A plethora of US companies flourished under the administration of former US president Donald Trump, with many benefiting from his "America First" tariffs, corporate tax cut, and other policy actions.

President Biden has rescinded some of these policies but retained others, with his new initiatives and approaches affecting these firms in different ways. Read on to discover how 15 businesses that boomed under Trump are doing under Biden today.

Berkshire Hathaway did well under Trump thanks to the former POTUS's 2017 corporate tax cut, which saw the rate slashed from 35% to 21%.

In fact, chairman and CEO Warren Buffett revealed in 2018 that the Nebraska-based conglomerate saved $29 billion in 2017 alone. Biden wants to hike the rate to between 25% and 28% but the move lacks congressional support at present, meaning the Trump tax cuts remain firmly in place. 

Berkshire Hathaway has continued to ride high since Biden assumed office. The current president's cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline means millions of barrels of oil are now being carried by rail instead. Berkshire Hathaway owns BNSF, one of America's largest freight railroads and the biggest transporter of crude oil in the US, and the corporation is benefiting big time.

In fact, the firm's profits soared to record levels last year, with operating profits reaching $7.3 billion in the final three months of 2021 alone. Profits were also boosted by the recovery of its other businesses such as GEICO and Dairy Queen, along with the solid performance of its stock holdings.

Other factors working in Berkshire Hathaway's favor at the moment include skyrocketing inflation, high oil prices, and the war in Ukraine, all of which have prompted investors to flock to the safety of Berkshire Hathaway stock.

The conglomerate has also been delighting investors with its aggressive buyback program. As a result, the stock price surpassed a staggering half a million dollars in the middle of March 2022 and as of 7 July is trading at around $418,000. 

Facebook Inc, which rebranded as Meta in October 2021, had a "long, tortured" relationship with Trump, who signed an executive order in September 2020 that threatened to make it liable for removing or modifying what its users post.

But the firm actually thrived during his presidency. Facebook, the company's flagship social media service, saw its number of users go up by around a billion, while annual revenue increased from $40.7 billion to $86 billion. 

Although Biden has rescinded the Trump executive order, Meta has been having a hard time under the current administration.

No doubt buoyed up by whistle-blower Frances Haugen's shocking revelations, Biden called for increased privacy protections and hinted at antitrust measures in his first State of the Union Address. Revealingly, Haugen was among First Lady Jill Biden's VIP guests at the event, with the president making a point during the address of praising her for her courage.

A lawsuit filed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that aims to break up Meta was given the go-ahead in January 2022, adding to Mark Zuckerberg's woes.

Additionally, the company reported in February that the number of daily users on its social platform fell for the first time ever, with Gen Zers and Millennials deserting it in favor of TikTok. This, along with decreased profits and Apple's new privacy protections, has rattled investors and battered Meta's stock price. It currently sits at between $160 and $170, down from highs of over $200 in May. 

In March 2018, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on imported steel, a move that the domestic industry welcomed with open arms.

But while US Steel saw its profits surge in response, its stock tumbled throughout the rest of 2018 and 2019, due in part to the company's poor cash flow and continued use of complicated traditional blast furnaces. This is in stark contrast to competitors such as Nucor, which produces the alloy using far more energy-efficient electric arc furnaces. These smaller-scale operations use cheap scrap steel, unlike the older technology, and adapt better to downturns, whereas blast furnaces require high volumes to be profitable.

Needless to say, US Steel stock remained in the doldrums for much of 2020, with the pandemic further suppressing demand. It has since bounced back spectacularly, with restrictions easing and steel prices hitting record levels. US Steel has also been ditching blast furnace tech for the newer electric arc mills, which has helped further bolster its stock.

The firm reported record earnings for 2021 and strong cash flow, and while prices fell back at the end of the year, they are on the rise again due to the war in Ukraine. 

Echoing his predecessor, Biden has stressed that protecting domestic steel production is a matter of national security. Instead of eliminating tariffs entirely, the current administration has introduced a hybrid system whereby imports from the EU, UK, and Japan are subject to the 25% tariff if they exceed quotas, while the blanket tariff remains on Chinese steel.

And although the domestic industry has called for all tariffs to remain in place, it's faring surprisingly well under Biden, having been boosted by the passage of his trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and reinforcement of "Buy American" laws. That said, there are lingering fears that American companies could suffer, and banks including Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co have lowered their stock price targets for US Steel as a result.

As America's largest steelmaker, Nucor boomed following the introduction of the 25% tariff on imported steel. Its profits jumped by almost 30% in 2018 but dropped back in 2019 as demand and prices fell, and were further impacted for much of 2020 by COVID-19.

Still, it's likely that the fallout would have been significantly worse had the Trump tariffs not been in place. Plus, former chairman and CEO John Ferriola said the tariffs enabled Nucor to press ahead with ambitious expansion plans, including the construction of a new billion-dollar plant.

As we mentioned, the firm has the edge on US Steel as it uses newer electric arc mills rather than old-school blast furnaces and is more diversified too.

This means Nucor is in a more favorable position to deal with downturns in what is, by its very nature, a cyclical industry. Much like US Steel, its stock price shot up when pandemic restrictions eased and demand, as well as commodity prices, soared towards the end of 2020. But it's not all been good news.

The company was one of 55 called out by Biden last year for not paying its fair share of taxes. Despite this harsh criticism and the fact that the Trump tariffs have been tempered, Nucor had been flourishing under the current administration. But its stock price has recently plummeted from highs of $170 in April to just over $100 in July, threatening the idea that headwinds are likely to be mitigated by Biden's infrastructure spending and "Buy American" ethos, not to mention the high steel prices precipitated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Firing up Twitter with his incendiary tweets, Trump was wonderfully lucrative for the micro-blogging platform, keeping it in the news 24/7 and pulling in new users like no tomorrow.

Perhaps partly as a result, the company turned its first-ever quarterly profit in 2018 and reported record revenues for the last quarter of 2020. The pandemic and the US presidential election both helped to boost user numbers to unprecedented new levels.

Having said that, Twitter's "permanent suspension" of Trump's account in January 2021 didn't make a dent in the platform's popularity. In fact, if anything, it's attracted new liberal-leaning users, as well as a slew of advertisers that were previously put off by the former president's rhetoric. February 2021 saw the company's stock price hit a record $80.75.

The number of Twitter users totaled 217 million in late 2021, up from 186 million the previous year. Revenue also significantly increased by 59%, from $3.7 billion to $5.08 billion.

Twitter stock later tumbled back down in value. While the number of users on the platform increased, growth missed the expectations of analysts. Other factors, such as the replacement of Jack Dorsey as CEO and uncertainty around Elon Musk's proposed takeover, also dampened the stock price. But the launch of Trump's rival platform Truth Social and Apple's new privacy protections have been less impactful than the company initially feared.

Twitter is now cautiously optimistic about its growth prospects. Earlier this year the company announced that it was "making meaningful progress" toward reaching its target of 315 million daily users and $7.5 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2023. These goals were called into question during Musk's controversial negotiations. But Twitter ramped up its expectations in early June, telling staff it hopes to add 13 million monetizable users to the platform this quarter. It's the highest goal the company has ever set, but it might be achievable: Statista data shows that between the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of this year, Twitter gained 12 million users.

Construction aggregates producer Vulcan Materials was in fine form during the early part of Trump's presidency, aided by the ex-POTUS's "America First" policies, the building of the Mexican border wall, and a proposed infrastructure blitz, which helped turbo-charge revenue, profits, and the firm's stock price.

The last couple of years of the Trump presidency weren't quite so successful, however, with the wall unfinished and his infrastructure plan a non-starter.

See the Trump administration's projects that were canceled by Biden

Like other companies in the construction sector, Vulcan Materials suffered during the pandemic. It enjoyed a period of posterity after Biden took the helm, thanks to a boom in construction fueled by pent-up pandemic-induced demand. What's more, the 46th president's trillion-dollar infrastructure plan was like a gift from the gods for the company, which fittingly shares its name with the Roman fire deity.

Having acquired US Concrete last year, Vulcan Materials is now the country's largest supplier of construction aggregates, which are poised to be in red-hot demand over the coming years as America updates its tired infrastructure.

This worked wonders on the company's stock, which attained a record $213.65 in January. But it has since dropped back down and is currently trading at around $144, hampered by ongoing labor shortages in the construction industry, as well as a resurgence of supply chain issues due to lockdowns in China and the Russian war in Ukraine. 

Private prison operator GEO Group was enriched by the Trump administration's controversial border policy, landing plum multimillion-dollar contracts to run detention centers in Texas and California.

However, it actually ended up suffering from the negative publicity, with almost every major bank stopping financing for private prisons.

The company, which ironically was founded by an immigrant from Greece, donated big to the 2020 Trump campaign, and for good reason.

Biden signed an executive order in January of last year phasing out federal contracts with private prisons. Consequently, the firm's stock price, which was trending down already, fell even more dramatically.

That said, the for-profit prison operator has found ways to circumvent the order by exploiting the immigration court backlog caused by COVID-19, as revealed in a previously confidential document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Nonetheless, it has still lost federal contracts worth around $125 million, with its profits falling by 32% in 2021. Financial services company Moody's downgraded the company's credit rating earlier this year, but several institutional investors are now more optimistic and have recently added more GEO Group shares to their portfolios. 

Leading investment bank Goldman Sachs was among the biggest winners from Trump's corporate tax cut. The reduced tax liability translated to a $2.3 billion jump in the company's profits for the first quarter of 2018, an increase of 30% compared to the previous year, and boosted the firm's bottom line throughout the four-year presidency.

The investment bank has been vocal in its opposition to the Biden administration's desire to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%, warning last year that such a hike would reduce S&P per-share earnings by a painful 9% during 2022.

However, the bank has been proven right in its assumption that the increase would be likely moderated and is undoubtedly thrilled there isn't the support for it in Congress.

Still, the investment bank's pride has been dented somewhat by Biden's preference for rival BlackRock. Instead of appointing Goldman Sachs alumni, he has given top jobs to former employees of its competitor, in contrast to Trump.

In terms of company performance, Goldman Sachs had a stellar first three quarters of 2021 but missed Wall Street's expectations for Q4 partly due to the Federal Reserve slowing its pandemic stimulus. This has hurt the firm's stock, which reached an all-time high of over $400 in November but has since slipped back down to under $300. That said, it's still trading well above where it stood during the Trump years.

Citigroup also benefited hugely from Trump's corporate tax reduction. Its profit and stock price shot up when the tax cut was introduced in November 2017, and the financial institution continued to perform reasonably well during the course of the former administration.

But the pandemic hit it hard.

The banking giant's stock price nosedived in February 2020 but began its recovery in October of that year. It has slipped since June 2021 and is underperforming rivals.

The Biden administration's inability to raise the corporate tax rate has of course been a boon for the financial institution. The current president was also expected to beef up regulation of the nation's banks, but this too has fallen by the wayside, with the Senate failing to confirm Biden's nominees, such as Saule Omarova and Sarah Bloom Raskin (pictured), for top regulatory roles. Both Raskin and Omarova have withdrawn their nominations in recent months.

Regardless, Citigroup isn't in the best of shape. Its results for Q1 2022 were decidedly lackluster, with its net income a staggering 46% lower than the same period last year. 

Citigroup has the largest presence in Russia of any American bank, and therefore is taking a bigger hit from the war in Ukraine and withdrawal from the Russian market. This is reflected in its stock price, which has trended down even more markedly since the invasion began.

Bar a dip in 2018, Walmart's stock price trended up throughout the Trump presidency, with the retail giant posting robust results, quarter after quarter.

The former administration's corporate tax cut allowed the company to raise wages, reward staff with a juicy bonus, and expand maternity and paternity leave, and is credited with making the business more competitive at home and overseas.

The lack of support for Biden's proposed corporate tax hike is music to Walmart's ears, but America's biggest private employer has pretty much abandoned its fight against the $15-an-hour minimum wage touted by the new administration.

However, it's yet to pay all its workers the magic figure, instead stressing that the average hourly wage has been raised to $15.

On another note, the relationship between the retail giant and America's 46th POTUS, which wasn't great before, has actually warmed significantly. In December 2021, Biden praised Walmart for its effort to alleviate the nation's supply chain issues and the administration has embraced the company of late.

Still, the retailer's stock price has more or less plateaued under Biden – it grew consistently during the Trump years – although this has more to do with factors such as overvaluation and tight margins rather than anything the current administration is doing.

The chain has also recently come under fire for allegedly allowing "hundreds of millions of dollars" to change hands illegally through its money transfer system. The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit that accuses Walmart of facilitating fraud and failing to protect victims and will order the store to repay the funds if its lawsuit is successful. 

Trump's loathing for The Washington Post and its owner Jeff Bezos knew no bounds. Ironically, his controversy-filled presidency was a bonanza for the publication, with the constant dramas helping to drive record levels of traffic to its site. Its monthly unique visitors peaked at 139 million in March 2020.

Rather prophetically, Trump warned in December 2017 that "newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there." And he wasn't wrong.

Dubbed the "Trump slump," traffic to The Washington Post website dropped by 26% during February 2021, which was the first full month of the "boring" Biden administration. And since then, the numbers have failed to recover.

In January 2022, the site had 74.6 million unique visitors, which is down by a third compared to the same period in 2021. Traffic dropped even further in April, with around 61 million people visiting the site that month.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the slump has triggered some soul-searching at the publication, prompting the people in charge to broaden the scope of its coverage away from politics, as well as to launch initiatives such as its "Next Generation" drive to attract younger readers.

Despite the former president's rabid dislike of Jeff Bezos, Amazon thrived during the Trump administration. The 45th POTUS did try to make life hard for his nemesis. However, threats of slapping punishing taxes on the online retailer and cloud computing giant, and of whacking it with an antitrust suit, came to nothing, as did attempts to force the US Postal Service to raise the rates it charges the retailer for deliveries.

Amazon's bigwigs clearly breathed a sigh of relief when Biden won the 2020 election, as there is no such personal animosity between the new president and Bezos.

But it turns out they were under a perilously false sense of security by assuming the new administration would give the corporate titan an easy ride. In fact, the company's bosses could very well be lamenting the demise of the former president who, despite his many threats, turned out to be a paper tiger.

Biden's Department of Justice and FCC appointees are coming down hard on Amazon by pursuing a number of antitrust cases that could spell disaster for the business, while its treatment of workers is coming under increased scrutiny.

This has elicited a furious response from the company, which is currently at loggerheads with the White House and Congress. And while the business remains exceptionally strong, its stock price has faltered over the past 12 months following several years of fairly steady growth. Relations between Biden and Bezos clearly remain sour, with the latter recently taking to Twitter to criticize the president's request that gas stations should lower consumer prices at pumps. 

Super-cozy with Big Oil, fossil fuel fan Trump lavished the domestic industry with generous tax cuts and rolled back over 100 environmental regulations, which traditional energy companies like ExxonMobil lapped up.

The 45th POTUS hired Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil's former chairman and CEO, as his Secretary of State, as well as opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline.

While stopping short of banning fracking, Biden has canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, rejoined the Paris Climate Accords, and suspended oil and gas leasing on federal land and waters, albeit only temporarily.

In fact, during 2021, the Biden administration approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands per month than the Trump administration did on average during its first three years. 

Yet 9,000 of these permits remain unused. This has led to accusations from the Biden administration that ExxonMobil is keeping prices, which have surged due to skyrocketing post-lockdown demand and the war in Ukraine, artificially high in order to boost its profits and stock price. After all, profits are the highest they've been in seven years and ExxonMobil stock has recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

This has provoked an industry investigation by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which could make for a major headache for the energy colossus and five other big-name oil corporations. 

Trump's corporate tax cut added billions to UnitedHealth's profits. While the pandemic slashed the number of elective surgeries and out-patient appointments, and the cost of caring for COVID-19 patients has been high, the country's leading health insurance provider posted better-than-anticipated results for Q4 2020 to Q4 2021. This trend has continued into 2022, with the company's Q1 earnings report showing revenues of $80.1 billion. That's apparently an increase of 14% year-over-year.

The failure of the current administration to raise the corporate tax rate has helped keep profits high. However, it's the Democratic government's bolstering of the Affordable Care Act (also known as "Obamacare") and Medicare Advantage that are really proving to be lucrative for the insurance heavyweight – especially the shoring up of the latter.

Last year, UnitedHealth welcomed 2.2 million additional members. This growth has been fueled in the most part by programs linked to government benefits, with Medicare Advantage the key driver.

And this insurance plan is set to expand even further in 2022. Unsurprisingly, the company's stock has been going through the roof and hit a record high of almost $550 in April. As of 7 July, it's trading at a healthy $514. 

One of America's Big Three automakers, Fiat Chrysler was the least prepared for the transition to renewable fuels and benefited the most from the Trump administration's rollback of US vehicle emissions standards and other pro-gasoline policies.

The company was also boosted by the corporate tax cut, which enabled it to invest a billion dollars and reward thousands of staff with a fat bonus.

Shortly before Biden's inauguration in January 2021, Fiat Chrysler merged with France's PSA Group, creating a new entity called Stellantis.

Like other corporate entities, the monster carmaker will benefit if corporate tax remains at 21%, which – as we've mentioned – is a distinct possibility given the lack of support in Congress for a hike.

While company CEO Carlos Tavares is going all out to accelerate the transition to electric, which the Biden administration is bending over backwards to facilitate, Stellantis currently lags behind its major US competitors Ford and GM in the electric vehicle race. In fact, it has zero all-electric models in the US at present.

This, however, could be seen as an advantage of sorts, as the automaker will be able to evaluate its rivals' offerings and take steps to improve on them when it launches its own versions.

Now take a look at Donald Trump's worst business decisions