The power of our presidents has grown chiefly during wartime or other crises, and as the development of mass media, beginning with radio, enabled them to speak directly to their fellow Americans. There was nothing pernicious or threatening about Franklin Roosevelt’s aptitude for radio or John F. Kennedy’s for television. Trump’s tweets, on the other hand, are pernicious and dangerous, not because he’s mastered that medium but because he deliberately peddles lies and slanders. Nor has he taken power at a time of crisis; rather, he’s claimed this to be a time of national emergency that presumably justifies his power grabs, though that emergency is not visible to the naked eye.
So Trump’s opening salvos are in no way like Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days, as some right-wingers have argued. Roosevelt took office in a time of genuine crisis, when unemployment stood at 25 percent and when an epidemic of runs on banks had shuttered every depository institution in the nation on the eve of his inauguration. To address this, Roosevelt did order federal examiners to spend the next several days assessing the solvency of the country’s banks, but then he turned to Congress to enact the emergency measures that defined his first months as president. At his behest, Congress enacted a bailout for American farmers and a semi-cartelization of American industry, created deposit insurance for the nation’s bank depositors, and established a Civilian Conservation Corps that provided work to jobless young men and improvements to national parks and forests. He did not claim for himself powers he knew presidents did not have; he asked Congress, successfully, to enact these far-reaching changes.
Progressive presidents have indeed enlarged government’s regulatory capacity, but invariably because public interest and public safety demanded it. Congress established the departments and agencies that these presidents sought and the public desired. The growth of the administrative state did not come from presidential decrees, unlike the destruction of the administrative state flowing from unlawful executive orders today.
Teddy Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration so that Americans wouldn’t be poisoned so frequently by what they consumed. Wilson’s allies pushed a bill through Congress that established the Federal Trade Commission to aid consumers and small businesses struggling to deal with corporate domination of markets. FDR signed congressional legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Congress, responding to the financial chicanery that led to the crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, passed a bill, which Obama signed, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This was all government by consent of the governed, with Congress passing, the president signing, and the courts upholding the constitutionality of these newly created agencies. None of these fundamental changes were due to presidential executive orders, decrees, tweets, or pronunciamentos.