A little more than a year into President Trump’s second term, his executive power grabs have been arrestingly similar to ones pioneered by an iconic predecessor liberals revere: Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Yet this comparison, far from proving that Trump might reconstruct the nation through sheer will, highlights the limits of what he can accomplish. An executive strongman is scary and can do much damage. But without a broader consensus in Congress and the nation, which Roosevelt had and Mr. Trump lacks, he cannot transform the country.
Mr. Trump has called Roosevelt “amazing” and posed with a Roosevelt portrait he bragged about hanging in the White House. Like Mr. Trump, Roosevelt operationalized the belief that, as the progressive Woodrow Wilson argued in 1885, “the checks and balances which once obtained are no longer effective” and that government power should be centralized in the nationally elected president, who alone reflected the national interest.
“The president is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can,” Wilson said in 1908, adding that only “his capacity will set the limit.”
Roosevelt embraced this view upon taking office amid the economic emergency of the Depression. He issued 676 executive orders in his first year (compared with Mr. Trump’s 229 in the first year of his second term).
And Roosevelt pushed the idea of what we today call a unitary executive to claim complete presidential control over the newly expanded executive bureaucracy. In 1933 he fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission, the Republican William Humphrey — a step the Supreme Court invalidated in a case that the Supreme Court is now reconsidering.
Unbowed, Roosevelt commissioned a panel of dignitaries who in 1937 recommended that presidential power be enhanced to safeguard citizens “from narrow-minded and dictatorial bureaucratic interference” by independent agencies and the “permanent civil service.” He endorsed the plan and in a message to Congress stated that the constitutional framers established the presidency “as a single, strong chief executive office in which was vested the entire executive power of the national government.”
He was also the first president to systematically weaponize the government to help achieve his transformative goals. He set loose the I.R.S. on perceived enemies like Senator Huey Long, the former Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon and the publisher William Randolph Hearst. Roosevelt’s Federal Communications Commission pressured broadcasters to avoid criticism of presidential policies. He authorized the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover to surveil and build dossiers on political opponents.
Roosevelt viewed the Constitution as a “layman’s document, not a lawyer’s contract,” as he put it in a Constitution Day speech in 1937. In practice this meant that he was not terribly concerned with constitutional compliance when he sought to achieve what he viewed as an important goal. His attorney general Francis Biddle would later explain that this attitude prevailed when F.D.R. ordered the exclusion of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
And Roosevelt regularly disrespected the Supreme Court. The White House apparently floated rumors that Roosevelt would ignore an adverse decision, and he prepared an explanatory fireside chat that he never delivered because the court sided with him. He later ignored another Supreme Court decision (on surveillance) and threatened to defy yet another if the court ruled against him.
He also sought to pack the court with like-minded justices in 1937, arguing in a fireside chat that “we must take action to save the Constitution from the court and the court from itself.” The tactic failed, but the court soon changed its mind and enabled the constitutional revolution in rethinking the power of the federal government over the economy that Roosevelt had long sought. He eventually appointed eight justices to the court to help ensure a judicial stamp of approval on his constitutional revolution.
Roosevelt implicitly justified his approach — attacks on the judiciary, iron-fisted control of the bureaucracy, weaponization of government and opportunistic constitutional interpretation — by the ends of saving the country, transforming fundamental arrangements to serve the needy and to win World War II. Today many progressives view his imperious tactics in a benign light, if they remember them at all, because of what he accomplished.
Mr. Trump and his supporters have justified their tactics on a claimed need for similar fundamental change. And he has some of his predecessor’s gifts, including a rare talent for exploiting media, as Roosevelt did with the radio; a connection (at least at times) with the common man; and an innate political feel for emerging national issues and opportunities. Roosevelt’s actions were also divisive, branded as authoritarian or worse in their time, though leavened by a public geniality and soothing rhetoric that is the opposite of Mr. Trump’s openly inflammatory approach to governance.
But Mr. Trump acts in an entirely different context. The country does not face anything like F.D.R.’s emergencies. Mr. Trump has started his second term with a more sympathetic Supreme Court on many issues but oppositional lower courts. Yet he shows no interest in creating the institutional conditions to achieve permanent fundamental change, and he lacks Roosevelt’s broad popular support and large majorities in Congress needed to accomplish such change.
Mr. Trump’s basic strategy is to act aggressively based on old laws and pray that the Supreme Court blesses his initiatives. He has done this most successfully on executive branch firings, spending cutoffs and, especially, administrative deconstruction, where the court has long been sympathetic. But he has also acted unilaterally on birthright citizenship, tariffs, domestic military deployments and aggressive deportations, where the court’s support is less certain.
The trade agreement comparison with Roosevelt is instructive. In 1934 he secured from Congress the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, beginning nearly a century of presidential authority to reduce tariffs unilaterally. Mr. Trump reversed that trajectory by raising tariffs sharply. But instead of pursuing durable congressional change, he relied on a strained reading of an old emergency statute that the Supreme Court greeted skeptically.
Mr. Trump’s “big, beautiful” domestic policy legislation cut taxes, reduced social benefits and increased military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement spending but did little to alter the nature of presidential authority or the structure of the federal government.
By contrast, acting with a friendly Congress, Roosevelt passed 15 major laws in his first 100 days and hundreds more as the New Deal evolved. These laws reorganized American governance by federalizing economic and social regulation, embedding vast discretionary authority in executive agencies and converting the presidency from a limited office into a permanent institution of national economic and military management. They transformed the legal powers of the national government and the expectations of presidential leadership, initiative and responsibility. That transformation persists.
Mr. Trump’s unilateral actions, especially his weaponizing ones, will have influence beyond his presidency — if for no other reason than that the painful disruptions to the civil service, universities, law firms and the media might deter them from reverting to the pre-Trump state of affairs for fear of future retribution. And who knows where his adventurism abroad — a context where unilateralism is typically more consequential — could leave U.S. foreign policy.
But his institution-crushing unilateral efforts are very unlikely to add up to transformations on par with Roosevelt’s. Most if not all of Mr. Trump’s weaponizing tools can be deployed by progressive successors for progressive ends. The same goes for unitary executive power. President Bill Clinton wielded such power to pursue pro-regulatory objectives. President Joe Biden, alongside his executive order sprees, engaged in widespread firings of Trump 1.0 officials.
One lesson here is that expansion of presidential claims easily becomes a spent force and fails to stick without large and durable congressional majorities and sustained public support. For all the ambition of Mr. Trump’s second term, it is more like his first — and recent Democratic presidencies — in lacking that foundation.
A second lesson is that aggressive unilateralism under these conditions tends to provoke retaliatory escalation by a successor administration that repurposes prior innovations to push executive power in new directions, only to see those unilateral moves likewise collapse for want of broad political support. This cycle is, in a nutshell, the story of presidential power since at least 2009.
To take the true measure of this presidency so far, therefore, we must acknowledge the increasing self-aggrandizement of recent executives, none of whom have been able to consolidate a paradigm shift in American governance, ruling as they all have amid democratic disagreement and legislative gridlock. Roosevelt, by contrast, went from strength to strength, with greater electoral popularity in the 1934 midterm elections and his re-election in 1936.
From this perspective, Mr. Trump — precisely by attempting to do so much with the presidency’s tools, honing their sharpest edges yet further — is showing that no president can reconstruct the political order with brittle support that is the hallmark of presidents in our time.
It would be foolish to declare an end to his time on the stage of presidential history, but he is teaching revealing lessons about the genuine limits of executive power, not just about its nefarious uses.
Jack Goldsmith is a law professor at Harvard, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a former assistant attorney general and an author, with Bob Bauer, of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency” and the newsletter Executive Functions. Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, is the author of “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.”
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