Roosevelt to Reagan to Trump

A friend becomes the enemy

Ordinary Americans in the 1930s took one lesson above all from the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government could be their friend.

This was new in American history. From the 18th century into the 20th, Americans perceived government, especially the federal government, as an institution far removed from their lives. The federal government delivered the mail, but that was about it as far as most Americans experienced things. The feds collected tariffs but far up the supply chain. Final customers rarely encountered a customs agent.

Grover Cleveland summarized the philosophy of the era when he vetoed a bill that would have sent federal aid to drought-stricken Texas farmers. “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution,” Cleveland said. “And I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

Attitudes changed by the time Roosevelt became president amid the Great Depression. Millions of Americans were without jobs, without homes, without savings, without hope. Disaster had befallen them, in most cases through no fault of their own. With nowhere else to turn, Americans looked to the government for relief. Herbert Hoover resisted, retaining the Cleveland philosophy of individual self-sufficiency. For this perceived hard-heartedness, voters turned Hoover out and replaced him with Roosevelt, who promised a “New Deal” featuring government acting on behalf of the people. The New Deal provided cash to the destitute, employment to the jobless, price support to farmers, security to savers, pensions to the elderly and — above all — a sense that Americans had a friend in Washington.

This sense persisted for half a century, until Ronald Reagan called a halt. As a young man, Reagan had voted for Roosevelt and applauded the New Deal, which helped keep the Reagan household in Illinois afloat. But Reagan had moved on to Hollywood and better fortunes, and he concluded that as comforting as the friendly hand of government might have been during the Depression, it had become oppressive amid the boom of the decades after World War II. It fueled inflation and hindered economic growth.

A new philosophy would guide Reagan’s conduct of the presidency. “Government is not the solution to our problems,” he said in his first inaugural address. "Government is the problem."

Reagan pared back regulation of business. He persuaded Congress to slash taxes. He was less successful cutting spending on existing programs, but he halted the program proliferation that had characterized American politics since Roosevelt. The Reagan attitude toward government was skepticism. Republicans were more skeptical than Democrats, but that GOP skepticism was sufficient to stymie extensions of FDR's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society or Richard Nixon’s New Federalism.

Almost two generations after Reagan, Donald Trump became president. By then conservatives’ skepticism of government had escalated into hostility. Where Reagan had called government the problem, Trump treated government as the enemy. In his first inaugural address Trump lashed government as the epicenter of evil in America. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” he said. “Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” Those days were over, Trump said. There was a new sheriff in town. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

At the start of his second term, Trump loosed a demolition team headed by Elon Musk upon the executive branch. Musk’s orders were never made public, but his cadres didn't disguise their disdain of government. Federal workers were commanded to justify their continued employment, on pain of termination if they failed to do so. Trump issued executive orders closing whole programs and agencies.

As the hundred-days mark of Trump's term neared, it remained unclear how much of the demolition federal courts would allow. Yet the contrast with the first hundred days of FDR’s administration was breathtaking. In Roosevelt's time, government was seen as a positive force in Americans’ lives. The principal question was how much more of it they could get. In Trump's day, government was criticized unrelentingly, and the more of it that could be eliminated, the better.

Was one view right and the other wrong? Americans liked Roosevelt enough to reelect him overwhelmingly in 1936 and by lesser margins in 1940 and 1944. Americans were unimpressed by Trump in his first term, chucking him in favor of Joe Biden in 2020. But they suffered evicter's remorse and reinstated Trump in 2024. How much they would like him the second time around remained to be seen.

How much they liked government was easier to discern. Significantly, Trump told Elon Musk to keep his hands off Social Security and Medicare, the two biggest government programs and the signature structural accomplishments of FDR and LBJ respectively.

Getting angry at government was easy. Getting rid of government was harder. People like friends, though they sometimes complain about them.