moral clarity.
- Trump has inverted that premise, pardoning thousands of Jan. 6 defendants, appointing 2020 election deniers to senior positions and deploying state resources to whitewash the Capitol assault.
- Bent on retribution after surviving four prosecutions, Trump has targeted political enemies with investigations and indictments that have shattered any pretense of the Justice Department's independence.
2. Racial justice: Trump has purged DEI frameworks from government and waged a broad campaign against universities and institutions he views as enforcers of the Biden-era's "woke" agenda.
- Trump has paired that rollback with explicit racial grievance, arguing that civil rights protections have harmed white Americans while repositioning the federal government as their defender.
- That shift has coincided with an aggressive crackdown on both illegal and legal immigration, with Trump singling out communities of color — including Somali Americans in Minnesota — while extending special refugee protections to white South Africans.
3. Bureaucracy: Biden governed on the premise that expertise and professional institutions deserved deference, particularly after COVID and the chaos of Trump's first term.
- Trump has rejected that premise wholesale, firing thousands of career officials, imposing loyalty tests across the federal workforce and gutting independent agencies once insulated from political control.
- "Trust the experts" has become a relic of COVID, with Trump's elevation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other heterodox figures helping upend decades of public-health consensus.
4. Climate change: Biden treated global warming as an existential threat and organizing principle of government, weaving it through economic policy, diplomacy and national security.
- Trump, who has called climate change a "hoax," has waged war on clean energy and championed fossil fuels as the key to unlocking lower prices and powering the AI revolution.
- The level of erasure cannot be overstated: Less than four years after Congress passed the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history, the topic has completely receded from the national agenda.
5. Multilateralism: Biden's foreign policy was anchored in the idea that American power flowed through alliances — with NATO unity and support for Ukraine as its clearest expressions.
- One year later, Trump is forging a new world order in which great powers make the rules — alienating traditional allies with threats of territorial conquest and economic coercion.
What they're saying: "The American people sent President Trump back to the White House because they wanted him to undo every single disastrous policy decision Biden made — erasing his mess is actually the point," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
Between the lines: The ideological differences between Trump and Biden are stark. But Trump's drive to expunge his predecessor's legacy is also deeply personal.
- He has never abandoned his baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and he regards the prosecutions he faced while out of office as an attempt by Biden's Justice Department to destroy his life.
- Trump has even replaced Biden's portrait inside the White House with an image of an autopen — mocking the 83-year-old Democrat and casting his presidency as a farce.
The bottom line: Biden's fate suggests presidential legacies now last only as long as their successors allow them to. Trump, who's determined to leave a physical imprint on Washington, is betting his will prove more durable.
