An opinion essay published by Inquirer.com says President Donald Trump is the anti-FDR, arguing that he inherited a government built to help ordinary people and then took a chain saw to it. The piece, written by James Roosevelt Jr. and Henry Scott Wallace, says Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to crisis by expanding the federal government, while Trump is dismantling it by executive fiat.
The contrast is drawn bluntly. FDR, the essay says, inherited a do-nothing federal government after his landslide victory in 1932 during the Great Depression, then won congressional approval for alphabet soup programs meant to create jobs, protect workers, rescue family farms, and rein in corporations and banks. Trump, by contrast, is described as seeking the largest budget in modern history with military spending at the center, while refusing spending on Medicare or Medicaid and giving huge tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest among us.
That argument lands with extra force because it is not just about two presidents with different policy preferences. The essay says FDR convinced Congress to legally create his reimagined government, while Trump governs by order and decree, bypassing the legislature. It also says the framers made Congress first in Article One, subordinated the presidency in Article Two, and gave lawmakers the sole power to declare war. FDR, it notes, asked Congress for a declaration of war immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack.
The piece says Trump broke with that model in another way, too. It says he embraced authoritarian leaders and ridiculed allies, while FDR embraced foreign allies to fight authoritarians. It also says Trump started a war on Iran with neither imminent provocation nor authorization by Congress, a move the authors present as part of a longer drift toward an all-powerful executive branch and a government by and for the wealthy few.
That drift, they argue, is not inevitable. The essay points to Hungary, where a 16-year autocracy was overwhelmingly unseated by popular vote, as evidence that voters can reverse it. The authors identify themselves as descendants of the Roosevelt era: James Roosevelt Jr. is a grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Henry Scott Wallace is a grandson of Henry A. Wallace, one of FDR’s vice presidents. Their closing claim is clear enough to answer the question the headline raises: if FDR used government to widen opportunity, Trump is using it to narrow it, and the fight now is over whether Congress and voters will let that stand.