The progressive hero created the predicate for the Trump presidency.
The progressive hero created the predicate for the Trump presidency.
P rogressives have long pined for another FDR. Here in the first couple of months of 2025, they’ve gotten one.
President Trump’s mad opening dash is like nothing we’ve seen since Franklin Roosevelt’s historic first 100 days.
It’s a cliché to say that we live in an unprecedented era, but it’s not the first time we’ve had a frenetic, action-oriented president who cares more about the results than the rules and, oh yeah, is interested in serving more than two terms in office.
Like Trump, FDR was an improviser who didn’t sweat the details and a big personality who prided himself on his showmanship and never displayed anything other than supreme confidence in public.
Like FDR, Trump doesn’t quail at remaking the economy on the fly and can’t stand judges who get in his way.
Obviously, it’s a mistake to exaggerate similarities between the patrician Democrat who overcame polio and drastically increased the size and power of the American state, and the billionaire Republican who, tariffs aside, has been a deregulator and tax-cutter.
FDR was dealing with a genuine world-historical crisis at the outset of his presidency and, importantly, passed major pieces of legislation through a compliant Congress with sizable Democratic majorities. Trump, in contrast, inherited an economy in pretty good shape, and the Republican Congress has been a non-factor the first couple of months.
What fundamentally unites FDR and Trump, though, is a Big Man view of the presidency as an overwhelming force that takes the rest of the system — and the country — by the scruff of the neck and pushes it wherever the president wants to go.
This institutionally immodest view is a natural match for personal immodesty — in this sense, Trump obviously has much more in common with FDR than, say, Calvin Coolidge, who lacked both personal and institutional grandiosity. Coolidge biographer Amity Shlaes calls him “the great refrainer.”
Roosevelt promised “action, and action now” in his first inaugural address. As Raymond Moley, a New Dealer who eventually turned on the project, observed, “The American people wanted their government to do something, anything, so long as it acted with assurance and vigor.”
In his initial days in office, Roosevelt issued only the second emergency proclamation in U.S. history to shut down the banks and ban all gold transactions. He used a war-time power to do it, the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA). This move stretched the act to the breaking point or beyond, just as Trump has done with his tariffs and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the successor to TWEA. (Congress shortly thereafter gave FDR the powers he needed retroactively.)
As John Yoo pointed out in his book Crisis and Command, the entire FDR model was based on assuming war-like powers in a time of peace. FDR said in his first inaugural that he sought “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” This would bring radical change to our constitutional balance, bolstering the power of the executive branch in general and the presidency in particular.
The historic raft of legislation that followed gave the executive extraordinary powers, from determining what crops farmers could plant to imposing intrusive codes of conduct on industry. Walter Lippmann decried the “excessive centralization and dictatorial spirit.”
The constitutionality of all of this was in serious question, and when parts of the agenda began to get struck down, FDR didn’t take it with calm equanimity any more than Trump has his reverses in the courts.
When FDR thought that the Court might ax his prohibition on gold transactions, the president prepared to counter with, as Yoo writes, “a declaration of national emergency, a fixed price for gold, and an attack on the Court for ‘imperil[ing] the economic and political security of this nation.’”
Of course, when the so-called First New Deal was eviscerated by the Supreme Court, FDR threatened to impose his will on the Court by packing it, a scheme more audacious and alarming than anything Trump has proposed (it was Joe Biden who took a page from FDR with his own plan for Court “reform”).
Like Trump, FDR also sought to bring the executive branch to heel with controversial personnel moves to cement his power. FDR moved to fire holdovers and bring in his own people, even when his legal authority to do so was in doubt. He lost a significant case involving his removal of the head of the FTC. Roosevelt fired him despite the statute saying a commissioner could only be cashiered for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
FDR’s equivalent of DOGE, by the way, was his Brain Trust, a team of trusted advisers in the White House and spread throughout the government.
All of this is to say that, insofar as FDR created the domineering modern presidency, Trump is his heir, both institutionally and, to some extent, personally.
A master of contemporary media who made himself widely available to the press and overawed his party with his persona, FDR considered himself an accomplished performer. He once told Orson Welles that the two of them were the best actors in the country.
He was a talker — Vice President John Nance Garner said he uttered 500 words for every one he listened to — and a large figure in every sense.
In his book on FDR’s first hundred days, Jonathan Alter quotes the historian Richard Hofstadter for the proposition, “At the heart of the New Deal was not a philosophy, but a temperament. The essence of that temperament was Roosevelt’s confidence that even when he was operating in unfamiliar territory, he could do no wrong, commit no serious mistakes.”
Who does that sound like? Needless to say, FDR wasn’t posting outlandish social-media items at 2 a.m., and, whatever his flaws, he ascended to the American pantheon with his strategically deft leadership of the U.S. in World War II.
That doesn’t change the fact that the progressive icon helped create the presidency that Trump now happily fills and wields as a tool of creation and destruction here at home and abroad.