Counterfactual history: the Art of the Deal Edition
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It’s always instructive what mainstream political reporters feel free to editorialize about:
When you got a big win… OR DID YOU pic.twitter.com/79u9prwBlw— Seth Masket (@smotus) November 6, 2021
Two A1 stories whose lede is throwing cold water on the deal, impressive.
Reasonable people can disagree about precisely how important this legislation is. But one thing we can say with as much certainty as is possible with a counterfactual is that if Trump had signed, say, a $200 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill, much of which was just tax credits for existing projects rather than actual infrastructure spending, there would be so much fawning coverage of how Donald Deals and the new populist working class GOP had OUTFLANKED the Democrat Party you’d be sick of it already. One way you can tell this is how much preemptive credit they tried to give him for a hypothetical infrastructure bill that never moved an inch toward passing during his administration.
I perhaps will accept this tone of coverage from any reporter who, in January 2021, was saying that a bipartisan trillion dollar infrastructure bill that passed despite the filibuster remaining in place with a 50/50 Senate was such an easy lift it was the minimum that could be expected. I’m guessing this will be a null set.