Donald Trump’s first-day vows – the opening of what MAGA insiders are calling the Days of Thunder – amount to an attempt to provide a 21st-century version of the breadth and depth of change that FDR accomplished in what became known as the Hundred Days. The West Front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 17, in Washington, DC.Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Close the border. End birthright citizenship. Pardon the rioters of the Capitol siege of Jan. 6, 2021. Strike out Joe Biden’s executive orders. End federal subsidies for electric vehicles. Spur offshore oil drilling. Ban transgender people from participating in women’s sports. Remove “every single burdensome regulation driving up the cost of goods.” And more.
That’s quite a to-do list for a day that begins with Donald Trump’s inauguration at noon, includes a time-consuming inaugural parade and, shortly after nightfall, calls for visits to three inaugural balls.
When French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau examined Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points for peace after the First World War, he noted dismissively that God had delivered only 10. The God of Genesis “created the heaven and the Earth” on the first day. Mr. Trump has vowed to move heaven and Earth on his first day as president.
Sometime on Monday, amid taking the oath of office, witnessing the passing of 7,500 participants in the great parade, saluting the Butler County first responders who sped into action after the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania and listening to the Village People sing their Y.M.C.A anthem at one of the inaugural balls, Mr. Trump will squeeze in a presidential signing ceremony.
Many of his pledges will be included in this first flurry of executive orders. Mr. Biden, in a similar moment four years ago, swiftly rejoined the Paris climate-change agreement, ordered an end to the construction of the Trump border wall and mandated that executive-branch employees sign an ethics agreement.
Now, Mr. Biden is issuing a series of last-moment executive orders designed to restructure offshore drilling and enhance artificial-intelligence efforts.
But the day-one agenda being polished this weekend behind the walls of Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago retreat is almost certainly the most ambitious for a new president in recent years.
On his first night in the White House in 1933 amid the Great Depression, the newly inaugurated Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the drafting of an emergency banking bill. That was dramatic action, to be sure. But the more substantive work happened in the next three months, when Mr. Roosevelt’s administration passed 15 major pieces of legislation, transforming industry, agriculture, social welfare and the economy while dramatically overhauling the relationship between the government and the people.
Mr. Trump’s first-day vows – the opening of what MAGA insiders are calling the Days of Thunder – amount to an attempt to provide a 21st-century version of the breadth and depth of change that FDR accomplished in what became known as the Hundred Days. The phrase comes from the 1815 period from Napoleon’s escape from Elba exile to his return to Paris. For the past 92 years, the 100-day mark has been the standard of measurement of a new president’s early impact.
Mr. Roosevelt’s record is so daunting that John F. Kennedy, in laying out his vision in his celebrated 1961 inaugural address, said in a cautionary aside, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration.”
But while Mr. Biden liked to consider his remit the creation of a second Roosevelt New Deal, Mr. Trump is hoping to recreate what the historian William Leuchtenburg, the author of several Roosevelt volumes, called “the quick-step tempo of the First Hundred Days” when “everything moved at a breathless pace.”
The great Roosevelt scholar James MacGregor Burns captured the frenzy and the mood of Depression-era Washington in those days. “It was like a war,” he wrote in his 1956 book, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. “While soldiers and sailors marched smartly in the long inaugural parade, while couples waltzed gaily in the inaugural balls, haggard men conferred hour after hour at their desks. In the huge marble holdings along Pennsylvania Avenue, the lights burned late, dully illuminating the confetti and debris strewn along the street below.”
The 32nd president was often described by his Republican opponents as a dictator. Mr. Trump drew enormous attention when he said, in an interview 13 months ago, that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for day one.” He added, as if to quell fears, “After that, I’m not a dictator.”
And while there are many protections against presidential dictatorship, an American chief executive has many prerogatives to act without consultation, without congressional approval, and even, after a Supreme Court decision last year giving presidents broad immunity, without legal consequence. Many of those prerogatives are inherent in executive orders, which permit presidents to impose policies for which there is statutory authority. It’s a power that recent presidents have used widely – often, according to their critics, to the point of abuse.
Mr. Trump, who criticized Mr. Biden for his use of executive orders – 155 of them, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara – now is poised to employ them himself. Mr. Trump actually issued more executive orders in his first term (220) than any president since Jimmy Carter (320).
Mr. Trump has the ardent support of the Republican Party but the GOP holds only a four-seat margin in the House of Representatives, where revenue, tax and tariff bills originate. He is not, moreover, the same legislative maestro as FDR, whose latitude was widened by virtue of the Democrats’ 194-seat margin in the House during his first months in the White House.
“FDR came into office calling for ‘action, and action now,’ and he had better skills than Trump does,” Susan Dunn, a Williams College expert on Mr. Roosevelt, said in an interview.
“He was surrounded with outstanding people of the calibre that Trump’s team doesn’t match. And there was a sense of national unity that we don’t have now.”