WASHINGTON
US President Joe Biden has moved to quickly roll back much of his predecessor’s legacy on a wide gamut of policies at home and abroad during his first 100 days in office.
In many ways, Biden’s nascent presidency is a striking rebuke to former President Donald Trump and his legacy of isolationism and unilateralism as the incumbent president works to “Build Back Better” despite Trump’s efforts to hamstring his successor.
That included labeling Yemen’s Houthi rebels a terror organization and designating Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism in Trump’s final days, as well as years of efforts aimed at complicating any US return to the landmark 2015 nuclear accord Iran struck with world powers.
Biden quickly rescinded the Houthi’s designation, but while he has also moved to resume negotiations with Iran the efforts have hitherto been deadlocked. The parties have argued for months about who should first resume compliance with obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Iran has insisted that since Trump chose to unilaterally leave the deal in 2018 and reimposed crippling economic sanctions it should be up to Biden to loosen the penalties before it will walk back from any steps it took in violation of the deal’s constraints.
There is, however, momentum building in indirect talks being held in Vienna in which the Biden administration has reportedly indicated which sanctions it would be willing to lift, including blacklistings on its pivotal oil and finance sectors.
Those sanctions were imposed by Trump under terrorism authorities and a senior administration official told reporters recently that the former administration invoked terrorism “purely for the purpose of preventing or hindering a return to compliance with the JCPOA.”
“It’s not as if – when the former administration reimposed sanctions, they labeled them: ‘These are sanctions that are consistent with the JCPOA, and these are the kind of sanctions that are not consistent with the JCPOA,’” the official said. “So it is a much more difficult work that we are doing to try to understand the nature of the sanctions and on what basis they were imposed.”
For the time being, Biden has not prioritized removing Cuba’s state sponsor of terror designation amid an ongoing review. But Republican lawmakers in the Senate are working on legislation that would attempt to block Biden from removing the designation as former President Barack Obama did in 2016.
Besides Cuba, just North Korea, Iran, and Syria are on the terrorism sponsor list.
Nor has Biden prioritized a return to the diplomatic opening with Cuba brokered by his former boss that Trump worked for years to roll back with successive actions that limited travel and trade.
On immigration, Trump’s efforts to deplete the US refugee program proved an early stumbling block for Biden who was forced to renege on his pledge to quickly increase the number of refugees allowed into the US.
Biden had sought to eventually ramp up the admittance cap from the historical low of 15,000 established by Trump with the eventual goal of hitting 125,000.
Biden vowed to hit 62,500 by the end of the current fiscal year that ends in September but the White House had said the 15,000 limit would remain in place due to constraints imposed by Trump, an announcement that was met with swift condemnation by Biden’s Democratic allies.
The backlash prompted the White House to say Biden would increase the number by May 15, citing what it called Trump’s gutting of the asylum processing division at the State Department and culling the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s "personnel, staffing and financial and funding needs,” which has run out of funding.
Biden has yet to act, however, as he grapples with the realities of the US’s refugee program.
More broadly on immigration, Biden has nixed several controversial Trump-era policies including the former president’s travel ban that targeted several Muslim-majority countries.
He also ended policies that separate migrant children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, and required asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their immigration court cases were adjudicated in the US -- both were key components of Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” policy aimed at deterring immigration from Latin America.
The policy reversals come as the US grapples with a significant uptick in the number of migrants coming to its southern border, and Biden has moved to institute $310 million in aid to the Northern Triangle – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – intended to improve conditions in those countries to reduce the desire for people to immigrate.
While Biden has largely broken from Trump’s foreign policies, he has generally remained in step on China.
Even as he has halted the divisive and racist rhetoric Trump employed to malign Beijing amid the coronavirus pandemic, Biden has left in place tariffs established during a bitter trade war, and continued to describe Beijing as the US’s pre-eminent challenger on the global stage.
And even though Biden extended a May 1 deadline to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan that was brokered by Trump, he is nonetheless intent on doing so by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The war is the US’s longest-running foreign conflict and Biden has maintained it was never intended to be a multi-generational undertaking. The US, Biden says, has achieved its goals of holding the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks to account as he prepares to draw down all US forces in the country amid criticism that Afghanistan could again become a terrorist haven.
Biden seeks to mend wounds at home
At home, Biden has prioritized healing some of the country’s deepest wounds, including race relations that were repeatedly exacerbated during Trump’s time in office.
Pivotally, Biden has worked to address grievances from Black and brown communities related to policing while also seeking to address systemic racism in US institutions.
Police-involved shootings have been on the rise as the nation has slowly emerged from restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic, including the April 11 death of Daunte Wright who was killed during a traffic stop near Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Biden called for “peace and calm” after the shooting led to widespread protests but said he could offer “a lot” on overhauling policing in the US.
And after ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, Biden signaled what that means, including an overhaul of current legal protections for police.
“Such a verdict is also much too rare,” Biden said hours after Chauvin was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
“As we saw in this trial, from the fellow police officers who testified — most men and women who wear the badge serve their communities honorably. But those few who fail to meet that standard must be held accountable,” said Biden.
“But it is not enough. We can’t stop here,” he added, further rebuffing systemic racism as a “stain on our nation’s soul.”
Those comments are in stark contrast to Trump’s, who, in addition to calling white supremacists “very fine people” and denying the existence of systemic racism, resisted efforts to institute police accountability.
The former president rebuffed suggestions that qualified immunity, essentially a very high legal threshold for police to face civil suits, needs to be revisited, and further dismissed a blanket ban on chokeholds like the one that led to Floyd’s death.
While seeking to remedy the US’s deep racial divides and problems with policing, Biden has also prioritized efforts to institute gun control amid an uptick in mass shootings this year, albeit with extremely limited success.
While the president has taken executive actions to combat gun violence, the actions have been limited by constitutional realities that require more meaningful action to emanate from Congress, which has the authority to set laws.
Biden’s actions have hitherto been centered on regulating the “ghost gun” market and banning stabilizing braces for pistols after one was allegedly used in a March 22 shooting in Boulder, Colorado.
The president has repeatedly called on lawmakers to take more meaningful action, including reinstating a federal assault weapons ban that lapsed in 2004 and urged the Senate to take action on legislation that passed the House of Representatives in March that would close two major background check loopholes.
So far, lawmakers have shown little appetite to take up the assault weapons ban, and the loophole bills have failed to gain traction in the Senate where pivotal centrist Democrats have resisted the measures.
With the Senate divided equally 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, the Democratic caucus needs to be uniformly lined up behind almost all aspects of Biden’s agenda given party-line opposition among Republicans.
That could change in 2022 when one-third of the chamber and all House seats will be up for election, but at least until then, Biden will have to thread a very fine needle as he seeks to advance gun control and the rest of his legislative agenda.
