Niall Ferguson: Trump’s New Deal: 100 days to reverse the legacy of FDR

In their own right, the five anti-DEI executive orders, which end not just DEI but also the 60-year-old policy of affirmative action, represent a counter-revolution in government of historic significance, as Christopher Caldwell pointed out in The Free Press.

There are other resemblances between DJT and FDR. Roosevelt sold his revolution to the public with cosy, folksy “fireside chats” on the radio. Trump’s equivalent are the “truths” he posts on Truth Social, the platform he created when he was kicked off Twitter in January 2021. FDR faced opposition. In February 1933, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Giuseppe Zangara. In May 1935 the Supreme Court declared the act establishing the National Recovery Administration unconstitutional.

Friends and family gather for a birthday dinner held for Roosevelt at the White House

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A 40 per cent cut in spending on veterans’ benefits sparked a successful popular backlash. The equivalent resistance to Trump will come from lower, more liberally inclined courts, and from the public sector unions, as well as the legacy media.

True, Roosevelt enjoyed much larger majorities in the Senate (59 of 96 seats) and House (nearly three-quarters of 405 seats). But that did not make Congress a rubber stamp. Democrats were deeply divided and often unruly. He had to make frequent use (or at least threaten to use) his veto power, and even more frequent use of presidential patronage to buy votes. But there are two much bigger differences. First, Roosevelt was sworn in near the end of the Great Depression, the worst period of economic contraction since the Industrial Revolution. Trump is coming in after a sustained post-pandemic boom that has defied what most economists regarded as the gravity of higher interest rates.

Second, on foreign policy FDR started out as a pygmy. Apart from his early “Good Neighbor” policy with Latin America, he was a study in weakness. He slashed military spending by 29 per cent between 1932 and 1934. He resumed relations with the Soviet Union in November 1933, disregarding the evidence of Stalin’s evil. The isolationist Neutrality Acts prevented arms exports. In practice, the first Roosevelt term was the most isolationist in American history. He “torpedoed” the World Economic Conference held in London in July 1933. He also raised tariffs even higher than the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930.

Trump, by contrast, has returned to Washington as commander-in-chief in such a belligerent mood that it smacks of hubris. You might think he had enough on his plate with an axis of authoritarians that threatens not only Ukraine and Israel, but also Taiwan and the Philippines. But Trump seems to be enjoying smacking down the leaders of little countries, notably Colombia, Denmark and Panama.

The Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has been one of the leaders Donald Trump has been tough on

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His trolling of the outgoing Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was a grotesque way to treat a neighbouring state with which the US has more in common than just a border. His brusque insistence that Binyamin Netanyahu should settle with the terrorists of Hamas was unnerving to staunch supporters of Israel. Trump has been tougher on Russia than expected; softer on China and Iran. If this is a national security strategy, its logic is obscure.

Roosevelt is fondly remembered today. But it is not because the New Deal worked. Economically, it was largely unsuccessful. Recovery came only when the US belatedly but massively armed itself against the threat posed by the Axis powers. And nostalgia for FDR has much more to do with his deft wartime leadership than with the bureaucratic creations of his first 100 days.

This is not The West Wing

What does that imply for the way Trump will be remembered? To answer that question, one must first rid oneself of what I call the Woodward Illusion. For half a century, Americans have been encouraged to think of their government as a real-life version of the TV drama The West Wing. Each president receives a minimum of one bestselling book by the journalist Bob Woodward.

There’s a monarchical figure called the president. The drama plays out in his White House. There are two factions: the Good Guys (officials willing to talk to Woodward) and the Bad Guys (their enemies). Sometimes the king himself is wicked (Nixon); sometimes he is admirable but flawed (Clinton); sometimes he is in over his head (Ford, Bush Jr). But the cast of characters is manageably small. And there is usually one big issue (eg, Bush Jr and the War on Terror).

In the real world, the US federal government is quite different. The president sits atop a sprawling “org chart”. There are 15 executive departments and 430 federal agencies — 229 agencies and 201 sub-agencies. The process whereby the executive branch constantly subdivides itself like some kind of rapidly growing cellular organism can be traced back to FDR. Within the White House itself there is a National Security Council and a National Economic Council, to name just two sources of presidential advice.

The true role of the president is to try somehow to ensure that this vast array of institutions collectively functions in ways that vaguely resemble the platform he campaigned on. More accurately, the president acts as the arbiter when the collisions between competing agencies cannot be sorted out within the bureaucracy.

And this is just the executive branch. At the far end of the National Mall is Congress, which the constitution gives the power to make laws. The Supreme Court has the final say if a presidential order or act of Congress is challenged as unconstitutional or illegal. And let’s not forget an equally independent body, not foreseen by the founding fathers and established only on the eve of the First World War: the Federal Reserve, which has the responsibility to influence the rates of inflation and unemployment and determines the ease or difficulty with which the Treasury can fund its deficit.

Yet the org chart is misleading. First, only a small fraction of key positions have been filled. Of 1,300 that need Senate confirmation, we have six confirmed, 70 under consideration, 38 awaiting formal nomination — and 569 without a Trump nominee. And the confirmation process gets slower every time. Trump 1.0 managed just 238 confirmations in his first year.

Trump has said he wants to “take back” the Panama Canal after claiming it was being “run by China”

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Second, with all this frenetic activity, snafus are inevitable. On Wednesday the White House Office of Management and Budget had to rescind a memo issued two days before that had frozen federal grants and loans. Did Trump even know about this memo (OMB Memorandum M-25-13)? Unlikely.

Third, as is always the case, even those people hired by a president break down into factions, and these are not necessarily congruent with the org chart. At present, I see the emergence of about six distinct factions:

• The Maga originals, or Magans, around the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, for whom immigration is the number one issue.
• The red-pilled tech bros, who joined forces with Trump only last year and whose leader, Elon Musk, aspires to do to the federal government what he did to Twitter when he took it over: drastically shrink its payroll and purge it of “the woke mind virus”. (Note that this week’s “Fork in the Road” memo offering federal workers a severance package was copied and pasted from Musk’s downsizing of Twitter.)
• The Wall Street wise guys, in particular the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, who know that the president is playing with fire if he says or does anything “Mr Market” doesn’t care for, and whose ideal is to rerun the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
• The hawkish national security types, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who see their job as containing China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
• The realists or “restrainers”, notably the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the vice-president, JD Vance, who worry more than the hawks about stumbling into a Third World War.
• The outright isolationists, influenced by Tucker Carlson (a key figure without an official position) and the president’s eldest son (another), who passionately hate the previous generation of Republican foreign policy makers — “the neocons” — whom they see as over-eager to commit US resources to the Middle East and, in particular, to the support of Israel.

Henry Kissinger once memorably observed that there is “no such thing as an American foreign policy”. There is, he wrote, only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” which they “may not have been planned to produce” and to which “research and intelligence organisations, either foreign or national, attempt to give a rationality and consistency … which it simply does not have”.

Henry Kissinger said there is “no such thing as an American foreign policy”

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The title of the 1968 essay where those lines appeared was Bureaucracy and Policy Making. The key to all administrations is how far they can manage a bureaucracy of career officials who like nothing better (as Kissinger wrote in his memoirs) than “to confront the policymaker with the [three] choices of nuclear war, present policy, or surrender”.

President as the big Decider

George W Bush once defined the role of the president as to be “The Decider”. As FDR’s biographer James MacGregor Burns showed, Roosevelt derived his power from a certain amount of organisational chaos. He would give three jobs to one man and one to three men, then see what the ensuing competition would produce. Then he would decide. But FDR also knew how to inspire, despite being confined to a wheelchair — or perhaps because he had overcome polio with his joie de vivre undimmed. “After spending an hour with the president,” an ordinarily sober agency chief exclaimed to a friend in 1933, “I could eat nails for lunch!”

Trump 2.0 unquestionably has something of that about him, unlike the thin-skinned and edgy first-term version. Surviving assassination and securing decisive re-election have put a spring in his step. He has shed pounds. But can all this new energy be channelled into effective decision-making? In his first term, Trump never allowed his chief of staff to be an effective gatekeeper.

Trump reacts during a meeting with Kissinger in the Oval Office while president

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Like some of the American artificial intelligence models the Chinese have been so busy copying, the president is open-source; too many people can get to him. And he is liable to be impressed by anyone who can convey their pitch concisely and amusingly. Whether or not Susie Wiles can do better as chief of staff than her four predecessors — Reince Priebus, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows — remains to be seen. Battle number one is to keep Elon out of the White House, and the jury’s out.

What seems more than likely, then, is that we shall end up with a national security strategy in the Kissingerian sense — “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” which they “may not have been planned to produce”.

FDR did not set out in 1933 to become the architect of victory in a world war 12 years later. The goals of the New Deal were 100 per cent domestic. DJT’s Art of the New Deal is an equal and opposite phenomenon, aiming to shrink the government but expand US power from the Panama Canal to Greenland. We are clearly in for as frenetic a hundred days as our grandparents witnessed 92 years ago. But where will it lead? The law of unintended consequences is a binding constraint, even on the most powerful man in the world.

This article is written by WWSG exclusive thought leader, Niall Ferguson.