Prez Trump, you’re no Franklin Roosevelt

NEW DELHI: 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.

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 centred on limited government and the rule of law into a personalist autocracy centred 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.

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.

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.

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, and the financial economy had all but shut down, with banks closed and markets frozen. About one-quarter of the nation’s workforce — or close to 15 million people — was out of work. Countless businesses had failed.

What followed was a blitz of action meant to ameliorate the worst of the crisis. “On his very first night in office,” historian William E Leuchtenburg recounted in his seminal volume, '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, 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, Congress had created the Civilian Conservation Corps.

This was just the beginning of a burst of legislative and executive activity. Roosevelt then went on to sign the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, followed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities Act, Glass-Steagall, a law regulating the banking system, and the National Industrial Recovery Act.

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 cannot 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.