I’ve noted that President Joe Biden steers his administration using his rearview mirror. Whatever President Donald Trump did, he’ll do the opposite. He talks about the future but seems to spend most of his time looking behind him rather than ahead.

You might assume this is a good idea, an instinct for self-preservation, because the president is an old-school Democrat heading a new-school socialist revolution. And such revolutions have a strong track record of displacing their leaders ruthlessly. Biden doesn’t want to find himself stumbling out of the White House one day crying, “Et tu, Kamala?”

But his backward glances aren’t the furtive and alarmed type that keep a weather eye on impending danger. Rather, they are focused and sustained, as though the president was reading a map. He uses the past as an inverted guide about what to do next. He wants, where possible, to create a carbon copy of the policies of his good friend Barack Obama — see Iran; sucking up to — but even more than that, he is determined that whatever Trump did, he’ll do the opposite.