The first 100 days—then and now

FDR set the pace on policies to make life better for Americans. Trump instead has set fire to governmental structures.

By James F. McHugh

As President Donald Trump reaches the 100-day milestone, an instructive point of comparison is with Frankin D. Roosevelt’s enormous achievements in the same period. FDR, in his first 100 days, presented and got passed through Congress legislation to help the country emerge from the Great Depression. Trump, too, was elected amid significant challenges, some of which flow from stagnant wages, job losses caused by automation, rising food prices and increased global economic competition. Unlike FDR, though, Trump is not focused on solutions to those problems. Instead, as those problems proliferate, he has focused on destruction of governmental structures on which every person in this country in some way depends. He has shattered world alliances, attacked the federal government and created national and international chaos.

In their 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warned about what they saw as a serious erosion of democratic principles that had long held the nation together. At the time, Trump had been in office for about a year, and, as they put it, they had “watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States—but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crises in other places . . . . American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services and ethics offices.”

They were right to be concerned. After Trump lost the 2020 election, he refused to accept the results and urged his followers to come to Washington on the day the ballots were to be formally counted because it was going to “be wild.” They came, it was “wild,” and he refused to do anything to try to stop them as they invaded the Capitol to stop the electoral count.

Four years later, Trump’s admiring references to Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his periodic admiring references to Hitler's generals suggested strongly that if he won the election, he would try to take the nation in an historically different direction.

He has. That different direction has two principal components. The first has been all-out revenge. Within a week of returning to office, angered by critical comments, he stripped security details from former staffers John Bolton, Anthony S. Fauci, Mike Pompeo, and Pompeo aide Brian Hook, regardless of the continuing danger they faced because of their roles in his previous administration.

The pettiness of Trump’s revenge was underscored by the way he dealt with General Mark Milley, the internationally respected former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Just hours after he was sworn in, Trump ordered the removal of Milley’s portrait from the hall in the Pentagon where it had hung among the portraits of every former chair of the Joint Chiefs. Removal of his security detail soon followed.

The second component has been a frontal assault on the rule of law. That assault includes stripping security clearances from prominent national law firms and banning their lawyers from federal property because some lawyers in those firms once represented individuals or organization with which Trump disagreed. These measures infringe on their constitutional rights and make it enormously difficult for them to participate in litigation or other activities for which security clearances were necessary.

More recently, Trump has focused directly on federal judges with whom he disagreed. Among other things, his administration ignored a federal judge’s order staying deportation of some 260 individuals to El Salvador. Trump and his allies have called for impeachment of judges. In a particularly outrageous post on Truth Social, his preferred social media platform, Trump attacked thoughtful and well-respected federal Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the stay, in this fashion:

“This Radical Left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President - He didn't win the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn't win all SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn't WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY.”

Continuing, Trump said that “this judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before should be IMPEACHED.” That prompted an extraordinary response from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. , who said that “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreements concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

So, 100 days into this administration, we cannot celebrate presidential efforts to reduce stresses the nation has recently faced. Instead, we find ourselves nearing the precipice Levitsky and Ziblatt warned about.

This is no longer about politics. It's about whether the rules, norms and modes of collective behavior that have guided this Nation through extraordinarily difficult periods will long endure. Despite our differences, we all have a common stake in the outcome, and our collective, active energy is necessary to resist the forces that are pushing us closer and closer to the edge.

James F. McHugh, a retired Massachusetts Appeals Court justice, is a former board member and current volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy.

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