Trump’s First 100 Days: Roosevelt in Reverse
2025-04-29T09:00:00Z
FDR calmed and unified the country; Trump has terrified and further divided us.
The post Trump’s First 100 Days: Roosevelt in Reverse appeared first on Washington Monthly.
This piece is also available at Old Goats with Jonathan Alter.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted the United States out of the fetal position with his thrilling First Hundred Days. I entitled my first book The Defining Moment because this period changed the social contract—the deal—between the American people and their government by redefining what we owe each other. That “New Deal” is now 92 years old. It is still in place. But the world FDR helped to build is under assault as never before.
In his famous first inaugural address, Roosevelt promised “action and action now.” So did Donald Trump in his second inaugural, and both men provided it. Unfortunately, Trump has inverted FDR’s actions at every turn, replacing construction with destruction and compassion with contempt.
It’s always easier to wreck than to build. Roosevelt rescued the banks, which were failing everywhere; Trump alarmed the banks and global markets with his idiotic tariff policy. Roosevelt calmed and unified the country with his first Fireside Chat; Trump has terrified and further divided us, even using his Easter message to trash his critics. Roosevelt put 250,000 people to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps in his first three months; Trump fired tens of thousands of federal employees and is trying to disband AmeriCorps; Roosevelt envisioned a system of social security at home and collective security abroad; Trump has undermined both.
Let’s not forget their contrasting views on authoritarian power. In 1933, “Dictator” had a positive connotation. Studebaker built a car called “The Dictator” that sold well. Mussolini was popular not just in Italy but also in the U.S., and Hitler was brand new in power. Walter Lippmann and Eleanor Roosevelt told FDR he should adopt a “mild species” of dictatorship to confront the Great Depression.
FDR was tempted. I found in his files at Hyde Park the draft of a radio speech to the American Legion on the second day of his presidency. In the draft, he told his audience of World War I veterans, “I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation that now confronts us.” That reference to assembling a Mussolini-like private army to guard banks or otherwise do his bidding was dictator talk. But Roosevelt didn’t give that speech, opting instead for a short re-purposing of his inaugural address. He signed a few executive orders but mostly worked with Congress. Even his ill-advised 1937 court-packing scheme was not an unconstitutional power grab but a bill that Congress rejected.
Trump hasn’t dealt much with Congress, beyond ramming his awful Cabinet appointments through the Senate. Note the Congress-free contents of his paltry and lame 100-day victory lap.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers crowed in a statement this week:
In less than 100 days President Trump has leveled the field for our manufacturers.
The National Association of Manufacturers backs deregulation, not tariffs.
Brought us closer to peace in Gaza and Ukraine
The ceasefire in Gaza didn’t last, and the U.S. is walking away from Ukraine talks.
Flooded the US with historic investment commitments
Like what —trying to scuttle Joe Biden’s CHIPS bill and other genuine investments?
Returned American hostages
Fewer than Biden got released last year.
Held universities accountable for fostering anti-Semitism
Partially true at Columbia, but anti-Semitism is mostly a pretext for a dangerous attack on academic freedom and the American system of higher education that, whatever its faults, is the envy of the world.
Of course, the White House failed to cite what historians will agree were Trump’s biggest early “accomplishments”: Vandalizing the federal government and ruling by decree. Trump began by pardoning all of the January 6 terrorists, even the ones who wanted to kill his vice president and the speaker of the House. He then handed immense power to the richest man in the world, who put USAID through “the wood chipper,” condemning thousands of poor and sick people to misery and death. Trump empowered 22-year-olds to assault the FAA, the NIH, the CDC, NOAA and other agencies that help keep Americans healthy and safe; fired inspectors general and anyone else who might provided democratic accountability and root out genuine waste, fraud and abuse; and surrendered the soft power (e.g. the Voice of America) that advanced American interests abroad.
It remains unclear how permanent this lawless damage will be; courts may reinstate many civil servants, and Congress still has the power of the purse. But history will record that Elon Musk not only failed to cut even a small fraction of the $1 trillion he promised to save, but he also set a new standard for how not to reform the government.
More broadly, historians will remember Trump’s first 100 days for his unquenchable thirst for money, power, and retribution, and for his imperial threats against Panama, Greenland, and even Canada, until now our closest friend. The indelible visual images of this period will include two Oval Office horror shows. In the first, the president sold out Ukraine, NATO and American ideals in favor a might-makes-right foreign policy. In the second, he was overheard asking the self-described “cool dictator” (a contradiction in terms) of El Salvador to build five new gulags to hold American citizens he doesn’t like. Trump hawking Teslas and hosting his meme coin investors from the White House might also get a mention in the history books.
Trump has moved faster than expected, with results that are already far more sinister than the record of his blundering first term, which itself was so bad that he was rated the worst president in American history. But understanding just how much more sinister requires separating the crap the comes out of his mouth from durably evil deeds.
The record shows that a truly successful debut requires proper sequencing, or nothing major gets done. This demands a president’s intense focus and willingness to expend political capital.
On one level, those requirements should have played to Trump’s strengths. With his threats to destroy any dissenting Republicans in primaries, Trump has put the bully into the bully pulpit. It helps that he’s hands-on in dealing with Republican politicians and other knee-benders and generous with perks like rides on Air Force One and signed MAGA hats. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were missing the schmooze gene, which hampered them on Capitol Hill. Trump has it and uses it.
But to what end? Not just FDR and LBJ but Carter and Obama signed much more legislation early on than Trump, who has little to show legislatively so far. He is so convinced that he’s king — and so short-sighted and ignorant about the way government actually works — that he seems to believe that his executive orders have the force of law. Some are legitimate expressions of his lawful authority and will be upheld by the courts; others will turn out to be little more than rightwing press releases (e.g., overhauling local elections over which he has no legal authority); none are permanent. A Democratic president in 2029 can reverse them all.
In the meantime, Trump has now blown his honeymoon. At first, Democrats were in much more disarray than in 2017. But his betrayal of America’s closest friends and ruinous tariff policy has done him serious political harm outside his base. Once markets tanked on news of his tariffs, Trump lost his connection to independents and non-MAGA Republican voters, much as Joe Biden did after his chaotic retreat from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. So while Trump will never lose the hardcore base of 35 percent or so, he is in trouble with the other 15 percent that he needed to get elected last fall. He’s now in the low to mid-40s in most polls. If he drops below 40 percent, he’ll be much easier to neuter.
Some Trump victories lie ahead. He and FDR agree on one thing: presidents should be able to fire commissioners of federal regulatory agencies. Later this year, the Supreme Court will likely reverse a New Deal-era decision and side with Trump’s efforts to seize control of long-independent functions of government.
On the positive side, here’s something else that has happened in the last 100 days—a brilliant new “empty chair town hall” movement around the country. This one is from John Boehner’s old district in Ohio, where David Pepper, a smart Ohio activist, executed the Town Hall Strategy to perfection.
There was other good news in the last three months. Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, among others, began breaking through, and Harvard President Alan Garber modeled principled resistance from other elites. In the Wisconsin race for state supreme court, Democrat Susan Crawford won by ten points, in part by tying Musk around her Republican opponent’s neck. This sent a message that taking money from Musk in 2026 is risky, a development that may level the playing field even as Trump corruptly orders his attorney general to investigate Act Blue, the Democrats’ fundraising arm.
In his first 100 days, Trump hijacked Roosevelt’s famous line and essentially said: “The only thing we have to use is fear itself.” Without it, he’s still a dangerous old man who acts like a king, but a less intimidating figure. Fear, we’ve learned from some craven CEOs, media executives, and managing partners of law firms, is a virus that spreads easily among those who lack the character to stand and fight. But courage is contagious, too.
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