The Official Presidential Agenda Name Tier List

Tracking how far this nation's imagination has fallen.

Hello everyone! I’d like to open this article with a quick apology for the fact that it’s been published past my usual weekly upload schedule. I spent most of last week in the Galapagos Islands planning to propose to my now-fiancé, and the WiFi for the boat we were on wasn’t capable of loading Substack, so I wasn’t able to do much work. I’m back home now, though, and so we will be back to our usual upload schedule this week. In the meantime, here’s a piece on something I couldn’t keep off my mind during my vacation.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

In April, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress did something unusual—something that we hadn’t seen before and many doubted would ever happen. They passed a bill. More specifically, they passed a framework for a bill through one chamber of Congress by a single vote, in no small part because members of their opposition keep dropping dead, and now have to shepherd it through what looks to be a brutal floor battle in the Senate. But the bill still won a vote nonetheless, and that win was no small thing. Because of the nature of Senate rules, practically the entire Republican agenda has been stuffed into this one piece of legislation. If it gets passed, there will be little for them to do legislatively for the next four years.

This structure has made the bill incredibly bloated, hard to analyze, and essentially blocked up from public scrutiny through sheer size alone. It also gave us something that had been mysteriously lacking since Trump secured his majority: an actual name for his agenda. As he pressed Republicans to pass his legislative priorities in “one big, beautiful bill,” I found myself curious as to what he was cooking up, if he was cooking up anything at all. Would he continue in the tradition of the blunt, uninspiring “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” of 2017? Would he officially enshrine the Orwellian “Agenda 47” of the campaign trail? Or would he take yet another page from the Democratic book and declare a national deal of his own?

It turned out to be none of these things. “One big, beautiful bill” was never his dumb way of describing the reconciliation process. It was the entire name for his legislative agenda. It’s what they officially labeled it in Congress. It’s on official letterheads. House leaders have spoken behind podiums with signs saying “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” on the front.

Official White House video about the bill with a Star Wars-ass opening scroll.

This is atrocious. It is also just one part of a larger pattern. For the past few decades, American presidential administrations—even those that have accomplished quite a lot—have been utterly incapable of establishing, or even attempting to establish, the kinds of iconic names for domestic political programs that this country once regularly produced. This happened slowly and subtly, with one weak attempt here and another no-attempt there. It was easy to miss when both sides of the political spectrum made airs of returning to past eras of big, expansive agendas. But when the most audacious administration in living memory can only come up with something as lame, as weak, as unbelievably corny as “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” it is clear that something has gone awry. If this country is failing at branding, of all things, it is clearly incapable of succeeding at anything at all.

So: what happened? How did we get here? To answer these questions, I evaluated every single presidential agenda name of note since the Teddy Roosevelt administration, from the Square Deal to the One Big Beautiful Bill, ranking them based on their political effectiveness and overall aura. What was the golden age of presidential advertising? When did things go so wrong? And what does the recent inability for our leaders to even articulate their visions for the country say about the state of this country?

Z Tier

Obama: FUCKING NOTHING