Trump Wants Credit for That Too

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“Everyone is calling it the”—Donald Trump paused while speaking to a crowd at a rally the day before his inauguration. “I don’t want to say this,” he insisted. “It’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway—the Trump effect.” He went on to describe how the stock market was booming and bitcoin prices were surging, and then boasted about a domestic-infrastructure investment from Apple, much of which had already been planned before the November election.

In spite of his claims to the contrary, Trump has no qualms about taking credit, including for achievements that were in progress or complete before he took office. The president has taken full responsibility for negotiating a hostage swap and a cease-fire deal in the Israel-Hamas war (Trump posted on social media in mid-January that “this EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November”), not mentioning that President Joe Biden had announced some of the deal terms last year. The Trump administration said that its policies had quashed migrant border crossings; immigration data are hard to parse, especially for such a short time period, but tallies show that border crossings had already been on the decline during the Biden administration. And this week, Trump credited himself with returning two astronauts who had been stranded for months at the International Space Station; last summer, NASA announced its plan to bring them home in 2025, but Trump still claimed without evidence that Biden “was embarrassed by what happened, and he said, ‘Leave them up there.’”

Trump relied on similar framing during his campaign: Ahead of a debate with Biden last year, he posted that “low INSULIN PRICING was gotten for millions of Americans by me, and the Trump Administration, not by Crooked Joe Biden,” saying of his opponent that “all he does is try to take credit for things done by others, in this case, ME!” Shared credit would have been appropriate here: Trump did sign an executive order in his first term that capped out-of-pocket costs of insulin for some Medicare patients at $35 a month, but Biden expanded this cap to all Medicare drug programs through the Inflation Reduction Act, affecting significantly more patients. Trump enjoyed taking credit for Barack Obama–era achievements during his first term too: In 2017, for example, he claimed credit for Obama’s immigration plan and bragged about a Ford-factory investment that had been in progress since a 2015 union contract.

Politicians are storytellers, and Trump is shameless about telling only the version of the story that flatters him. The stock market is thriving under the Biden administration? That’s thanks to projections that Trump will win, he claimed last year (even though economists suggested that such gains were also linked to low unemployment, flagging inflation, and solid growth). The economy is struggling after Trump takes office? Blame the “catastrophic” situation Biden left him with (even though many economists suggest that recent stock-market downturns are due to anxiety about the effects of Trump’s trade war). Talking about the egg-price crisis in January, the White House team pilloried the Biden administration for killing sick chickens, neglecting to note that this was a tack Trump also took during his first term.

Biden struggled to communicate victories during his term, particularly those related to the economy, which left a “void” for Trump to fill, Lori Cox Han, a scholar of the presidency at Chapman University, told me. And Americans’ perception that the economy was struggling under Biden, boosted by their personal experience of inflation, affected how they voted. Whenever the White House changes hands, some projects inevitably bleed from one administration into the next. Embracing continuity between terms can be a sign that a president cares more about good policy outcomes than about bucking his predecessor: If a federal initiative is good for Americans, why not continue? But Trump is doing something different—he’s attempting to erase other presidents’ role in policy achievements entirely.

Past presidents have also tried to claim credit for a victory set in motion by the previous administration—or perhaps even to hold off the victory until they can take office. The question of whether Ronald Reagan’s aides tried to delay the release of U.S. hostages in Iran so that they could come home during the early days of his administration—with the accompanying photo opportunities—has been discussed for years. Still, Han said, unspoken rules of decorum generally prevent new presidents from claiming full credit or trashing their predecessors. This, she noted, is another norm that Trump has disregarded.

Trump has long sought to portray himself as America’s sole savior. Recall his 2016 campaign refrain: “I alone can fix it.” As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum wrote at the time, in beseeching Americans to place trust in him and only him, Trump “broke with two centuries of American political tradition, in which candidates for office—and above all, for the nation’s highest office—acknowledge their fallibility and limitations, asking for the help of their fellow Americans, and of God, to accomplish what they cannot do on their own.” Trump seems set on sending the message that he doesn’t need help—and that, implausibly, he hasn’t received any along the way.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held a call to discuss cease-fire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Trump suggested that America could assume control of Ukrainian power plants to protect that infrastructure.
The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged and signaled that inflation may be slightly higher than their December forecast predicted.
Turkish police arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a top political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on allegations of corruption and terrorism.

Evening Read

What Impossibly Wealthy Women Do for Love and Fulfillment

By Sophie Gilbert

As With Love, Meghan went on, it started to hit a few of the classic pleasure points. A beautiful woman with a wardrobe of stealth-wealth beige separates and floral dresses? Check. A fixation, both nutritional and aesthetic, on how best to feed one’s family, down to fruit platters arranged like rainbows and jars of chia seeds and hemp hearts to sneak into pancakes? Check. A strange aside where she details what it meant for her to take her husband’s name? Ding ding ding: We’re in tradwife territory now. This is absurd, of course. Meghan isn’t a tradwife; if anything, she’s a girlboss, a savvy, mediagenic entrepreneur with a new podcast dedicated to businesswomen and a nascent retail brand. So why does she seem to be trying so hard to rebrand as one, offering up this wistful performance of femininity and old-fashioned domestic arts that feels staged—and pretty familiar?

Read the full article.