So now comes Biden, in a sense, to simply scoop up elements of Trumpian populism and try the trick himself. He’s entrenching protectionism in trade policy and arguably broadening the last administration’s China hawkishness. He’s trying to do the trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that Steve Bannon promised but the Trump administration never delivered. And he’s taking the Senate G.O.P.’s inchoate ideas on family policy and outbidding them with new child spending. Because he’s a Democrat, there’s no anti-tax pledge to fall afoul of, so he can do all this while promising explicitly to raise taxes on the rich. But he’s also ditched the deficit anxieties of past Democratic administrations, he’s got a full-employment Federal Reserve behind him, and following Trump’s lead, he’s just going to run up deficits until inflation finally bites. You can tell that these moves are well suited to the political moment because the Republicans don’t know how to counter them. They’re stuck betwixt and between, unable to fully revert to their pre-Trump positioning as deficit hawks (who would believe them anymore?) and unsure how to counter Biden when he just seems to be making good on Trump’s promises.