One Hundred Days of Solitude

It’s been said that it’s lonely at the top. It should now be said of the first 100 days of the Second Season of the Trump Show that, after all the drama, what’s left is a series of hollow and pyrrhic victories. Where others have built, this administration has torn down. And for sure, sometimes destruction can be constructive; trees and plants need pruning or else they will die. There is creative destruction, where eliminating the old gives way—often painfully—to the new. And then there is just destruction.

The whirlwind first 100 days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term, starting in March of 1933, created a template for the modern presidency. Widely heralded as a transformative period, those first days—driven by FDR and huge Democratic majorities in Congress—saw a vast expansion of the federal government and a multitude of legislative acts that set up the Securities and Exchange Commission, created a framework for workers’ rights, bolstered labor and agricultural workers, created temporary jobs, and ensconced the idea that the government is responsible for ameliorating the dangerous effects of economic downturns.

Over the past decades, it’s become increasingly common to assess the beginning of a new presidency against those first 100 days. While the fervid pace of FDR’s early months eventually slowed, his entire first term was marked by a sweeping remaking of the federal government that was equally significant in rewriting the compact between the government and the people by creating an expectation that government would not simply be a passive participant in economic cycles but an active manager.

It's certainly true that the New Deal of that first term did not live up to its promise to end the Great Depression. In fact, it can be argued that economically, the New Deal was at best a modest success, and that the United States didn’t fully emerge from the economic funk of the 1930s until it began ramping up production to fight in the Second World War after 1939. Unemployment, for instance, remained stubbornly high throughout the 1930s. There is also an ongoing debate about whether the template of the New Deal—and then the next significant domestic government expansion during the Great Society programs of the 1960s—went too far and ultimately hobbled capitalism rather than governing it.

But no one seriously argues that the first part of FDR’s first term didn’t restore hope, unify a fractious and depressed public, and create a common sense of shared purpose, much as wars often do. Even so, the United States remained a roiling, noisy democracy, and FDR had myriad opponents who were passionate and vociferous in their criticism.

Now let’s contrast that with the first 100 days of Trumplandia. Trump has issued more executive orders to this point than any prior president, and his administration has managed to upend the federal bureaucracy with the most aggressive moves ever to reshape and downsize the federal workforce. They have eliminated the bulk of American foreign health and development programs by dismantling USAID. His team has waged a jihad against the excesses of DEI in both the public and private sectors. They have targeted universities with budget cuts over how student protests against the Gaza conflicts were handled. They have opened up more federal lands to commercial development. They have ramped up immigration enforcement efforts beyond simply securing the southern border. And Trump himself has championed a novel, expansive, and—for the moment—disruptive and damaging set of tariff wars against every other country on the planet.

In short, the vast majority of what the Trump administration has accomplished lies in tearing things down and breaking things apart. That, in and of itself, is not necessarily negative. As I mentioned, there is creative destruction, and there is needed pruning. No one really disagrees with the idea that over the decades, the federal government has become bloated and inefficient and often does not serve the public. No one really disagrees that better technology, a more skilled and nimbler federal workforce, and fewer overlapping regulatory and duplicative agencies would be a good thing. Few dispute that borders matter and that immigration should be controlled. And judging from the November election, a majority of Americans did think DEI initiatives had gone too far.

And yet, the most radical disruptors who create positive, lasting change do so because they not only have a passion to destroy what’s standing in the way—they also have a vision for what to create and a plan for how to create it. The first 100 days of FDR had a vision and a plan to end the Depression and restore hope, grounded in the belief that hope was a key ingredient in changing the future for the better. I will continue to quote till my dying day the famous FDR inaugural address in March of 1933, where he said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” He understood that fear is the enemy of constructive change, and that actions rooted in fear will fail.

Yet so much of Trump’s first 100 days is an exercise in fear: fear that the world is ripping off the United States, that enemies loom abroad and at home, and that the task of government is to root those out. Yes, there are adversaries abroad, and yes, we often work at cross-purposes domestically. How could we not, in a country so large and so open? Yet the first 100 days of the Second Season of the Trump Show do not offer a coherent plan for what to do once the old has been torn down.

Read No Matter How Dire the Coronavirus Threat, Fear is Not the Way Out by Zachary Karabell (May, 2020)

Tariffs remain the prime example. If you are going to attempt to end the global trading system, you better have a plan to build a new one. Colin Powell warned on the eve of the Iraq War in 2002, “You break it, you own it.” The Bush administration then went on to one of the most disastrous and destructive policy choices in American history: it invaded Iraq, dismantled the Iraqi state and its army, and then… crickets. The result was the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, a swath of instability in the region that led to the rise of ISIS and other groups, civil war in Iraq, the ascendency of Iran—not to mention a series of laws in the United States, such as the Patriot Act, that set the precedent for the Trump administration’s policies toward due process against MS-13.

Trump’s tariffs are his Iraq War: a plan to destroy a trade regime that he sees as the economic equivalent of Saddam Hussein, with no plan for what comes after “victory.” That does not bode well for the policy.

The same goes for tearing down the federal bureaucracy. What is the plan afterward? Who pays for the new once we’ve destroyed the old? If you’re going to build a new bridge to replace the old one, everyone knows that the one thing not to do is tear down the old bridge first and then start building the new one.

And finally, the Trump administration is so focused on eliminating enemies foreign and domestic that it is forgetting the value of making friends and allies. No one can do everything alone, not abroad and not at home. Constructive change needs allies, and there are still things the Trump administration wants to do that many others would support: revitalizing the American workforce, rationalizing the immigration system, tempering DEI, making government efficient, creating a refined global trading order that reflects the rise of China, ending the Ukraine war, resolving the Gaza and Israel-Palestine morass.

These are real problems, which is a recipe for real alliances. Perhaps the economic slowdown that is almost certainly happening and worsening will be a spur to reach out and work with others. But for now at least, the Second Season of the Trump Show is a lesson in solitude.