Sunday Thoughts

Trump is coming up on the hundredth day mark of his second time in the White House, so this week will feature a lot of that sort of analysis. The “first hundred days” business has been with us since FDR, owing to the centrality of FDR in the managerial narrative. He was the first fully managerial president, setting the bar for how to take over a broke organization and setting it right. Ever since the one-hundred-day window has been a stock part of the presidential narrative.

There is a parallel between Trump and Roosevelt. Roosevelt was met with resistance from the courts until he unleashed his court packing scheme. The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 would have granted Roosevelt the right to appoint an additional justice for every current member over the age of seventy, up to six new justices. His own party killed the effort, but it did loosen up the courts so that the important bits of the New Deal could become law.

Trump will not get favorable comparisons to Roosevelt if he finds a way to influence the courts, but he will have to find some way to intimidate the judicial branch. The Obama admin threatened the courts to get Obamacare approved by the Supreme Court. They most likely blackmailed Roberts. The Bush administration got Congress to pass the Military Tribunals Act to get around the courts. This was eventually struck down in the Obama years in Boumediene v. Bush.

There is a lesson for Trump in the Bush experience. After 9/11, the Bush admin was hyper aggressive and confidence in their response. As a result, the midterms were a rare success. The 2002 midterm was just one of six successful midterms for a sitting president. It turns out that Osama bin Laden was right when he said that when people see a strong horse and weak horse, they will always pick the strong horse. Trump needs to be the strong horse.

Topics

• Trump In Rome
• Zelensky & Trump
• First 100 days (Link)
• Deportation Panic (Link)
• Misinformation Science (Link)
• Epstein (Link)