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THE NEW DEAL IS A STINGING REBUKE TO TRUMP AND TRUMPISM  
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Jamelle Bouie
April 30, 2025
The New York Times
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_ As exhausting as they’ve felt to many Americans, these first
months of Trump’s second term fall far short of what Roosevelt
accomplished _

, Nathan Howard/Reuters

 

There is no question that Donald Trump’s ambition in the first 100
days of his return to the Oval Office was to set a new standard for
presidential accomplishment. To rival, even surpass, the scope of
Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts nearly a century ago, when he moved so
quickly — and so decisively — that he established the first 100
days as a yardstick for executive action.

But as consequential as they have been, and as exhausting as they’ve
felt to many Americans, these first months of Trump’s second term
fall far short of what Roosevelt accomplished. Yes, Trump has wreaked
havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our
relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of
American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. You could even
say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a
ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of
civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.

If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a
failure. To understand why he failed, we must do a bit of
compare-and-contrast. First, let’s look at the details of Trump’s
opening gambit. And second, let’s measure his efforts against the
man who set the terms in the first place: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
To do so is to see that the first 100 days of Trump’s second term
aren’t what we think they are. More important, it is to see that the
ends of a political project cannot be separated from the means that
are used to bring it into this world.

TRUMP BEGAN HIS second term with a shock-and-awe campaign of
executive actions. He, or rather the people around him, devised more
than 100 executive orders, all part of a program to repeal the better
part of the 20th century — from the New Deal onward — as well as
fundamentally transform the relationship between the federal
government and the American people.

His ultimate aim is to turn a constitutional republic centered on
limited government and the rule of law into a personalist autocracy
centered on the rule of one man, Donald J. Trump, and his unlimited
authority. Trump’s vision for the United States, put differently,
has more in common with foreign dictatorships than it does with almost
anything you might find in America’s tradition of republican
self-government.

To that end, the president’s executive orders are meant to act as
royal decrees — demands that the country bend to his will. In one,
among the more than four dozen issued in his first weeks in office,
Trump purports to purge the nation’s primary and secondary schools
of supposed “radical indoctrination” and promote a program of
“patriotic education” instead. In another, signed in the flurry of
executive activity that marked his first afternoon back in the Oval
Office, Trump asserts the power to define “biological” sex and
“gender identity” themselves, in an attempt to end official
recognition of trans and other gender nonconforming people.

In Trump’s America, diversity, equity and inclusion programs
aren’t just frowned upon; they’re grounds for purges in the public
sector and investigations in the private sector. Scientific and
medical research must align with his ideological agenda; anything that
doesn’t — no matter how promising or useful — is on the chopping
block. Any institutions that assert independent authority, like law
firms and universities, must be brought to heel with the force of the
state itself. Everything in American society must align with the
president’s agenda. Those who disagree might find themselves at the
mercy of his Department of Justice or worse, his deportation forces.

Trump claims sovereign authority. He claims the right to dismantle
entire federal agencies, regardless of the law. He claims the right to
spend taxpayer dollars as he sees fit, regardless of what Congress has
appropriated. He even claims the right to banish American citizens
from the country and send them to rot in a foreign prison.

Trump has deployed autocratic means toward authoritarian ends. And the
results, while sweeping, rest on a shaky foundation of unlawful
actions and potentially illegal executive actions.

NOW, LET’S consider Roosevelt.

It’s from Roosevelt, of course, that we get the idea that the 100th
day is a milestone worth marking.

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Roosevelt took office at a time of deprivation and desperation. The
Great Depression had reached its depths during the winter of his
inauguration in March 1933. Total estimated national income had
dropped by half
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financial economy had all but shut down, with banks closed and markets
frozen. About one-quarter of the nation’s work force — or close to
15 million people — was out of work. Countless businesses had
failed. What little relief was available, from either public or
private sources, was painfully inadequate.

“Now is the winter of our discontent the chilliest,” Merle Thorpe,
the editor of Nation’s Business — then the national magazine of
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — wrote in an editorial that captured
the mood of the country on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration.
“Fear, bordering on panic, loss of faith in everything, our
fellow-man, our institutions, private and government. Worst of all, no
faith in ourselves, or the future. Almost everyone ready to scuttle
the ship, and not even ‘women and children first.’”

It was this pall of despair that led Roosevelt to tell the nation in
his Inaugural Address
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only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning,
unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat
into advance.” Despite the real calls for someone to seize
dictatorial power in the face of crisis, Roosevelt’s goal — more,
possibly, than anything else — was to rescue and rejuvenate American
democracy: to rebuild it as a force that could tame the destructive
force of unregulated capitalism.

As such, the new president insisted, the country “must move as a
trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common
discipline.” His means would fit his ends. He would use democracy to
save democracy. He would go to the people’s representatives with an
ambitious plan of action. “These measures,” he said, “or such
other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and
wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to
speedy adoption.”

What followed was a blitz of action meant to ameliorate the worst of
the crisis. “On his very first night in office,” the historian
William E. Leuchtenburg (who died three months ago
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recounted in his seminal volume, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New
Deal, 1932-1940,” Roosevelt “directed Secretary of the Treasury
William Woodin to draft an emergency banking bill, and gave him less
than five days to get it ready.”

Five days later, on March 9, 1933, Congress convened a special session
during which it approved the president’s banking bill with a
unanimous vote in the House and a nearly unanimous vote in the Senate.
Soon after, Roosevelt urged the legislature to pass an unemployment
relief measure. By the end of the month, on March 31, Congress had
created the Civilian Conservation Corps.

This was just the beginning of a burst of legislative and executive
activity. On May 12 alone, Roosevelt signed the Federal Emergency
Relief Act — establishing the precursor to the Works Progress
Administration — the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Emergency
Farm Mortgage Act. He signed the bill creating the Tennessee Valley
Authority less than a week later, on May 18, and the Securities Act
regulating the offer and sale of securities on May 27. On June 16,
Roosevelt signed Glass-Steagall, a law regulating the banking system,
and the National Industrial Recovery Act, an omnibus business and
labor relations bill with a public works component. With that, and 100
days after it began, Congress went out of session.

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The legislature, Leuchtenburg wrote,

had written into the laws of the land the most extraordinary series of
reforms in the nation’s history. It had committed the country to an
unprecedented program of government-industry cooperation; promised to
distribute stupendous sums to millions of staple farmers; accepted
responsibility for the welfare of millions of unemployed; agreed to
engage in far-reaching experimentation in regional planning; pledged
billions of dollars to save homes and farms from foreclosure;
undertaken huge public works spending; guaranteed the small bank
deposits of the country; and had, for the first time, established
federal regulation of Wall Street.

And Roosevelt, Leuchtenburg continued, “had directed the entire
operation like a seasoned field general.” The president even coined
the “hundred days” phrasing, using it in a July 24, 1933,
fireside chat
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his recovery program, describing it as a period “devoted to the
starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”

The frantic movement of Roosevelt’s first months set a high standard
for all future presidents; all fell short. “The first 100 days make
him look like a minor league statesman,” said one journalist of
Roosevelt’s successor Harry S. Truman. The Times described the first
100 days of the Eisenhower administration as a “slow start.” And
after John F. Kennedy’s first 100 days yielded few significant
accomplishments, the young president let the occasion pass without
remark.

There is much to be said about why Roosevelt was able to do so much in
such a short window of time. It is impossible to overstate the
importance of the crisis of the Depression. “The country was in such
a state of confused desperation that it would have followed almost any
leader anywhere he chose to go,” observed the renowned columnist and
public intellectual Walter Lippmann. It also helped that there was no
meaningful political opposition to either Roosevelt or the Democratic
Party — the president took power with overwhelming majorities in the
House and the Senate. The Great Depression had made the Republicans a
rump party, unable to mount an effective opposition to the early
stages of the New Deal.

This note on Congress is key. Beyond the particular context of
Roosevelt’s moment, both the expectation and the myth of
Roosevelt’s 100 days miss the extent to which it was a legislative
accomplishment as much as an executive one. Roosevelt did not
transform the United States with a series of executive orders; he did
so with a series of laws.

Roosevelt was chief legislator as much as he was chief executive.
“He wrote letters to committee chairmen or members of Congress to
urge passage of his proposals, summoned the congressional leadership
to White House conferences on legislation … and appeared in person
before Congress,” Leuchtenburg wrote in an essay arguing that
Roosevelt was “the first modern president”:

He made even the hitherto mundane business of bill signing an occasion
for political theater; it was he who initiated the custom of giving a
presidential pen to a congressional sponsor of legislation as a
memento.

Or as the journalist Raymond Clapper wrote of Roosevelt at the end of
his first term: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the
president, although not a member of Congress, has become almost the
equivalent of the prime minister of the British system, because he’s
both executive and the guiding hand of the legislative branch.”

LAWS ARE NEVER fixed in place. But neither are they easily moved.
It’s for this reason that any president who hopes to make a lasting
mark on the United States must eventually turn to legislation. It is
in lawmaking that presidents secure their legacy for the long haul.

This brings us back to Trump, whose desire to be a strongman has led
him to rule like a strongman under the belief that he can impose an
authoritarian system on the United States through sheer force of will.

His White House doesn’t just rely on executive orders; it revolves
around them. They are the primary means through which the
administration takes action (he has signed only five bills into law),
under a radical assertion of executive power: the unitary executive
taken to its most extreme form. And for Trump himself, they seem to
define his vision of the presidency. He holds his ceremonies —
always televised, of course — where subordinates present his orders
as he gushes over them.

But while we have no choice but to recognize the significance of the
president’s use of executive power, we also can’t believe the
hype. Just because Trump desires to transform the American system of
government doesn’t mean that he will. Autocratic intent does not
translate automatically into autocratic success.

Remember, an executive order isn’t law. It is, as Philip J. Cooper
explained in “By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of
Executive Direct Action,” a directive “issued by the president to
officers of the executive branch, requiring them to take an action,
stop a certain type of activity, alter policy, change management
practices, or accept a delegation of authority under which they will
henceforth be responsible for the implementation of law.” When
devised carefully and within the scope of the president’s lawful
authority, an executive order can have the force of law (provided the
underlying statute was passed within the constitutional authority of
Congress), but it does not carry any inherent authority. An executive
order is not law simply because the president says it is.

Even though Trump seems to think he is issuing decrees, the truth is
that his directives are provisional and subject to the judgment of the
courts as well as future administrations. And if there is a major
story to tell about Trump’s second term so far, it is the extent to
which many of the president’s most sweeping executive actions have
been tied up in the federal judiciary. The White House, while loath to
admit it, has even had to back down in the face of hostile rulings.

The president might want to be a king, but despite the best efforts of
his allies on the Supreme Court, the American system is not one of
executive supremacy. Congress has all the power it needs to reverse
the president’s orders and thwart his ambitions. Yes, the national
legislature is held by the president’s party right now. But that
won’t be a permanent state of affairs, especially given the
president’s unpopularity.

MAGA propaganda notwithstanding, Trump is not some grand impresario
skillfully playing American politics to his precise tune. He may want
to bend the nation to his will, but he does not have the capacity to
do the kind of work that would make this possible, as well as
permanent — or as close to permanent as lawmaking allows. If
Roosevelt’s legislative skill was a demonstration of his strength,
then Trump’s reliance on executive orders is a sign of his weakness.

NONE OF THIS is to discount the real damage that he has inflicted on
the country. It is precisely because Republicans in Congress have
abdicated their duty to the Constitution that Trump has the capacity
to act in catastrophically disastrous ways.

But the overarching project of the second Trump administration — to
put the United States on the path toward a consolidated authoritarian
state — has stalled out. And it has done so because Trump lacks what
Roosevelt had in spades: a commitment to governance and a deep
understanding of the system in which he operated.

Roosevelt could orchestrate the transformative program of his 100 days
because he tied his plan to American government as it existed, even as
he worked to remake it. Trump has pursued his by treating the American
government as he wants it to be. It is very difficult to close the gap
between those two things, and it will become all the more difficult as
the bottom falls out of Trump’s standing with the public.

Do not take this as succor. Do not think it means that the United
States is in the clear. American democracy is still as fragile and as
vulnerable as it has ever been, and Trump is still motivated to make
his vision a reality. He may even lash out as it becomes clear that he
has lost whatever initiative he had to begin with. This makes his
first 100 days less a triumph for him than a warning to the rest of
us. The unthinkable, an American dictatorship, is possible.

But Trump may not have the skills to effect the permanent
transformation of his despotic dreams. Despite the chaos of the
moment, it is possible that freedom-loving Americans have gotten the
luck of the draw. Our most serious would-be tyrant is also among our
least capable presidents, and he has surrounded himself with people as
fundamentally flawed as he is.

On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump seemed to be on top of the world.
One hundred days later, he’s all but a lame duck. He can rage and he
can bluster — and he will do a lot more damage — but the fact of
the matter is that he can be beaten. Now the task is to deliver him
his defeat.

 

* Trump
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* 100 Days
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* FDR
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* New Deal
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