For about a week now, we’ve been hearing story after story about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office.
We’ve heard stories about his poll numbers, his policies, his perceived successes and failures. If you’ve been following presidential politics for a while, these stories have a familiar ring to them. You may recall similar waves of analysis of the first 100 days of President Trump’s first term — or the terms of Presidents Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
The fact is, this idea that a president has a 100 days to do something consequential goes back almost 100 years. And it can be easy to forget, but with a few exceptions, pretty much every president on that list has fallen short of that benchmark. Yet the expectation persists.
So, why does this keep happening? Where does this storyline about the first 100 days come from? And is there any reason to believe that President Trump’s second first 100 days will be remembered differently than his predecessors’?
Alasdair Roberts, professor of public policy at UMass Amherst, joined The Show to answer all these questions. Back in 2021, Roberts wrote a piece for Wilson Quarterly called “The Hundred Days Mistake.”
The Show asked if he was still feeling skeptical about this pesky political narrative.
Full conversation
ALASDAIR ROBERTS: I think we want to probably distinguish the facts of the 100 days and the myth of the 100 days, and we can talk a bit about that. But the facts of the 100 days basically are rooted in Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office.
He was the last president to be inaugurated in March, so he was inaugurated in March 1933. The country was in deep economic and social crisis. And when he gets into the White House, he lays out a plan for legislative action. And there are a little more than a dozen major bills that he sends to Congress to resolve the crisis. Most of those bills are passed by the time that Congress adjourns for the summer.
That’s roughly a period of about 100 days. And that’s the sort of factual predicate for the story we know about the 100 days.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes. And, as you quote, a columnist of the era, Walter Lippmann, said that it was a time when we found out that the United States, “had a government that could govern.”
ROBERTS: Well, that’s right. There was a widespread sense that the country was on the edge of collapse and broad public support for a president who was ready to sort of act to resolve the crisis. And Roosevelt himself, in his inaugural address, said it’s basically like the country is at war. He said we face a crisis equal in scale to war.
DINGMAN: Well, one of the big things that jumped out at me from your unwinding of the history of the first 100 days — both in the piece that you wrote about this and in the answer that you just gave — is that these measures were passed by Congress, not executive order, which is the standard we’ve become more familiar with.
ROBERTS: That’s right. The interesting thing about the Trump 100 days, the period we’re in right now, is that there’s no legislative program. It’s qualitatively different. Life was, in a way, simpler back then because the federal government was smaller. Roosevelt was writing on a clean slate in many ways. He wasn’t revising legislation or reforming programs. He was setting things up for the first time.
And the second point is that the country is behind him. There’s no effective political opposition at that time. Even Republicans are saying that — there’s one Republican member of Congress who says, if ever we needed a dictator, we need one now. And he’s talking about Roosevelt. So we’re in a very different time politically.
DINGMAN: So almost every president since Roosevelt has campaigned on some version of a promise of what they’re going to accomplish in the first 100 days. And it’s basically never worked, right?
ROBERTS: You know, there’s the fact of 100 days, what actually happened under Roosevelt. But there’s also the myth of the 100 days, which I think is sort of more powerful. And it’s the myth that we’re dealing with right now.
For the 20, 25 years after Roosevelt, people paid some attention to the 100 day concept, but not much. The idea really got polished by a Harvard professor, a historian named Arthur Schlesinger, in the late 1950s. And he’s the one who made it seem like a dramatic episode in American history. And Schlesinger was a key advisor to John Kennedy and also in the sort of Democratic circle in the early 1960s.
So that’s when the whole myth comes, the notion that the presidents have to act powerfully in the first 100 days, that’s when it really becomes settled. And ironically, this is basically a democratic invention.
DINGMAN: Can you talk a little bit about when it became less feasible legislatively in the first 100 days? Because it seems as though, in addition to the fact that Roosevelt took office in the midst of an economic and social cataclysm, Congress has also become much more of a complex operation than it was back then.
And in your piece, you write that federal government was a small and ramshackle enterprise in 1933. When does that start to change?
ROBERTS: Basically after World War II and especially after the 1950s. So one of the challenges today is that government is just much, much larger and much more complex. And as I said, today we’re not talking about writing laws that have never existed before. We’re usually talking about renovating laws or big bureaucracies.
DINGMAN: Well, it also strikes me that a lot of the increased complexity and bureaucracy of the federal government is a result of FDR’s his presidency, right?
ROBERTS: Well, that’s right. FDR and postwar presidents as well steadily expanding the remit of the federal government.
DINGMAN: So, Professor Roberts, you wrote this piece that we have been talking about in 2021 at the beginning of President Biden’s term. And you wrote that 100 days was a misguided standard to judge Biden or any president by, because even though Biden was facing a crisis, it was more of a crisis of national unity rather than a crisis on the order of what Roosevelt was facing.
And Trump, in his second presidential campaign — much like in his first one — very much campaigned on the idea that America is a nation in crisis. And as we’ve been talking about as a result of that, he has moved very aggressively with executive orders in his first 100 days. What do you make of his approach?
ROBERTS: Well, I think the key difference is that President Trump may say there’s a crisis, but there’s no broad consensus that there is a crisis or what the crisis is. And that’s a qualitative difference from earlier periods. And the problem with the 100-day benchmark is it basically says to incoming presidents, “Go in there and sort of tear things up as fast as you can.”
DINGMAN: I think a lot of people would argue that Trump has taken a — to quote you — “tear things up” approach in his first 100 days. How impactful do you think it’s been? I mean, he obviously hasn’t passed as many bills as Roosevelt did. But how would you contextualize it historically?
ROBERTS: I it’s going to be tough. I think a lot of what he’s doing is being done through discretionary powers given to the president. And one of the difficulties is that if it’s a discretionary power, any future president could undo it.
So, for example, there’s talk about removing the Department of Education, but that requires legislative action. If there’s no legislative action, a president down the road could breathe life back into the Department of Education.
So it could be that some of this — “ephemeral” might not be the word to use — but it might be that a lot of this could be reversed by a future president. But the aggressive talk toward other countries, the reversals in trade policy have severely damaged relations with other countries, and that is unlikely to be repaired quickly. That’s damage that’s going to persist for decades.
DINGMAN: Well, speaking of legacy, how much do you think the actions of a president in the first 100 days — which, as we’ve been talking about, tend to get a tremendous amount of focus in that initial sprint — how much do you think the accomplishments or lack thereof, in those first 100 days stick to the historical memory of a president?
ROBERTS: Well, the irony is that if President Trump and his advisers really wanted to sort of lay down a historical legacy, the prudent path would have been to forget about the 100 days, think carefully about what their priorities are and focus on those priorities. Lay a legislative foundation for what they want to do so that the changes that they were making are durable.
What they’ve done in this sort of rush to meet the kind of 100-day deadline, much of it has been chaotic. It’s been error prone, and it may well evaporate quickly. So the prudent path would have been to forget the 100 days and just focus on a longer-term agenda.
