Trump Is Dismantling Biden’s Blame-Game Bureaucracy – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

President Donald Trump is back — and he is taking a wrecking ball to Biden’s political regulation Leviathan. Trump smartly begins by deconstructing unnecessary rules that do not actually solve problems but instead  deflect blame from failed policies.

Just last week, Trump took aim at one of the overzealous, unconstitutional rules issued by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB). This Trump action signals the beginning of a broader dismantling of Biden-era rules that the prior administration used as a bogus excuse to blame the fallout of Bidenflation on so-called “junk fees.”

This new approach is more than just a policy reversal. It’s a reckoning.

After all, Biden oversaw an orgy of lavish spending: $1.2 trillion for infrastructure, $1.9 trillion for unnecessary COVID stimulus, and $900 billion for (ironically) “inflation reduction.” The mammoth, deficit-exploding outlays formed an unholy trinity of Bidenomics, a fiscal orgy of borrowing and spending.

Plenty of experts warned Biden that pumping all that money into the economy would make inflation worse. He didn’t listen. In fact, he doubled down.

By 2024, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that average American families were spending almost $17,000 more per year to maintain the same living standard they’d enjoyed during Trump’s first term. Biden’s burdensome new regulations threatened those same families with nearly $50,000 in additional lifetime costs. Food prices rose 22 percent. The cost of a house more than doubled.

But Biden couldn’t afford to back down from his own agenda or to alienate the crony special interest groups who benefited from it. All he could do was offer Americans a shiny nickel with one hand while he picked your pocket with the other.

Rather than own up to his inflationary madness, Biden launched a crusade against “junk fees” and “corporate greed.” But these policies were almost all Biden PR stunts, except for a couple of initiatives that President Trump continued, such as one to reduce hidden ticket fees, which violate consumer protection laws.

By cracking down on things like credit card late fees and overdraft penalties, Biden hoped to convince Americans that he was tackling the root causes of inflation and actually saving them money.

This diversion followed the same script every time: Biden targeted companies with headline-grabbing claims while ignoring the real drivers of economic pain.

Nowhere were these political theatrics more cartoonish and obnoxious than in the Biden Justice Department’s lawsuit against Visa.

The Biden DOJ claimed that Visa’s debit card network fees — mere fractions of a cent per transaction — inflate the price of “nearly everything.” But that ridiculous claim is economic alchemy.

For instance, take a 14-cent transaction fee on a bag of groceries — fees voluntarily paid by businesses, not consumers, and that have existed for eternity — and then somehow pretend it’s responsible for $20 of price increases for the whole purchase. This sham isn’t law enforcement but simply headline-chasing spin.

Trump Knows the Problem: Fiscal Policy

Not only did these policies misallocate blame, they did real harm.

In the case of Biden targeting credit card late fees (the policy that Trump reversed last week), banks depend on those fees to balance out the costs of extending their services to higher-risk clients. By attempting to cap them, Biden’s CFPB risked raising prices for everyone while cutting off access to credit for millions of vulnerable Americans.

And in the case of aiming at debit card companies’ pennies-on-the-transaction fees, targeting them could have significant negative implications for fraud prevention efforts.

Now, Trump flips that script.

He dispels the fiction that fees, not fiscal policy, caused inflation.

Walking back these Biden-era blunders isn’t just good policy — it’s a clear sign that the era of government gaslighting is over.

But Trump isn’t just undoing Biden’s misguided policies. He is also actually bringing down inflation.

By extending his first-term tax cuts, slashing regulations, securing fair trade deals for U.S. companies, and ensuring access to cheap, abundant energy, Trump can drive the economic growth we need to make America prosperous again.

November’s election results made it clear that Americans saw through Biden’s blame game. They weren’t interested in scapegoats. They demanded real solutions — and a president who knows how to deliver them.

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Steve Cortes is president of the League of American Workers, a populist right pro-laborer advocacy group, and senior political advisor to Catholic Vote. He is a former senior advisor to President Trump and JD Vance and a former commentator for Fox.