Successful 21st-century presidential candidates present a bold blueprint for how they would govern, but the most successful recent presidents govern with humility.

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It is a vexing paradox, one that the last two commanders in chief have struggled to wrap their heads around.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the White House largely on the promise of returning the country to the status quo that existed before Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, as well as the incumbent Trump’s numerous mistakes in his final year in office. But even Biden recognized the need to add a patina of depth and ambition to his campaign and thus promised to “restore the soul” of his country. Instead of appealing to partisan, left-wing objectives, Biden 2020 was selling a more bipartisan, and more essential, product. He was going to put America back on the right moral track after years of Trumpian sins, both real and perceived.

His mistake was that after winning, he misremembered, as is his custom, what he had offered the public. Rather than fulfilling the simple promises he ran on, Biden sought to transcend the office in a way that few of its occupants ever have. 

Just a few weeks after he placed his hand on the Bible, the whispers coming out of Pennsylvania Avenue all compared its most famous resident to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“I’m no FDR, but …” the president remarked during a March 2021 meeting with a group of partisan historians who egged him on. 

For a time, the media also eagerly assumed the role of pom-pom-touting cheerleader. Reporting on said meeting, Axios’s Mike Allen asserted that “Biden’s presidency has already been transformative.” NPR asked if Biden might “Join FDR And LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?” CNN’s David Gergen pointed out “three striking similarities” between the 32nd and 46th presidents. In the New York Times, Jonathan Alter christened Biden FDR’s “heir” and insisted they were “fused in history by the size and breadth of their progressive ambitions.”

Biden was listening. He identified the first major piece of legislation he signed into law as president, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, not as an emergency measure to help the country come back from the COVID-19 pandemic but as a program that would at last compel the wealthy to “pay their fair share,” and even “change the [economic] paradigm.”

A little over a year later, after Biden finally acknowledged the vice grip inflation had on people’s wallets, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. And yet, in remarks celebrating its enactment, the then-president characterized it not, first and foremost, as an immediate solution to the problem its name suggested it might be but as “one of the most significant laws in our nation’s history,” “the most aggressive action ever, ever, ever to confront the climate crisis,” and “proof that the soul of America is vibrant, the future of America is bright, and the promise of America is real.”

Biden’s delusions of grandeur were observable in more than his economic policies.

He suggested that the proponents of popular, commonsense voter ID laws were the descendants of racist historical villains such as Jefferson Davis, Bull Connor, and George Wallace, while casting himself and other supporters of a massive federal elections takeover as the successors to Abraham Lincoln, John Lewis, and Martin Luther King Jr.

“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation’s history,” Biden declared in January 2022. “The issue is: Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend the right to vote, our democracy against all enemies — foreign and, yes, domestic.”

So great was his calling that not only did he find reason to invoke the 16th president but also to allude to the idea that he was facing down a domestic enemy as menacing and morally challenged as the one Lincoln did. 

The world knows how apt that analogy turned out to be. Biden dropped out of the 2024 race amid bipartisan calls for him to do so, only to watch as his vice president and handpicked successor was swept by Trump in the swing states. 

Even before his performance in his sole debate with Trump mainstreamed the conclusion that the octogenarian was no longer fit for office, Biden’s legacy was in tatters. On the morning of June 27, the day of the debate, he was already trailing the Republican nominee in national polls and sporting an approval rating that was, according to most surveys, nearly 20 points underwater.

The wages of claiming an unearned mandate, or place in history, are political death.

President Trump has this truth to thank for that very title, and yet he shows little sign of having internalized it.

Unlike Biden, Trump has never promised anything but the biggest and best on the campaign trail. But while voters might have elected him to “Make America Great Again,” that doesn’t mean they’re ready to surrender the country to his id.

In typical Trumpian fashion, the president has marketed the most controversial aspect of his economic agenda by using the most grandiose of language and making the most ambitious of promises. 

“THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN,” Trump declared on Truth Social on the Saturday after he implemented his “Liberation Day” tariffs. “It won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic.” 

The White House fact sheet was no less optimistic. “These tariffs are central to President Trump’s plan to reverse the economic damage left by President Biden and put America on a path to a new golden age,” it read, echoing a phrase used by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. 

Officials such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have widened the angle even further by declaring that Trump’s “bold international economic agenda will also provide the backdrop for his domestic economic policies to succeed.” 

“The president has already begun a campaign to rebalance the international economic system,” Bessent continued in remarks before the Economic Club of New York in March. “International economic relations that do not work for the American people must be reexamined.”

Of course, targeted tariffs to advance American geopolitical interests and force bad actors to drop their own barriers to American producers might not only be good politics but also good policy. But such a well-calibrated strategy is not what the president unveiled. 

Instead of taxing imports from declared enemies and bad actors, the president’s prescription called for massive tariffs on friends and foes alike. Moreover, while the Trump administration characterized them as “reciprocal” levies, the rates were based not on what other countries were taxing American exports but on the United States’s trade deficit with other countries. The game was given away for good when it became apparent that even nations with which the U.S. boasted a surplus would be subjected to an across-the-board, 10% tariff.

This was not a restrained strategy aimed at achieving reasonable objectives. It was a sweeping policy shift enacted by a man convinced that if only his vision for change were to come to pass, so too would a golden age.

Already, public opinion, a stock market panic, and plummeting consumer confidence have compelled Trump to backtrack somewhat. But still, the president and his team insist that Americans will soon not only benefit from the significant levies that remain in place but also marvel at the better world they inhabit — one remade by a transformative leader.

Sound familiar?

And while tariffs are Trump’s most risky, ambitious policy gambit to date, they’re hardly the only example of his overreach. 

The president was elected with a mandate to restore order at the southern border. With stunning speed, he has done just that while also acting on his promise to begin deporting illegal immigrants, especially those who have committed other crimes once in the country, en masse.

Trump’s actions on the immigration front, however, have stretched far beyond that mandate. His administration has not only begun sending some migrants to rot in notoriously rough Salvadoran prisons but has also, by its own admission, sent some there in error. Worse yet, it’s now flirting with refusing to comply with a court order, unanimously affirmed in principle by the Supreme Court, to rescue Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the husband and father of American citizens, from such a prison.

Likewise, while Americans may have been offended by the Democrats’ attempt at prosecuting Trump out of electoral politics during his wilderness years, Trump’s actions in his first months in office would seem to indicate that rather than remedying past wrongs, he’s out for blood. 

In a dizzying number of executive orders, Trump has targeted various people and law firms, threatening them with not only the revocation of security clearances but criminal prosecution. The consequences, for those paying attention to what might seem to be ticky-tacky inside-the-Beltway games, are profound. Several major law firms have agreed to provide the Trump administration with various goodies, including hundreds of millions in pro bono legal work, in exchange for a cessation of hostilities. 

And Christopher Krebs, Trump’s director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during his first term, is staring down the barrel of a Department of Justice investigation because he “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.”

“President Trump has made clear that loyalty to the United States must come before personal or partisan agendas, taking decisive action against those who misuse their undeserved influence to deceive the American public,” continued the almost dystopian fact sheet accompanying the Krebs order. Did Americans vote for the use of state power against the current executive’s political enemies, or is that precisely what they thought they had rejected? 

The president won a resounding second victory only a few months ago and sailed into office with a clear mandate: lower prices, end the border crisis, and move past the progressive social excesses of the last four years.

TRUMP AND DEMOCRATS COMPETE IN UNPOPULARITY CONTEST

If he pursues those simple chores with the single-minded focus he was elected to, he will enjoy a relatively smooth four years and leave behind a record that will be largely admired in the years to come.

But if he continues on his present course, he will be remembered in much the same way Biden is: as a quixotic figure so intent on building his legacy that he ends his watch with a shattered one.

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a Robert Novak fellow at the Fund for American Studies.