Trump vs. FDR’s First 100 Days

No Contest

This week on his 100th day in office, DJ Trump bloviated about how history-making his first one-hundred days have been.

"We're here tonight in the heartland of our nation to celebrate the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that's according to many, many people," Trump said to kick off his speech at Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan. "This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We've just gotten started. You haven't even seen anything yet."

Trump is so full of it.

He even had the gall to invoke the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (“FDR”) by way of comparison.

FDR pulled our country out of a depression; Trump seems intent to put us in one.

As I wrote recently, “FDR saved capitalism from self-destruction. He glued back together the shattered pieces of a country depressed in spirit and economy, and later would lead the nation to victory in a world war. It’s been said that FDR lifted himself from a wheelchair to lift a nation from its knees.”

What the hell has Trump accomplished so far?

Granted he’s cleaning up the immigration mess, but as the Washington Post pointed out, “It is no accident that Trump has repeatedly cited Roosevelt as a model when it comes to his impact and place in history. But Trump’s 100-day mark [shows] the differences are at least as stark as the similarities. Roosevelt’s onslaught, in the depths of the Great Depression, was aimed at expanding the federal government’s presence in Americans’ lives. Trump’s crusade is aimed largely at dismantling it. Perhaps more crucially, Congress came together to pass more than a dozen major laws in Roosevelt’s first 100 days, reflecting the wide national eagerness for his revolution. Trump, in contrast, has governed largely by unilateral executive action, which enables to him to ignore his opponents but avoids a broad political consensus — and leaves his actions more vulnerable to reversal.”

Here’s some more history — actual facts — regarding FDR’s first 100 days.

During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933, he introduced what historians refer to as the “New Deal”, which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reforms of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.

The nation's plight on March 4, 1933, the day Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, was desperate. A quarter of the nation's workforce was jobless in 1932 when the population in America was 124 million compared to a 2025 count of 347 million. A quarter million families had defaulted on their mortgages the previous year. During the winter of 1932 and 1933, some 1.2 million Americans were homeless. Scores of shantytowns (called Hoovervilles) sprouted up.

In his inaugural address, Roosevelt expressed confidence that his administration could end the Depression. "The only thing we have to fear," he declared, "is fear itself."

In Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office, he pushed 15 major bills through Congress. The bills would reshape every aspect of the economy, from banking and industry to agriculture and social welfare. The president promised decisive action. He called Congress into special session and demanded "broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

Roosevelt appealed directly to the people to generate support for his New Deal program. On March 12, he conducted the first of many radio "fireside chats." Using the radio in the way later presidents exploited television, he explained what he had done in plain, simple terms and told the public to have "confidence and courage." When the banks reopened the following day, people demonstrated their faith by making more deposits than withdrawals. One of Roosevelt's key advisors did not exaggerate when he later boasted, "Capitalism was saved in eight days."

Roosevelt also literally saved and preserved our founding principle that we are a nation bound by the supremacy of constitutional rule, not by the whims and dictates of a supreme ruler.