Who did it better? Comparing Trump and Biden's first two years as President

Donald Trump was a bit of a wrecking ball when he entered office in 2017 and the first two years of his presidency were a rollercoaster of ups and downs. Joe Biden also had a rocky start to his presidency.

But how do Biden's first two years in the White house stack up against the former president's first twenty-four months in office? Biden did have a lot of successes but he also suffered some major failures that have affected his presidency.

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Just like Trump, Biden entered his third year in office embroiled in a big classified documents controversy after secret Obama-era documents were discovered in his home. This mired Biden's reputation at a time when he could least afford it. 

“When that information is found, it diminishes the stature of any person who is in possession of it, because it’s not supposed to happen,” Senator D. Durbin told the hosts of CNN’s State of the Union at the time. 

“Whether it was the fault of a staffer or an attorney, it makes no difference. The elected official bears ultimate responsibility,” the Illinois Democrat added. But how did this affect Biden compared to Trump's classified documents problem?

Funnily enough, Trump was facing his own inquiries into the handling of classified documents in late 2022 after the National Archives and Records Administration blasted him publically for not returning a number of the sensitive files after he left office. 

But two years into Trump's presidency, the former president was suffering from a much more complicated scandal than the mere mishandling of confidential documents.

Trump was facing the longest government shutdown in modern American history and it didn't turn out well for him at the time. 

Over 800,000 government employees went without pay for more than a month according to a 2019 Politico report.

The shutdown chaos only ended after Trump conceded his demands for congress to include extra cash to help fund his absurd border wall project.

Trump started his presidency with the false claim that his inauguration drew the largest crowd in American history, and the lies only got larger and more absured from that point on. 

In his first 100 days, Trump signed a number of Executive Orders that rolled back several Obama-era regulations, sparked widespread criticism for his travel ban that targeted Muslim countries, and introduced a set of tax laws that favored the extremely wealthy. 

Michael Flynn also resigned in the first 100 days of Trump's presidency after his dealings with Russia were revealed, a controversy that helped spark Robert Muller's special investigation later in Trump’s presidency. 

The rest of Trump’s next two years were chaos as every week he seemed to be embroiled in a new scandal from something he did or said. 

“Trump’s first year was a public opinion disaster,” wrote Bloomberg journalist Jonathan Bernstein in a 2019 article, “he was almost always the lowest-ranked president.”

“His second year was better,” Bernstein added. “He rallied into the low 40s for most of the year, sometimes even moving up a bit higher as we reached a point in their presidencies where one of Trump’s predecessors had slumped.”

Bernstein went on to point out that during the first two years of his presidency, the U.S. deficit got worse, America’s trade deficit increased, and financial markets dropped significantly. 

It wasn’t all bad though. Under Trump, regulation in the U.S. actually increased, manufacturing job gains accelerated, and illegal immigration levels at the southern border began tapering off. 

But in the end, Trump was still Trump. The man made "8158 false or misleading claims" in his first two years in office according to the Washington Post, which didn't sit well with most Americans. 

On the other hand, Biden’s first two years in office weren’t as chaotic as Trump’s but they still tested what the American people were willing to deal with from their Commander-in-Chief. 

In Biden’s first 100 days, he was fairly popular with the American people as he got down to the business of governing without all the drama of the previous four years. 

“Biden entered the White House with an expansive agenda that includes taming the coronavirus, reshaping the economic recovery, overhauling climate policy and rethinking the power of tech companies,” according to Politico.

Unfortunately, Biden’s early popularity wouldn’t last as misstep after misstep caused Americans to lose faith in his administration. 

Biden’s fall from grace started with his administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan, a complicated holdover policy agreed to during the Trump era that would turn into a complete disaster for the Biden administration. 

Images of chaos at Kabul airport were reminiscent of the Fall of Saigon and the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemen ended Biden’s honeymoon with the American people. 

“Following the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden's approval rating fell below 50 percent,” wrote Newsweek's Ewan Palmer, “and he has not been above that level since.”

In July 2022, Biden’s polling numbers fell to just 38 percent as an underperforming economy and constant reminders about his old age made him an easy target for angry Americans. 

Miraculously, Biden was able to recover from the disaster in Afghanistan and ended up “winning” in the November 2022 congressional elections in a major rebuke of Trump-style politics, but it hasn’t helped his popularity. 

“Even in the wake of the positive midterm results,” wrote Palmer, “Biden's approval rating has remained in the low 40s until his two-year anniversary as president.”

In the end, it would seem that both Trump and Biden had a difficult first two years in office but for radically different reasons. Biden may have performed a little better but only because his administration didn't have all the media chaos. 

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Biden still has time to rebound from his first two years, however, and it will be interesting to see how things unfold with Biden's remaining time in office now that Trump has all but secured the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.