A headstrong president inherits an economy being remade by technology, a global climate of high tension and rising authoritarian powers, and a government whose perceived fecklessness has left Americans disgusted. He races to adopt an ambitious new program, installing true believers throughout the government, bending Congress to his will, and overwhelming opposition with the pace and audacity of his plans. Along the way, he sets the groundwork to rebuild the constitutional order and America’s very place in the world.
Such were the opening days of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. And such are the opening days of the second Donald J. Trump administration — but with some crucial differences. Almost a century ago, FDR launched a massive program that empowered the government to reconstruct a devastated economy. Today, Trump has embarked upon a massive program that dismantles the government and threatens to strangle an otherwise-promising economy.
Americans are now experiencing the historic first 100 days of the Roosevelt presidency in reverse. That was the New Deal. This is the Great Demolition.
As the historian Ira Katznelson shows in his book Fear Itself, the disaster of the Depression and the rise of European fascism led many Americans in the 1930s to ask whether democracy was up to the task of ordering modern society. The Protestant intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr worried that “a dying capitalism is under the necessity of abolishing or circumscribing democracy, not only to rob its foes of a weapon, but to save itself from its own anarchy.” This was no isolated sentiment. The nation’s most prominent journalist, Walter Lippmann, was openly calling for Congress to cede its powers to the president; as he put it, to grant, “for a period say of a year, the widest and fullest powers under the most liberal interpretation of the Constitution.” Roosevelt himself, in his first inaugural, warned that if Congress did not do what he believed necessary, he would ask lawmakers for “broad Executive power to wage 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.”
But these dark prescriptions were not filled. Within days, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, which retroactively blessed the bank holiday FDR had declared and created sweeping new federal powers to regulate and backstop financial institutions. There swiftly followed laws enabling major cuts to federal salaries and veterans benefits; establishing massive public works; creating deep agricultural subsidies; providing mortgage assistance, deposit insurance, and farm credit; and more. The most ambitious legislation of the first 100 days was the National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed the federal government to enforce prices and wages negotiated with high-level business and labor leaders, and was later felled by the Supreme Court.
It was an unprecedented burst of lawmaking that promised to give the executive branch previously unheard-of powers. In the jargon of political science, it was a surge in “state capacity” — the ability of a government to implement complex tasks while keeping electoral politics at arm’s length. But, as Katznelson notes, “the central role of Congress was maintained. Even more, the crucial lawmaking role that it undertook offered a practical answer to critics who thought the days of legislative institutions had passed.” And Congress developed new ways to supervise the administrative state it had created.
Of course, Roosevelt would later push even harder against the prevailing order, seeking to pack the Supreme Court and purge congressional Democrats who defied him. Critically, while both efforts were norm-shattering, neither sought to circumvent the legal procedures for making such changes. Both ended in failure, but also laid down important markers for the continued expansion of the presidency.
The Great Demolition — President Trump’s unilateral campaign to dismantle state capacity at home and shake the postwar liberal alliance abroad — resembles the first 100 days of the New Deal in terms of its ambition and backdrop of social upheaval, but the immediate causes and implementing strategy could hardly be more different. First, this campaign is based on a grotesquely distorted account of the problems we face. Second, the president’s approach has not been to summon Congress to action, but to sideline it.
The American economy has made a strong recovery from the pandemic and has largely beaten off the resulting inflation, and the emergencies Trump purports to be addressing are the stuff of conspiracy theories. The president argues that illegal immigration is not merely a serious problem, but a war-like “invasion,” and that America is beset by an “enemy within” whose redoubts include the media and, crucially, the federal government (or “deep state”) itself.
His approach to this fantastical crisis has not been to ask Congress for extraordinary powers, but simply to take them: bullying and firing federal workers in defiance of the law, freezing appropriated funds, decapitating and shutting down agencies created by Congress. And the Republican-led Congress, far from objecting to these moves, has largely responded by applauding and approving the nominations of scandalously unqualified individuals to key posts in government.
The fact that Donald Trump managed to build a stunning political comeback and so decisively overpower Congress by trafficking in widely recognized falsehoods offers a clue to the deeper, real problems confronting us. Just as in the era of the New Deal, we again face questions about whether liberal democracy is up to the task of governing.
The prosperity generated by the capitalist system that FDR saved in the New Deal has multiplied many times over, but the life satisfaction of average Americans has lagged. Rising premiums to education have benefited the third of Americans with college degrees and the regions where they congregate, leaving the rest of the country feeling abandoned. The rise of technology has upended recreation and social life as well as traditional working arrangements in industries ranging from retail to media to tax preparation. Our discontents arise from the yawning gap between mass prosperity and mass flourishing, as Brink Lindsey puts it. Now, the rapid improvement of artificial intelligence means we face much more economic upheaval, along with powerful new technologies in regime-shaping fields such as surveillance and communication.
Meanwhile, the administrative state built by FDR and expanded upon by every subsequent president has grown sclerotic; interactions with the bureaucracy too often leave Americans deeply frustrated. Enormous problems like undocumented immigration and the opioid epidemic fester for years with no effective solution. In areas ranging from housing to infrastructure to health care to innovation to finance, incumbent interests use the machinery of the state to strangle developments that would redound to the common good, leaving economic disruption unbalanced by a sense of economic progress.
Donald Trump’s answer, of course, is that liberal democracy is not up to the job at all. Liberal democracy, in the logic of the Great Demolition, is largely a front for the machinations of a “woke elite” that has brought us to this sorry state of affairs. Liberal democracy in this worldview means the “censorship” and sidelining that Vice President J.D. Vance recently bemoaned in Germany, where the far-right AfD competes freely in elections but will not find any coalition partners. As in the 1930s, Americans are drawn to whispers that only strongman rule can liberate the majority to speak its mind and enact its will. And so, the Trump program calls for a new era of cozy relations with Russia, while approaching the Chinese Communist Party with a mixture of hostility and admiration. The Great Demolition seeks to deconstruct the government that won World War II. It also seeks to deconstruct the fruits of that victory: the idea of a natural alliance among liberal-democratic nations, and of norms disciplining raw interest in foreign affairs.
And what about the effects? The historiography of the New Deal has proceeded in stages, with initial generous accounts giving way to more skepticism. A rough modern synthesis holds that FDR’s fiscal program helped only modestly with recovery from the Depression, and that changes in monetary policy, international economic conditions, and World War II mobilization did the lion’s share. But this hardly means the effort was all for naught. FDR built a modern state that was able to rapidly mobilize American industrial might toward victory in World War II, and set the stage for the widely shared prosperity of the postwar years. His programs remain pillars of the American economy today, enabling modern banking, not to mention the entire individual financial life-cycle from savings through home-buying through retirement.
Rather than redirecting or building on the state capacity that prior generations have established, Donald Trump’s program is to tear it down, to a degree that has no parallel in American history. How far he can take this program remains to be seen, but the facts he has created on the ground already will surely have lasting consequences. If it persists, the indiscriminate de-staffing and disempowering of the administrative state will amount to a reduction in both the gasoline and the engine oil available to America’s innovation economy. As to the gasoline: We will see less of the basic scientific research that leads to the new materials, drugs, and technologies that wealth is built on. We will see a decline in the capacity of American universities to attract top-flight talent, and eventually, to offer undergraduates world-class education. We will see fewer of the inspections and routine monitoring that give the mass public the confidence to participate in the markets for food, medicine, air travel, the financial system, and other industries. We will eventually see lower innovation, higher prices, and less employment. It is possible that just as the New Deal had its largest effect in the long run, the Great Demolition will work its damage only over decades. But it is also possible that we are courting a catastrophe, such as a financial panic or another pandemic, that a better-prepared government could have foreseen.
The New Deal was transformative not only economically, but also constitutionally. As the political scientist Sidney Milkis argues, the rise of the administrative state hastened the rise of a presidency-centered partisanship and the decline of party organizations that previously constrained the chief executive. Over the long run, that has left us with a deep legitimacy problem. As Milkis puts it, “We are left with the odd situation that both Democrats and Republicans crave the power of the modern presidency, while half the nation hates the president.” The urgent constitutional task for our times is to resolve this paradox — not to deepen it by maiming Congress and the courts and further subordinating parties to the executive while simultaneously undermining its ability to actually solve problems.
The New Deal was a staggeringly ambitious effort to pull Americans back from the abyss. The superpower built on those achievements is now being systematically degraded with the same level of ambition. The effect may be to pull us back from frustrated prosperity to something far worse.