When he is not sharing memes of himself as a conquering Roman centurion or shrieking while brandishing a chain saw onstage at a CPAC conference, Elon Musk occasionally adopts the pose of a reasonable moderate offering an open hand of compromise that Democrats slap away.

“What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s,” he wrote on X last week. “The current Dem party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn’t recognizable anymore!” As evidence, he shared a video compilation of Bill Clinton promising to cut the federal workforce. Musk’s allies have made versions of this argument too. In a February 12 op-ed headlined “Democrats Ought to Love DOGE,” Matthew Hennessey, an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, argued, “Left and right should share a desire for government efficiency. It’s as unobjectionable as liberty and as essential as justice. Nobody who wants America to succeed could possibly be against it.”

Who could have a problem with efficiency? Didn’t the Clinton administration undertake a big reform effort to overhaul the government? Well, sure. But the similarities end there.

The Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, took place over a five-year period. Gore carefully studied the federal government and consulted a wide array of experts rather than bursting into an unfamiliar domain with a handful of unqualified lackeys hopped up on conspiracy theories.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The obvious inefficiency of Elon Musk’s new order]

Clinton and Gore put their policy ideas through normal channels of legal process and public scrutiny—when they offered buyouts to the federal workforce, it was done through an act of Congress, not an email—whereas Musk, by canceling spending appropriated by Congress, has repeatedly violated the plain text of federal law and the Constitution, if you care about that sort of thing. Musk clearly does not—and an aversion to wild illegality and rank amateurism is a better explanation for Democrats’ opposition than them no longer caring about government efficiency.

Crucially, the Clinton administration was actually attempting to make the government more efficient. Its most successful efforts involved carefully identifying and updating antiquated operational systems, including by introducing electronic filing at the Internal Revenue Service and giving federal employees more flexibility in procurement.

Musk, by contrast, is wreaking havoc on government effectiveness for approximately zero benefit. His most sweeping method of culling the workforce—terminating probationary employees—is worse than random firings, because probationary employees include some longtime civil servants who have recently been promoted, which means many of the highest performers. Contrary to DOGE’s inflated claims, the group’s gross savings so far, which are concentrated in the minority of the budget that is domestic discretionary spending, amount to a rounding error. And because DOGE has turned its metaphorical chain saw upon the IRS, crippling the government’s ability to collect revenue, the net fiscal effect of Musk’s reign of terror may well wind up increasing the deficit. There’s a reason that none of the innumerable budget experts who have studied the deficit have proposed anything resembling what DOGE has come up with. By almost any ideological standard, it is the worst possible approach.

DOGE’s haphazard methods are reflected in its work product. Its efforts have been marked by buffoonish mistakes, such as counting an $8 million cut as 1,000 times as large, and generally publishing ludicrously inflated tallies of its savings. Musk hastily fired, and then even more hastily un-fired, employees who turned out to have been securing America’s nuclear arsenal. The erratic decision making has unnerved not only Republicans in Congress but also Donald Trump’s own Cabinet. That Democrats are opposing publicly the things that many Republicans oppose privately is quite natural.

[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude]

One lesson of Clinton’s Reinventing Government project, if Musk had bothered to learn it, is that reducing staff is a bad way to save money. Cutting the government payroll was, by all accounts, the Clinton initiative’s greatest failure. Unlike a private company, the government is required to carry out certain functions by law. Clinton reduced the federal workforce, but not the responsibilities that those civil servants had carried out. As a result, the government wound up merely handing over more jobs to private-sector contractors. “Replacing government workers to do these jobs tended not to save money, and, of course, hiring the same employees back tended to cost government even more, because government paid twice—once for the buyout, once for hiring them as contractors,” Donald Kettl, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, told me. More contemporary plans to reform the federal workforce, such as an initiative led by Jennifer Pahlka at the Niskanen Center, have instead focused on making it easier for the government to both hire and fire employees rather than simply reducing its head count.

Contrary to Musk’s complaints, Democrats have not stopped caring about identifying waste and making government more efficient. Many members of the party, chastened by the 2024 election results, were willing to find common ground with Trump, including Musk’s project, which is why a few Democrats joined the new DOGE Caucus in Congress. It was Musk’s choice to spurn the legislative route that Clinton took and put all the power in the hands of himself and a small team of policy amateurs.

And it is Musk who, when he is not shedding crocodile tears over the lack of Democratic support, has been cackling maniacally about the conspiracies he thinks he’s uncovered. Musk seems to believe that the federal budget is hiding a gigantic scheme to prop up the nonconservative media and the Democratic Party through a web of disguised payments, and that canceling these will eliminate opposition to Trump. The factual predicate undergirding Musk’s plan to defund the American left is obviously a complete fantasy, but surely he understands that Democrats aren’t going to help him take actions designed to destroy them. Does he not realize that Democrats can see his posts?

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.