JEFF GREENFIELD: On October 22nd last year, Donald Trump went to Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, to define his Presidential priorities. The key was not just what
he said he’d do, but when.
DONALD TRUMP,
GETTYSBURG, PA, OCTOBER 22, 2016: What
follows is my 100 day action plan to make America
great again.
JEFF GREENFIELD: Why 100 days? Because Trump, like every
newly elected President for eight decades, has come to power in the shadow of
this President’s first 100 days.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT,
INAUGURATION DAY, MARCH 4, 1933: The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
JEFF GREENFIELD: Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in
March of 1933 with the nation in the grips of The Great Depression.
ADAM COHEN, AUTHOR OF
‘ NOTHING TO FEAR’: People could literally not pay their
bills when they were checking out of their hotels, who came down for the
inauguration.
The banking system had collapsed. Unemployment was at 25 percent. The stock
market had plunged. So everyone agreed that there had
to be bold action.
JEFF GREENFIELD: And that’s what FDR delivered. Within a
week, he declared a “bank holiday,” which closed all banks for four days, and
ordered others reforms that bolstered the financial system. He flooded Congress
— then dominated by Democrats and liberal Republicans— with bills saving
farmers from insolvency and putting thousands of jobless to work building
infrastructure and parks.
NEWSREEL: Hundreds of dams will make lakes in
regions where large bodies of water are unknown…”
JEFF GREENFIELD: By early summer, Congress had passed 15
major bills, and “the 100 days” became shorthand for decisive presidential
action.
ADAM COHEN: It was really was
as much for Congress the clock was ticking as it was Roosevelt. When people
look back they saw that he had done a lot in 100 days, but it was never the
plan. The plan was just to do a lot.
JEFF GREENFIELD: And that has posed a challenge for every
President since, including the incoming one: how much can you do in 100 days?
ROBERT DALLEK,
PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Since
this new president, Trump, has promised to ‘Make America Great Again,’ there’s particular pressure on him to deliver something in the first
100 days to demonstrate he’s moving the country forward.
JOHN F. KENNEDY,
INAUGURATION DAY, JANUARY 20, 1961: The torch has passed to a new generation
of Americans.
JEFF GREENFIELD: This pressure is often unwelcome; John
F. Kennedy was so exasperated by it that he made sure to disavow it in his
speech.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: All this will not be accomplished in the
first hundred days, nor will it be finished in the first thousand…
JEFF GREENFIELD: Moreover, Presidents rarely have the
massive Congressional majorities FDR had.
Ronald Reagan got his tax cuts through a Democratic-controlled
House of Representatives, in part because of the goodwill after he was nearly
assassinated. Bill Clinton got his first budget through Congress with one vote
to spare in the House and one in the Senate – the tiebreaker cast by his vice
president. Barack Obama’s stimulus package escaped a Senate filibuster by just
three votes.
More importantly, apart from Roosevelt, does a President’s first
100 days give us a very good measure of a chief executive?
ROBERT DALLEK: Historians look back not only on the
first 100 days but on the whole presidential term and
if they end up being there for 8 years, it dwarfs those first 100 days.
JEFF GREENFIELD: As for Mister Trump, he’ll have
Republican majorities in the House and Senate, and he can use his executive
powers to change some policies within days. But he also lost the national
popular vote and is entering the White House with the lowest approval ratings
of any incoming president in modern history. These will be significant
challenges for a President who promises bold, swift action.