The Relist Watch column examines cert petitions that the Supreme Court has “relisted” for its upcoming conference. A short explanation of relists is available here.
On Friday, the Supreme Court justices will be meeting for the first time in nearly a month to discuss whether to grant review of any new cases. As you might expect, a significant number of petitions and applications have built up – 420 are slated for Friday’s conference. But out of all of those cases, only one of them has been newly relisted since the court’s final conference of 2024: Burt v. Gordon
.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order requiring the state’s department of corrections to follow guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control to stem the spread of COVID-19 in Michigan’s prisons. The department created procedures to separate prisoners who had contracted COVID-19 or were in close contact with someone who had from other prisoners.
After contracting COVID-19 in August 2020 at the Muskegon Correctional Facility, Jimmie Leon Gordon sued the warden and deputy warden, arguing that they violated the Eighth Amendment by being deliberately indifferent to the risk that the COVID-19 pandemic presented to him.
The district court dismissed Gordon’s lawsuit on the ground that he had not shown that prison officials had recklessly disregarded the risk that he would contract COVID-19.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit reversed, holding the district court should have accepted as true Gordon’s allegations that prison administrators had disregarded published social-distancing guidelines and failed to isolate infected prisoners.
On remand, the district court concluded that prison administrators were entitled to qualified immunity because, in light of the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, no clearly established federal law would have alerted the defendants that their actions were unconstitutional.
The 6th Circuit again reversed. It held that notwithstanding the novelty of the coronavirus, it was clearly established before the pandemic that prison officials could not exhibit deliberate indifference to an inmate’s exposure to dangerous communicable diseases, and that prison officials have a duty to protect prisoners from exposure to dangerous prison conditions. The court concluded that “a reasonable prison official would have understood that, by purposefully commingling infected prisoners with uninfected prisoners, … she was violating the Eighth Amendment.”
At the Supreme Court, Michigan argues
that given the novelty of the COVID pandemic, there was “no clearly established precedent to provide specific guidance to prison officials in their protection of prisoners.” It contends that although courts of appeals have been “inconsistent in their treatment of COVID-19,” courts have generally held that “prison officials have fulfilled their duties so long as they established reasonable protocols … to combat the spread of the virus in prisons”—just as Michigan did here. And Michigan argues
that the 6th Circuit analyzed the issue “at too high a level of generality,” rather than looking at the specific measures Michigan employed and determining whether they were clearly illegal when they were adopted.
Though Gordon represented himself before the 6th Circuit, he is now represented by the MacArthur Justice Center
, which argues that the issue is not the subject of a circuit split and review of the court of appeals’ unpublished decision is not warranted.
The Supreme Court devotes significant resources to summarydecisionsreversing
what it concludes are unwarranted denials of qualified immunity, as well as unwarrantedgrants
of habeas relief
. It seems likely that one or more justices is taking a close look to determine whether the denial of qualified immunity here was warranted.
New Relists
Burt v. Gordon, 24-73 Issue: Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit improperly denied qualified immunity to prison officials based on their response to the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic by defining the relevant law at too high level of generality, and identifying no precedent recognizing a constitutional right under similar circumstances that would have put reasonable officials on notice that their conduct may violate the Constitution given the novel challenge of the pandemic.
Returning Relists
Andrew v. White
, 23-6573 Issues: (1) Whether clearly established federal law as determined by this court forbids the prosecution’s use of a woman’s plainly irrelevant sexual history, gender presentation, and role as a mother and wife to assess guilt and punishment; and (2) whether this court should summarily reverse in light of cumulative effect of the errors in this case at guilt and sentencing, including the introduction of a custodial statement made without the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona
.
(Rescheduled before the March 28, April 5, April 12, April 19, April 26, May 9, May 16, May 23, May 30, June 6, June 13, June 20, and July 1 conferences; relisted after the Sept. 30, Oct. 11, Oct. 18, Nov. 1, Nov. 8, Nov. 15, Nov. 22, Dec. 6 and Dec. 13 conferences.)
Turco v. City of Englewood, New Jersey
, 23-1189 Issues: (1) Whether the City of Englewood’s speech-free buffer zones, including zones outside an abortion clinic, violate the First Amendment; and (2) whether the court should overrule Hill v. Colorado
.
(Relisted after the Nov. 15, Nov. 22, Dec. 6 and Dec. 13 conferences.)
Carter v. United States
, 23-1281 Issues: (1) Whether Feres v. United States
should be limited not to bar tort claims brought by service members alleging medical malpractice who were under no military orders, not engaged in any military mission, and whose military status was retroactively altered from inactive to active duty post medical malpractice; and (2) whether the Feres doctrine conflicts with the plain language of the Federal Tort Claims Act
and should thus be clarified, limited, or overruled.
(Relisted after the Dec. 6 and Dec. 13 conferences.)
Apache Stronghold v. United States
, 24-291 Issue: Whether the government “substantially burdens” religious exercise under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
, or must satisfy heightened scrutiny under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, when it singles out a sacred site for complete physical destruction, ending specific religious rituals forever.
(Relisted after the Dec. 6 and Dec. 13 conferences.)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear the case of a former Chicago alderman, who served four months in a federal prison for lying to federal financial regulators about loans he took out from a local bank and failed to pay. Patrick Daley Thompson, a member of the city’s most famous political dynasty, hopes that his case will be the latest in a series of cases in which the justices push back against what a majority of the court has seen as overreach by federal prosecutors.
Thompson is the grandson of Richard J. Daley, who served as mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976, and the nephew of Richard M. Daley, who served as mayor from 1989 to 2011. He was elected to the city council in 2015, representing a district on the city’s South Side, and re-elected in 2019.
Between 2011 and 2014, Thompson took out three loans, totaling $219,000, from Washington Federal Bank for Savings, a small bank on the South Side where the Daley family made its name. Thompson used the money to make an equity contribution to the law firm where he had just become a partner, to pay off a tax bill, and to repay money that he owed a different bank, but he did not sign any paperwork for the second and third loans. He made only one payment on the loans — $389.58 in 2012. The bank did not request any additional payments.
After the bank failed in 2017, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which became the receiver for the bank, hired a loan servicer, Planet Home Lending, to try to recover some of the money owed to the bank.
In Feb. 2018, Planet Home Lending sent Thompson an invoice for the principal on his loans plus interest: a total of $269,120.58. Thompson called Planet Home’s customer service line, insisting that he had only borrowed $110,000 – the amount of the first loan, for which he had signed paperwork. A week later, he spoke with two contractors for the FDIC, telling them that he that he had borrowed $110,000 for “home improvements.”
Later that year the FDIC and Thompson settled the debt, with Thompson agreeing to pay the principal of $219,000 but not the interest.
Two-and-a-half years later, Thompson was charged with violating a federal law that makes it a crime to make false statements to influence (among other financial institutions and federal agencies) the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (He was also charged with filing false income tax returns, but those charges are not before the Supreme Court.) He was convicted by a jury, sentenced to four months in prison, and ordered to pay restitution to cover the $50,000 in interest that he still owed.
Thompson challenged his conviction. He acknowledged that his statements may have been misleading, because he failed to mention the second and third loans, totaling $109,000. But they were not false, he insisted, because he indicated only that he had borrowed $110,000 from Washington Federal – not that he owed $110,000. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit rejected this argument, he came to the Supreme Court, which agreed to weigh in.
In the Supreme Court, Thompson argues that the federal law at the center of the case only bars false statements; it does not apply to statements that, even if misleading, are true.
In 1982, Thompson tells the justices, the Supreme Court declined to interpret the same law to cover bad checks, rejecting the government’s argument that writing a bad check is a false statement because it falsely implies that there is enough money in the account to cover the amount of the check. In so doing, Thompson emphasizes, the court also rebuffed any suggestion that the law “should be construed non-literally to sweep in more conduct than the statute prohibits.”
Indeed, Thompson notes, Congress has in other laws prohibited “false or misleading” statements or omissions that would make statements misleading. It would not need to do either of those things if the reference to “false” in the law under which Thompson was convicted had the broader meaning that the government attributes to it, he contends.
Thompson cautions that the government’s interpretation of the law would criminalize a “vast range of everyday statements” by both would-be borrowers and debtors. For example, he asserts, a homebuyer who tries to negotiate a better interest rate by indicating that she has an offer from another lender, but who omits that the other lender also requires a larger down payment, could “be sent to prison for thirty years and fined a million dollars.”
And this would be true, Thompson adds, even if the borrower’s misleading statements had no effect on the lender’s decision, because all that matters under the law is whether the statement is made “for the purpose of influencing” a financial institution.
The federal government counters that holding defendants like Thompson liable would be consistent with the commonsense meaning of a “false statement” – which it defines as one that is “untrue or deceptive.” This can include, the government says, statements that are, “in context, inaccurate or incomplete.” For example, the government contends, a driver makes a false statement if he tells a police officer that he “had just one cocktail,” leaving out that he also drank four glasses of wine.
The government argues that its rule is also consistent with a 1938 Supreme Court decision that predated the reenactment of the federal criminal code, in which the justices interpreted a law that prohibited the “making of any statement, knowing it to be false” to apply to “false and misleading representations.”
The government dismisses as “unfounded” Thompson’s suggestion that the law could ensnare borrowers and debtors based on their “strategic puffery during negotiations.” Thompson cites no examples of anyone who was actually prosecuted in such a scenario, the government observes, “and such puffery has not traditionally been understood as fraudulent.”
But even if the law were limited to statements that are literally false, the government continues, Thompson’s conviction could still stand because he made false statements: He told the FDIC contractors that he had “borrowed $110,000,” he “disputed” the amount of the invoice that he had received from Planet Home, and he told the FDIC that he had taken out the first loan for “home improvements,” rather than for his equity contribution to his law firm.
President-elect Donald Trump hosted 22 of the nation’s 27 Republican governors for dinner at his Florida club, looking to help drive the agenda in conservative-run states after he takes office in 11 days
President-elect Trump understands the U.S. auto industry better now than he did during his first term, says Ford chairman Bill Ford, who’s hopeful that Tesla
Yesterday morning, donning his new signature fit—gold chain, oversize T-shirt, surfer hair—Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social-media platforms are getting a makeover. His aggrievement was palpable: For years, Zuckerberg said
, “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” No longer. Meta is abolishing its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the U.S.; loosening its content filters; and bringing political content back to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Meta’s chief executive declared.
In the announcement, Zuckerberg identified “the recent elections,” in which Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans claimed both houses of Congress, as a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” He said Meta will take direct inspiration from X’s “Community Notes” feature, which allows users to annotate posts—and surfaces the annotations based on how other users rate them—rather than granting professional fact-checkers authority to remove or label posts. Among the notable changes is permitting
users to describe gay and transgender people as having “mental illness.”
The dog-whistling around legacy media, censorship, and free-speech sounded uncannily like one of Zuckerberg’s greatest rivals: Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a defender of the most noxious
speech—at least when he agrees with it. Over the past several years, Musk has become a far-right
icon, railing against major publications and liberal politicians for what he deems
a “censorship government-industrial complex.” After buying Twitter, he renamed it X and has turned the platform into a bastion for hate speech, personally spread misinformation, and become a Trump confidant and trusted adviser. Zuckerberg has been feuding with Musk for years over their respective social-media dominance and masculinity—the pair even publicly challenged each other to a cage match
in 2023.
This week’s policy changes might be understood as another throwdown between the two men. Although Facebook and Instagram are both considerably more popular than X—not to mention extremely profitable—they lack the political relevance that Musk has cultivated on his platform. That asset has helped bring Trump back for occasional posting there (he is still much more active on his own platform, Truth Social) and, more important, has put X and its owner in favorable positions ahead of Trump’s ascension to the presidency. Musk will even co-lead a new federal commission
advising his administration. Their close relationship will likely benefit Musk’s AI, space, and satellite companies, too. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has not been viewed favorably by Trump or his allies: The president-elect has stated that Zuckerberg steered Facebook against him during the 2020 election, and threatened
to put the Meta CEO in jail for “the rest of his life,” while Republicans such as Ohio Representative Jim Jordan have complained about alleged censorship
on the platform. Currying favor with the right wing, as Musk has done so successfully, may well be mission critical for Meta, which is currently facing an antitrust suit from the Federal Trade Commission that it would surely rather settle
.
These shifts are occurring against a longer transformation
for the company and its chief executive. Zuckerberg has gone from a deferential, awkward, almost robotic nerd to a flashy mixed-martial-arts enthusiast who posts photos of his fights and has public beef with other tech executives. Meta, after years of waning influence, has been attempting a cultural and technological revival as well—pivoting hard toward generative AI by widely promoting its flagship Llama models and launching its own X competitor, Threads. These personal and corporate changes are one and the same: Zuckerberg has recently shared a photo of himself reading his infant a picture book titled Llama; posted AI-enhanced videos of himself sporting his new martial-arts physique, leg-pressing gold chains, or dressed as a Roman centurion; and showcased an AI-generated illustration of himself in a boy band. Also this week, the company announced that Dana White, the CEO and president of UFC (and a notable Trump backer), joined Meta’s board of directors. The blog post outlining Meta’s new “more speech” policies was written by Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist at Meta who just replaced the company’s long-standing head of global policy, who was considered center-left. Jordan, the once adversarial congressperson, said
he is pleased with Meta’s new approach to content moderation and will meet
with Zuckerberg in the coming weeks.
But for all the effort and bravado, Zuckerberg and Meta have been consistently outdone by Musk. The latter has already overhauled X into a “free speech” haven for the right. If Meta is responding to the recent election by seeking favor with the incoming Trump administration, Musk helped bring Republicans victory and will advise that administration. Musk helped get OpenAI off the ground, and his newer and smaller AI company, xAI, rapidly developed a model, Grok, that has matched and by some metrics surpassed Meta’s own. Zuckerberg might boast
about Meta’s AI infrastructure, but xAI partnered with Nvidia to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer in a shockingly fast
122 days. Musk has touted Grok as fulfilling the need for an anti-“woke” AI—the software has been shown
to readily sexualize female celebrities and illustrate
racist caricatures. It’s easy to imagine Meta lowering its AI guardrails next in a bid to better emulate Musk’s own offensive showboating.
Even if he catches up, Zuckerberg still lacks the confidence of his rival. He presents as both rehearsed and ostentatious; he announced the end of independent fact-checking while wearing a $900,000 watch
. Musk is many things, but he is not a poser: His speech is rambling, off-the-cuff, and perceived as visionary by his followers and much of Silicon Valley. He shows up to Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and talks business
while streaming video games. “This is cool,” Musk wrote
of Meta’s “free speech” pivot, on X, as if commending a younger sibling.
Becoming a martial-arts enthusiast, pivoting to AI, bringing Republicans into Meta’s leadership, decrying “legacy media” and “censorship,” and permitting homophobia are Zuckerberg’s attempts at defiance and renewal. But in no respect is he leading the conversation—rather than upending the technological landscape with the “metaverse
,” he is following his competitors in both AI and social media. He may not be capitulating to the Democratic establishment, as he believes
his company did in the past, but he is still capitulating to the establishment. It’s just that this time, he is apologizing
to the ascendant far-right. “They’ve come a long way,” the president-elect said of Meta’s changes at a press conference
yesterday. (Did he think the changes were in response to threats he had made toward Zuckerberg in the past? “Probably,” Trump responded.)
It is worth recalling that Facebook did not strengthen its approach to content moderation and limit political content, changes that Zuckerberg now says amount to “censorship,” just because a few Democratic senators asked. Russian-interference campaigns, various domestic far-right militias, and all manner of misinformation were rampant on the platform for years, wreaking havoc on multiple presidential-election cycles. Facebook exposed users’ private data, was used to plan
the Capitol insurrection in the U.S., and fueled ethnic genocide abroad
. The platform, prior to those policy changes, was viewed by some as a legitimate threat to democracy
; “we have made a lot of mistakes,” Zuckerberg told
Congress in 2018. He has had a change of heart—yesterday, Zuckerberg again promised to make “fewer mistakes,” this time referencing the supposed policing of conservative speech. For one of Silicon Valley’s self-appointed kings, perhaps abetting the unraveling of democracy and civil society is, in the end, nothing to apologize for.
Presidents whom most voters view as failures, justifiably or not, have frequently shaped American politics long after they leave office—notably, by paving the way for presidencies considered much more successful and consequential. As President Joe Biden nears his final days in office, his uneasy term presents Democrats with some uncomfortable parallels to their experience with Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral takes place this week in Washington, D.C.
The former Georgia governor’s victory in 1976 initially offered the promise of revitalizing the formidable electoral coalition that had delivered the White House to Democrats in seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 (won by Franklin D. Roosevelt) to 1964 (won by Lyndon B. Johnson), and had enabled the party to enact progressive social policies for two generations. But the collapse of his support over his four years in office, culminating in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, showed that Carter’s electoral victory was instead that coalition’s dying breath. Carter’s troubled term in the White House proved the indispensable precondition to Reagan’s landmark presidency, which reshaped the competition between the two major parties and enabled the epoch-defining ascendancy of the new right.
The specter of such a turnabout now haunts Biden and his legacy. Despite his many accomplishments in the White House, the November election’s outcome demonstrated that his failures
—particularly on the public priorities of inflation and the border—eclipsed his successes for most voters. As post-election surveys
made clear, disapproval of the Biden administration’s record was a liability that Vice President Kamala Harris could not escape.
Biden’s unpopularity helped Donald Trump make major inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, just as the widespread discontent over Carter’s performance helped Reagan peel away millions of formerly Democratic voters in 1980. If Trump can cement in office the gains he made on Election Day—particularly among Latino, Asian American, and Black voters—historians may come to view Biden as the Carter to Trump’s Reagan.
In his landmark 1993 book, The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek persuasively argued that presidents succeed or fail according to not only their innate talents but also the timing of their election in the long-term cycle of political competition and electoral realignment between the major parties.
Most of the presidents who are remembered as the most successful and influential, Skowronek showed, came into office after decisive elections in which voters sweepingly rejected the party that had governed the country for years. The leaders Skowronek places in this category include Thomas Jefferson after his election in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Roosevelt in 1932, and Reagan in 1980.
These dominating figures, whom Skowronek identifies as men who “stood apart from the previously established parties,” typically rose to prominence with a promise “to retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed had been lost.” Trump fits this template with his promises to “make America great again,” and he also displays the twin traits that Skowronek describes as characteristic of these predecessors that Trump hopes to emulate: repudiating the existing terms of political competition and becoming a reconstructive leader of a new coalition.
The great repudiators, in Skowronek’s telling, were all preceded by ill-fated leaders who’d gained the presidency representing a once-dominant coalition that was palpably diminished by the time of their election. Skowronek placed in this club John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Carter. Each of their presidencies represented a last gasp for the party that had won most of the general elections in the years prior. None of these “late regime” presidents, as Skowronek called them, could generate enough success in office to reverse their party’s declining support; instead, they accelerated it.
The most recent such late-regime president, Carter, was elected in 1976 after Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 had already exposed cracks in the Democrats’ New Deal coalition of southerners, Black voters, and the white working class. Like many of his predecessors in the dubious fraternity of late-regime presidents, Carter recognized that his party needed to recalibrate its message and agenda to repair its eroding support. But the attempt to set a new, generally more centrist direction for the party foundered.
Thanks to rampant inflation, energy shortages, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter was whipsawed between a rebellion from the left (culminating in Senator Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge) and an uprising on the right led by Reagan. As Carter limped through his 1980 reelection campaign, Skowronek wrote, he had become “a caricature of the old regime’s political bankruptcy, the perfect foil for a repudiation of liberalism itself as the true source of all the nation’s problems.”
Carter’s failures enabled Reagan to entrench the electoral realignment that Nixon had started. In Reagan’s emphatic 1980 win, millions of southern white conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, as well as northern working-class white voters renounced the Democratic affiliation of their parents and flocked to Reagan’s Republican Party. Most of those voters never looked back.
The issue now is whether Biden will one day be seen as another late-regime president whose perceived failures hastened his party’s eclipse among key voting blocs. Pointing to his record of accomplishments, Biden advocates would consider the question absurd: Look, they say, at the big legislative wins, enormous job growth, soaring stock market, historic steps to combat climate change, skilled diplomacy that united allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and boom in manufacturing investment
, particularly in clean-energy technologies.
In electoral terms, however, Biden’s legacy is more clouded. His 2020 victory appeared to revive the coalition of college-educated whites, growing minority populations, young people, and just enough working-class white voters that had allowed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win the White House in four of the six elections from 1992 through 2012. (In a fifth race over that span, Al Gore won the popular vote even though he lost the Electoral College.) But the public discontent with Biden frayed almost every strand of that coalition.
Biden made rebuilding his party’s support among working-class voters a priority and, in fact, delivered huge gains
in manufacturing and construction jobs that were tied to the big three bills he passed (on clean energy, infrastructure, and semiconductors). But public anger at the rising cost of living contributed to Biden’s job-approval rating falling below 50 percent in the late summer of 2021 (around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal), and it never climbed back to that crucial threshold. On Election Day, public disappointment with Biden’s overall record helped Trump maintain a crushing lead over Harris among white voters without a college degree, as well as make unprecedented inroads among nonwhite voters without a college degree, especially Latinos.
The defecting Democratic voters of 2024 mean that as Biden leaves office, Gallup recently reported
, Republicans are enjoying their biggest party-identification advantage in the past three decades. All of the intertwined and compounding electoral challenges Democrats now face ominously resemble the difficulties that Skowronek’s other late-regime presidents left behind for their parties.
Although Carter identified as an outsider and Biden was the consummate insider, each sought to demonstrate to skeptical voters that he could make the government work better to address their most pressing problems: Carter called upon his engineer’s efficiency; Biden used his long experience to negotiate effectively with both Congress and foreign nations. In the face of a rising challenge from the right, each hoped to revive public confidence that Democrats could produce better results.
Yet by the end of their term, voters—fairly or not—had concluded the opposite. As Skowronek observed, that kind of failure is common to late-regime presidents. By losing the country’s confidence, these leaders all cleared the way for the repudiating presidents from the other party who succeeded them. “Through their hapless struggles for credibility,” Skowronek wrote, “they become the foils for reconstructive leadership, the indispensable premise upon which traditional regime opponents generate the authority to repudiate the establishment wholesale.”
In an email last week, Skowronek told me he agreed that the public rejection of Biden had provided Trump with an opening for a repudiating leadership very similar to the one Carter had unwittingly bequeathed Reagan.
“Characteristically, reconstructive leaders do three things,” Skowronek wrote to me. “They turn their immediate predecessor into a foil for a wholesale repudiation of ‘the establishment’ (check). They build new parties (check). They dismantle the residual institutional infrastructure supporting the politics of the past (check; see Project 2025). Everything seems to be in place for one of these pivotal presidencies.”
“Biden,” Skowronek added, “set up his administration as a demonstration of the system’s vitality. He tried to prove that (what Trump called) the ‘deep state’ could work and to vindicate it.” The public’s disenchantment with Biden’s record could now have precisely the opposite effect, Skowronek believes, by undermining people’s already fragile faith in government. That could strengthen Trump’s hand to pursue “a substantial dismantling and redirection” of existing government institutions.
Carter and Biden each paved the way for his successor’s agenda by conceding ground on crucial fronts. “In Carter’s case, that included deregulation, the defense build-up, and prioritizing the fight against inflation,” Skowronek wrote. “In Biden’s case, that ultimately included tariffs, immigration restrictions, and an ‘America first’ industrial policy. Just as one could discern in Carter some consensual ground for a new ordering under Reagan, one can discern in Biden’s innovations some consensual ground for a new ordering under Trump.”
Although Biden may look like a classic late-regime president, Skowronek doubts whether Trump can grow into the kind of transformative leader who has typically followed such beleaguered figures—not least because Trump seems quite likely to exceed his mandate and overreach
in a way that provokes a voter backlash in 2026. Much in Trump’s record does indeed suggest
that his agenda and style will be too polarizing, his commitment to the rule of law too tenuous, for him to build a coalition as durable or expansive as that assembled by any of the mighty repudiators of the past.
For Democrats, however, the sobering precedent of the Carter era is a public loss of faith that set up 12 years of Republican control of the White House. They can only hope that the late-regime rejection of Biden doesn’t trigger another period of consolidated GOP dominance.
