“Capitalism was saved in eight days,” Raymond Moley said of the opening of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency in 1933. Ninety-two years later, in the opening days of Donald Trump’s second term, it seems much more like democracy and the American Republic are being destroyed in a week.
FDR came to office during a massive, all-too-real crisis. DJT returns to office at a time when he and those around him are the crisis. When Roosevelt took office, the Great Depression was at its nadir. The economy was in total collapse. Unemployment was at 25 percent. The banking system had crumbled. Trump returns to office at the zenith of the Great Deception. The American economy is booming. Unemployment rounds off to 4 percent. There is a genuine crisis facing America today, but it is not what Trump asserts. Rather, it is the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny number of fabulously rich men. Trump’s actions are designed not to mitigate that problem but to make it much worse.
Roosevelt’s most-remembered line in his first inaugural address, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” was antithetical to Trump’s approach, which can accurately be summarized as the only thing I have to preach is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which stimulates my efforts to convert the advance of democracy and freedom into retreat.
Trump’s actions in his first days back in the White House inverted what Roosevelt called for as he took office. FDR condemned “unscrupulous money changers” and “self-seekers.” DJT is turning over the government and nation to them. Roosevelt said the restoration of America was dependent on the application of “social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” Social values and nobility were entirely absent in the actions of Trump’s first week.
“Our true destiny,” Roosevelt said, is to “minister to our fellow men.” He spoke of “honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance.” Trump mocks such sentiments.
“We now realize as we have never realized before,” Roosevelt declared, “our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well.” Trump seeks to convince Americans of the opposite.
The second President Roosevelt called for “safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order.” The second term of President Trump is intent on returning to and exceeding the evils of the old order.
In 1932, Roosevelt had defeated incumbent President Herbert Hoover in a genuine landslide, winning the vote by 17.8 percent and the Electoral College 472 to 59. That constituted a mandate. Last November, Trump won fewer than half the votes cast and defeated incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris by only 1.5 percent. He won the Electoral College 312 to 226. In 1932, Democrats gained 12 Senate and 96 House seats. In 2024, Republicans picked up 4 Senate seats and lost 2 House seats. The assertion that those numbers constitute a mandate for a radical turn to the extreme right is the new Big Lie.
Restoration was the objective Franklin D. Roosevelt sought. Destruction is what Donald J. Trump is all about.
At the conclusion of what would come to be known as his first “Fireside Chat” with the American people via radio, on the eighth day of his presidency, FDR said, “You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear.” Trump promotes fear nearly every time he opens his mouth.
Over the Hundred Days that followed March 4, 1933, Roosevelt and the heavily Democratic Congress enacted an unprecedented number of major reforms. Some worked to ease suffering; some did not, but all were aimed at improving people’s lives. The legislation of the First New Deal dealt with shoring up the collapsed banking system, providing relief for the unemployed, assisting farmers and homeowners, conservation, infrastructure construction, and more. The 1933 programs were more analgesics than curative medicine, but easing the pain was an important first step.
The actions prioritized by Trump on January 20, 2025, and the days following have gone decisively in the opposite direction. Among his avalanche of Day One executive orders was one to rescind President Biden’s program that lowered prescription drug prices. Trump said, absurdly, that Biden's lowering of prescription prices was “deeply unpopular” and “inflationary.” Another Trump order halted spending on infrastructure projects under Biden-era laws. He released the violent criminals who attacked police and sought to kill members of Congress and his own Vice President during the insurrection to overturn his defeat by the voters on January 6, 2021. These domestic terrorists are now promising more violent actions as a paramilitary force supporting Trump. That is an echo of a new Leader who came to power early in 1933, but not in the United States. Those actions barely scratch the surface of Trump’s malignant endeavors in his first week.
Hope was all but dead among Americans in the despair of the winter of 1932-33. On March 4 and the days immediately following, Roosevelt revived hope.
Two days after FDR’s inaugural address, humorist Will Rogers said the new president was so popular that “If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, he at least got a fire started anyhow.’”
Donald Trump started a metaphorical fire at the Capitol four years ago, and he is now determined to burn down all that is good, caring, and decent in America. If he is not blocked soon, the level of destruction he may carry out in his first hundred days is incalculable.
