The Legend of the President’s First Hundred Days

By Richard Brookhiser,

Franklin D. Roosevelt invented the idea of an activist sprint from the start of a presidency, and many of his successors have followed his example. Will Donald Trump make his own early splash?

What will Donald Trump’s first hundred days bring: surprises, achievements, catastrophes? A slow, steady warm-up?

History can’t predict the mix, only offer a range of possibilities for the 45th president. For Mr. Trump, the range is wider than usual because he comes into office untethered by a record and uninformed by experience.

The initial “hundred days” as a distinct period in a presidency was first used to describe the special session of Congress called by Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1933. It set the template for the opening act of an activist administration: a president and his allies (really subordinates) in Congress passing a bold program to address a crisis. The president, if not the program, is then enshrined in myth.

Roosevelt’s crisis was the Great Depression, which had festering for 3½ years. Unemployment was over 20%, and the banking system had collapsed. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt said, “This nation asks for action, and action now.”

Between March 9 and June 17, Roosevelt signed into law a heterogeneous package of initiatives. The Agriculture Department would pay farmers not to plant crops. The Civilian Conservation Corps would pay people to plant trees. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration was designed to oversee welfare programs, the Tennessee Valley Authority to build dams and supply electricity in a backward part of the country. The National Industrial Recovery Act gave the president sweeping power to regulate the economy.

These measures were delivered by a Congress with Democratic supermajorities in both the Senate and the House. There were ideological supermajorities too, since conservative Southern Democrats prone to balk at radical reform were offset by progressive western Republicans raring to go.

The sprint from the starting line is not the only model for beginning an administration. Most presidents before FDR spent their first hundred days feeling their way into the job—none more consequentially than George Washington in 1789. Washington could consult the new Constitution for the legal specifications of his new office. But a constitution is not a flesh-and-blood example. Should a president shake hands at receptions? Should he seek the Senate’s advice on treaties by going to the Senate himself and asking for it? No one knew. Washington had to answer such questions day by day himself.

But FDR’s example inspired his successors, chiefly Democrats hoping to join him in the liberal pantheon (and in the winners’ circle of re-election landslides).

Bill Clinton in 1993 faced no true crisis. His predecessor, George H.W. Bush, had presided over a recession that was already beginning to lift by the time of Mr. Clinton’s inauguration. But Mr. Clinton had ambitions and sizable Democratic majorities in Congress. He tapped into myth by taking a bus to his inauguration from Monticello (the bus had been his signature campaign vehicle, and Jefferson was his middle name). Fellow baby boomers in the press hailed him as a generational transformer.

Five days into his term, he made his bid for greatness by announcing a task force on comprehensive health-care reform, to be chaired by Ira Magaziner and Hillary Clinton.

Barack Obama in 2009 faced real hard times—a crisis of the financial system. Congress and his predecessor, George W. Bush, fearing a second Depression, had already passed a $700 billion bank and credit bailout the year before. Mr. Obama, enjoying Democratic congressional majorities as large as Mr. Clinton’s, saw and raised with a $787 billion stimulus bill in February. In April and May (to stretch the hundred days a bit), Chrysler and General Motors filed for bankruptcy, setting up the auto bailout of July.

Unlike FDR and Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama also made dramatic foreign policy moves.

Republican presidents have tended to eschew the dramatics of the first hundred days, sliding calmly into office.

global upheavals beyond his control forced him into a spectator’s role. During his first hundred days, Poland’s Communist government legalized Solidarity, and Chinese students began protesting in Tiananmen Square. China’s liberation movement would be drowned in blood, but Eastern Europe’s would topple a half-dozen Soviet satrapies and the Berlin Wall before 1989 was over.

George W. Bush, though a brasher man than his father, also came into office in 2001 speaking softly. Minute Republican majorities in Congress—a Senate dependent on Vice President Dick Cheney’s tiebreaker and a 10-vote margin in the House—restrained him. The signature proposals of his first hundred days—the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the No Child Left Behind Act—were small-bore welfare programs wrapped in social-conservative rhetoric.

Among recent Republicans, only Ronald Reagan in 1981, perhaps reflecting his youthful admiration for Franklin Roosevelt, adopted the Democrat’s model. Reagan faced a double crisis: stagflation at home and communism on the march abroad, from Afghanistan to Africa. He used his hundred days to focus on the economy, proposing to cut tax rates and the rate of growth of the budget.

Although Reagan enjoyed a partisan majority only in the Senate, he worked with conservative House Democrats. His budget and tax packages would not pass until the summer, but his advocacy during the hundred days was vital to their success.

What Reagan excelled at, more than any other president since Roosevelt, was making his own myth. If Roosevelt was the patrician reformer, Reagan was the small-town optimist.

The first hundred days do not necessarily forecast the rest of a presidency. Roosevelt found the Depression hard to subdue. Reagan’s budget and tax cuts were followed by a recession. Mr. Clinton’s health-care task force ground to failure by the summer of 1994. George W. Bush’s compassion agenda was shoved aside by 9/11.

Skillful presidents recover from such reverses. Roosevelt became a heroic wartime leader in his third term. Reagan’s recession gave way to a roaring recovery.

Mr. Trump’s greatest strength, and potential weakness, is his skill as a mythmaker. The cartoonist Scott Adams, who predicted in 2015 that Mr. Trump would win the presidency in a landslide, speaks of his power to persuade by insistently repeating large and simple ideas.

Mr. Trump is a master of the effects of words, of how they amuse and wound; of the meaning, not so much. Since there is always another tweet coming, who cares what the last one said? That works for an entertainer, or even for a politician whose only concern is hogging the limelight—but not for a politician who wants to leave a legacy.

Can he keep it up? As an old man, John Adams wrote that George Washington had possessed “the gift of silence. This I esteem as one of the most precious talents.” The gift of silence allows a leader to conceal his purposes and forces opponents to reveal theirs. It gives the public a chance to catch its breath. Mr. Trump may come to regret that he never acquired it.

My instinct about Mr. Trump’s instincts is that he will want bold strokes soon. Start building a fence, if not a wall. Talk up infrastructure, even if no plans are in place yet. Nominate a surprising Supreme Court justice (Ted Cruz?). Make splashy, friendly trips to Israel, to Britain (in need of friends post-Brexit) and, if not to Russia, to some in-between rendezvous with Vladimir Putin, for a possible deal: You take Ukraine, the West keeps the Baltics, and together we’ll bomb Islamic State.

Mr. Trump’s first hundred days are harder to predict than any other president’s because he is unprecedented. Every previous president had held a position of public responsibility, either as a politician or a general. Donald Trump, uniquely, has no experience of leadership, and we have no experience of him leading. He doesn’t yet know what he is doing, and we have no way of knowing what he might do.

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