The New Yorker:

Donald Trump’s first hundred days have been an unprecedented economic fiasco.

By John Cassidy

On March 9, 1933, five days after the first Presidential Inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a special session of Congress, which Roosevelt had called to deal with an unprecedented economic crisis, convened on Capitol Hill. Roughly a third of Americans were jobless; hungry people were filling up soup kitchens across the country; and banks were collapsing as worried depositors rushed to withdraw their funds. On the first day that Congress met, it passed an Emergency Banking Act, which restored public trust in the banks by authorizing federal examiners to review their books and pronounce them sound, and also by paving the way for a federal guarantee on bank deposits. During the ensuing weeks, Congress established the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to put some of the unemployed to work. In addition to this, it created the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring electrical power and jobs to one of the poorest regions of the United States. On June 16th, the ninety-ninth day of the congressional session and the hundred and fourth day of Roosevelt’s tenure, he signed into law the National Industrial Recovery Act, which guaranteed collective-bargaining rights to workers and launched a Public Works Administration to build large infrastructure projects.

The following month, in a radio address to the nation, Roosevelt referred to the “hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.” From then on, Roosevelt’s “hundred days” has been viewed as a template for forceful Presidential action, and a standard by which to judge subsequent Presidents. When Donald Trump’s hundred days comes to an end, this Wednesday, he will have outmatched Roosevelt in one area: he has signed a hundred and thirty executive orders to F.D.R.’s ninety-nine. And yet Trump doesn’t have a single piece of major legislation to his name, and his economic policies, compared with Roosevelt’s, are having the opposite effect.

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