The Bizarro New Deal: Trump’s Dark Inversion of FDR’s First 100 Days

Not long after President Trump took office, Elon Musk stood onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference waving a chainsaw. It was an appropriate prop for Musk, who at one point said his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, could cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending. It was also an apt image for the Trump administration as a whole, which has slashed its way through not only the government but major American institutions and legal and societal norms.

We are now 100 days in, which has been a much-heralded benchmark for presidencies since 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first One Hundred Days were hailed for reviving a nation paralyzed by economic depression. It is clear that Trump’s first 100 days have been a mirror image of FDR’s — a funhouse mirror image that renders things upside down and in reverse. While FDR’s first few months were dedicated to establishing new and dynamic governmental departments, creating a social safety net that recognized society’s responsibility for its most vulnerable members, and building things, Trump has been hard at work destroying federal agencies, firing workers and gutting welfare programs — and leaving destruction in his wake.

The differences between the 47th and 32nd presidents are seen in personality as well as substance. Roosevelt was, famously, the man with a “first-class temperament,” who in his first One Hundred Days promised Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and invented the Fireside Chat to reassure Americans that they would survive bank failures and mass unemployment. Trump’s temperament could be regarded as “last-class,” and he has given Americans many new things to fear — from losing their life savings in a tariff-driven stock market crash to being rounded up and thrown in a prison cell in Louisiana.

In his governing style, Roosevelt was likened to a self-effacing “master of ceremonies” of his own administration, putting brilliant thinkers and doers in top positions and empowering them to follow their visions. Trump is, by contrast, a petulant autocrat, issuing pronouncements that seem to have emerged fully formed from his own id, which his advisors then scramble to make sense of and carry out.

But there are also uncanny similarities between Trump and Roosevelt. Both men were the scions of wealthy New York families with famous last names. Both were desultory students who nevertheless found their way to the Ivy League. And both were swept into the White House on a populist wave, promising to remake the country. With this combination of external similarities and more deep-seated differences, Trump is something of a “bizarro Roosevelt” — in the tradition of “Bizarro Superman” in the classic comic book, or “Bizarro Jerry” on “Seinfeld” — and what we are now living through looks like a dramatic inversion of Roosevelt’s presidency, a “bizarro New Deal.”

FDR’s first One Hundred Days thoroughly deserve their reputation as a time of unrivaled government action and extraordinary results. In this short period, Roosevelt shepherded 15 major laws through Congress and created an array of new agencies and regulatory regimes, from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to rescue starving farmers to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect families’ bank accounts. It was, as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has said, “a presidential barrage of ideas and programs unlike anything known to American history.”

While they were expanding the government, the New Dealers were also building up the nation. To give jobs to millions of unemployed people, FDR launched the Works Progress Administration, which constructed buildings and schools, more than half a million miles of streets and more than 10,000 bridges. The Civilian Conservation Corps put millions of unemployed men to work planting trees and improving national parks, and the Tennessee Valley Authority stimulated economic development in one of the nation’s poorest regions. There was so much visible progress in every direction that the journalist Earnest K. Lindley declared that “the nation was bewildered, thrilled, happy with hope.”

If FDR gave the nation 100 days of building, Trump has given us 100 days of tearing down. He has been trying to kill off the Department of Education and the Voice of America, and he has been hollowing out many other agencies. The cuts are wiping out a wide array of basic government functions. The Department of Health and Human Services cut, or otherwise lost, 20,000 jobs, including experts on disease tracking and drug approvals, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration are likely to lose 20% of their staff. The administration plans to eliminate the research department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and close weather and climate labs, gutting weather forecasting and early warning systems for natural disasters.

Trump has also been wreaking havoc on the rule of law. He and Musk have demonized federal judges for simply doing their jobs, excoriating them on social media and calling for their impeachment. And harsh new immigration policies have so degraded legal norms that the administration deported a Maryland man to El Salvador erroneously, and has refused to bring him back despite a Supreme Court order. And Trump has said he is considering putting some American citizens who are convicted of crimes in prison in El Salvador, rather than the United States.

The Trumpian chainsaw has not been confined to government. The administration has withheld or threatened to withhold more than $12 billion in government funding from universities, and it has been slashing funding for cutting-edge scientific research. Francis Collins, a geneticist who headed the National Institutes of Health under three presidents, has said that this assault “tears the long-standing fabric of the government’s contract to pursue medical research that seeks to better the healthspan and lifespan for all Americans.” 

Not all of the destruction has been intentional. Trump’s tariffs, which have the purported goal of strengthening American companies, are having the opposite effect. CNBC recently warned that “Trump tariffs on China will soon bring ‘irreversible’ damage to many American businesses.” Even worse, hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio had cautioned that the tariffs could break the global financial system.

Trump insists that he is adopting his most destructive policies for high-minded reasons, but these claims are hardly convincing. The administration says it is withholding funding from universities because they have not done enough to clamp down on antisemitism. But there are many ways it could fight antisemitism — including aggressive civil rights lawsuits, and more targeted funding cuts — that would not threaten the functioning of our leading universities. Similarly, there are many ways the nation could take a tougher line on immigration without deporting actual citizens or ignoring court orders.

It is clear that the administration is pursuing destruction for its own sake. Some of it fits an ideological agenda, like shuttering USAID and making undocumented immigrants live in fear. But much of it does not — where, exactly, is the constituency for stopping promising cancer research? Its real roots seem to be more psychological than political. Freud wrote of a fundamental drive called thanatos, also known as the “death drive,” that represents “the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction.” Destructive energy has animated a great deal of Trump’s life, from his star turn on “The Apprentice,” where he humiliated contestants with the catchphrase “You’re fired” to his love of attending bloody mixed martial arts fights — something he did, this month, with Musk and members of his Cabinet. This dark inclination seems to have played a large role in setting the policies of the past three months.

At the end of Roosevelt’s first One Hundred Days — which could be said to have been driven by eros, thanatos’ opposite, the drive to preserve life — he had created the beginnings of a compassionate, well-functioning modern state. FDR gave us a regulated stock market, savings account insurance, support for farmers and jobs and benefits for the poor. Those hundred days were the moment when America as we now know it emerged.

In Trump’s first One Hundred Days, we have seen a very different kind of New Deal. Our universities and science laboratories are reeling. America’s economic prosperity, and its place as the world’s economic leader, are in danger. People are worried about their futures in a way they were not before inauguration day. And there are still three years and nine months to go in this presidency.

It is possible that all of the damage can be reversed — but it is certainly not inevitable, even if the Democrats take back the White House and both houses of Congress. It is far from certain that the nation will ever again have the political resolve to fund the agencies and institutions Trump has targeted at the same level they once were. And guarantees like the rule of law, once taken away, are difficult to restore. It is easy, the saying goes, to turn an aquarium into fish soup, and very hard to do the reverse. It’s critical that we find a way to turn down the heat.