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If there’s a mirror image opposite to Donald Trump’s second-term blitz, it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose first 100 days in office is the model for presidents who want to get things done.
The only president to serve more than two terms, Roosevelt remade government, used his bully pulpit and realigned political coalitions, all things Trump sees himself doing.
Trump, working with Elon Musk, wants to re-define Americans’ relationship with government by firing federal workers, dismantling long-functioning agencies, and branding as much government spending as possible as wasteful. He’s also realigning global trade and reworking international alliances as quickly as possible.
Roosevelt, working with Congress, had public backing to do whatever was necessary to pull the US out of the Great Depression. He built government up with the New Deal, convinced Americans that government spending could improve their daily lives and put people to work, created the social safety net with Social Security, broke down barriers to trade and helped create a system of alliances.
I took the concept of Trump as a kind of anti-Roosevelt to Eric Rauchway, a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Davis and the author of multiple books on Roosevelt, including, most recently, “Why the New Deal Matters.”
Our conversation, edited for length and style, and conducted by video chat, is below:
WOLF: I’ve seen the argument made in the press that Trump in his second term is trying to act like FDR, but in reverse. Stephen Bannon recently talked about how this moment in US politics is like a 1932-style realignment. As an expert on FDR, what do you think when you see those arguments?
RAUCHWAY: Well, it certainly seems like the president’s policies are opposite to those of the New Deal. He seems to be taking apart regulatory mechanisms. He seems to be drawing down public investment in a variety of areas, including the arts and so forth. He seems to be, as far as I can tell, diminishing resources sent to the Social Security Administration, which of course is the central piece of the New Deal’s proto-welfare state. Substantively, these policies are the opposite of the New Deal.
But I wouldn’t say that he’s acting like FDR or that we see evidence of realignment. Let me talk about the first thing. Roosevelt acted by going to Congress and getting them to pass a law that would allow him to do the things that he then wanted to do, which we haven’t seen this current administration do even though it does have majorities in both houses of Congress.
Roosevelt was citing laws that allowed him to do what he did, which we don’t see a lot of in the current presidency, which seems to rely on claims of inherent executive power. So I don’t see this presidency acting like the Roosevelt presidency at all.
And as for the coalition, Roosevelt’s coalition swept in traditionally Democratic voters like white Southerners together with a whole bunch of other kinds of voters who hadn’t previously voted Democratic, including Midwestern farmers in 1936. His electorate included a majority of Black voters in the United States. And that was an enduring coalition that lasted to 1968 or so.
The off-cycle elections that occurred recently and various other factors seem to suggest that the current president’s popularity is the current president’s – that it’s a personal kind of popularity whereas Roosevelt reformulated the Democratic Party such that later Democrats could benefit from the machinery that he had built.
WOLF: We do see a populism in Trump’s message. We see a stratification in voters based on education that’s been happening for a long time, but it’s supercharged under Trump. You disagree that the plates are shifting?
RAUCHWAY: I won’t do the future. If you show me that those things hold up for later Republicans as they have for the current president, then I will believe that there has been a realignment. There’s no evidence of that yet.
WOLF: A lot of the agencies that Roosevelt started don’t really exist today in a modern form, although Social Security has grown to be the backbone of the safety net. So as Trump goes about dismantling the administrative state, do you see him reaching back all the way to Roosevelt or is it a more recent section of government that he’s going after? Things like the EPA and the Department of Education are more recent.
RAUCHWAY: As you point out, the Social Security Administration is a creation of the New Deal. Going after organized labor and shuffling around the National Labor Relations Board is a dismantling of the New Deal. Firing members of the boards of executive agencies, that’s a precedent that was set over Roosevelt during the New Deal.
The use of the president’s authority to change tariffs is completely the opposite of a trend that was begun under the New Deal.
Right prior to 1934, tariffs had been set by Congress. So every time you were going to change the tariff, you had to open up debate in Congress for every interest to lobby every congressperson or every senator. Tariffs tended to be a mixed bag of political favors. That’s what happened with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930.
Starting with the Roosevelt administration, in order to avoid that, in order to gradually bring tariffs down and to inaugurate a trend that persisted basically until yesterday, Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934 and created an executive capacity to negotiate tariffs with other countries, resting on expertise in the presidency, the US Trade Commission as it now is known. The whole point of that was to de-politicize tariffs, which the Trump administration has just now reversed.
WOLF: Trump made a bold claim yesterday in selling his tariffs to Americans when he said if Congress had doubled down on tariffs early in the Great Depression the effects would have been muted. That’s a debate that economists and historians might have. Where do you stand?
RAUCHWAY: I mean … Congress did double-tunnel tariffs early in the New Deal, that’s what the Smoot-Hawley tariff was! The downturn began late in the summer of 1929. It was evidently a serious downturn by the time you got into 1930 and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was in part a response to that, just as the previous Republican tariff legislation in 1921-22 had been a response to that recession. That was a kind of stock Republican play. So it’s hard for me to understand how to address an argument that if they had done the thing that they actually did, the results would be different than the results that we actually got. Historians have a hard time with those kinds of questions.
WOLF: Roosevelt did these big, expansive things. Did he have to recalibrate history in the same way Trump does, to change the way people viewed things in order to get these things passed. Were they controversial?
RAUCHWAY: Roosevelt was well ahead of public opinion in being opposed to the rise of Nazism. And he did spend the better part of his first two terms in office getting people to go along with him, making firm stands against Nazism and other kinds of fascism and dictatorship. So that was certainly a process of educating the public. But that was less about changing history than it was about getting people to see what was going on in international affairs as something that affected them in the United States.
WOLF: He was an incredibly powerful president. Was he in any way the progenitor of the kind of super powerful executive that Trump wants to be? I’m looking for some way to see some similarities between them.
RAUCHWAY: As you may have gathered, I don’t see a lot of similarities there, Except inasmuch as he occupies an office that has increased power because there was an increasing amount of power given to the presidency during Roosevelt’s term, and especially during World War II, and as a result of World War II. There’s not a lot to compare there. Roosevelt was responding to a terrible economy. The president now is not responding to a terrible economy.
WOLF: He might be creating one.
RAUCHWAY: As I say, I don’t really do the future, but that seems to be the consensus as of this moment, that it doesn’t look good.
Maybe the key thing is that not only was Roosevelt responding to a terrible economy, he — with the party that brought him into office —was responding to long-standing difficulties in the United States, right?
They were responding to inequality that had built up really since the Civil War or even had predated that.
WOLF: Many Americans might know about Roosevelt through the concept of fireside chats and communicating with Americans in a way that was novel at the time. Trump has done that with social media. How would you contrast the concept of a fireside chat and going directly to people in their homes versus on social media going directly to people in their pockets?
RAUCHWAY: Radio, especially at that time in the 1930s, was largely a communitarian medium or a social medium. People would gather around and listen to the radio sets in their homes. The broadcast would come at a set time. There are a number of reminiscences or testimonials to people being able to walk down an American street in the summertime so people had their windows open and you could not miss a bit of the president’s address because every radio in every house was tuned to it. It was a kind of shared experience in that respect in a way that social media really isn’t.
We tend to interact with social media individually, looking at your phone, whether you’re on the train or you’re waiting in line at the grocery store and you might catch something at a different time than everybody else. There are obvious exceptions where something swamps the site all at once, but generally speaking, it’s a kind of atomized and individualized experience.
WOLF: Roosevelt notoriously tried to pack the Supreme Court. Trump’s followers are trying to impeach district court judges. How would you view today’s court fight, through the lens of, what Roosevelt was trying to do?
RAUCHWAY: He was more actively trying to build something up and the courts were stopping it as opposed to Trump who’s doing the opposite, I guess.
It’s also, I guess, worth noting that Roosevelt, unusually in his first term in office, hadn’t gotten to appoint a single Supreme Court justice. So he was dealing with a Supreme Court and indeed a federal judiciary that had been appointed by the bulk of his predecessors who were mostly Republicans, except for Woodrow Wilson. Whereas the federal judiciary now is largely a product of not only the Republican Party’s appointments, but of Trump’s own appointments, especially the Supreme Court.
Roosevelt was trying to push against a judiciary that was probably more likely than any other to find against him in many cases, inasmuch as they had partisan leanings, whereas it seems peculiar that the current administration would be so antipathetic to a judiciary that’s largely its own making.
WOLF: Trump keeps teasing the idea of running again for a third term. It seems constitutionally impossible because after Roosevelt died, after being elected four times, they passed the 22nd Amendment.
Why was that amendment passed? Was there such a distaste for having a president that long? My impression is that he was super popular for most of his presidency. So why did the public get behind term limits?
RAUCHWAY: There’s an old joke about the Republican Party right after Roosevelt’s death and for really quite a long time after Roosevelt’s death, which is that they essentially ran on variations of the slogan, ‘The New Deal was a wonderful thing and nothing like it should ever happen again.’ Because it had been so popular and yet they wanted to forestall anything like that. And I think you can see the 22nd Amendment in that light.
There’s evidence that Roosevelt would have stepped down after his second term and in fact had made plans to do so were it not for the rapid Nazi Blitzkrieg leading up to the election of 1940.
Public opinion polling at the time tells us that people would have voted for his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, had there been no war in Europe, but given that there was, they were going to vote for Roosevelt.
WOLF: Roosevelt was unique in that the Democrats picked up seats in his first midterm. That goes against the historical trend. I think George W. Bush is the only other president recently. How is Roosevelt able to buck that trend and get more seats in that pivotal first midterm, which set the pace for his entire presidency?
RAUCHWAY: If you look at not only the election of ‘34, but then again, the landslide of ‘36, the evidence is that Roosevelt attracted voters based on the success of his policies. He had come into office in 1933 because voters were well and truly sick of the Great Depression and the Hoover administration seemed incapable of meeting the needs of the moment, and then you had a recovery that began immediately on Roosevelt coming into office, largely, I think, a lot of economists would now tell you as a result of his monetary and other policies.
With that recovery gaining momentum through the course of his first two years in office, that accounts for his party’s increased popularity come 1934 and even more so in ‘36. Some folks say they can show that Roosevelt’s big gains in ‘36 came where incomes went up most over that first term. So it’s the success of the policies in material terms that seem to have led to those large majorities at the midterm elections and then again in the ‘36 elections.
WOLF: What is the thing that you wish more Americans knew about Roosevelt? What do they get wrong when they corner you in the grocery store aisle?
RAUCHWAY: I wish people cared enough to corner me in the grocery store about these things. I think a lot of folks have really forgotten how materially successful the New Deal was over the first two terms, even before mobilization for the war, because mobilization for the war was then such a major spur to the economy afterwards, that really Roosevelt and his party wouldn’t have been able to do the things that they did do to transform government were it not for the successes of those policies in the first term.
WOLF: So be successful. That’s your advice to presidents.
RAUCHWAY: Good politics is good policy and vice versa.
