The Executive Fetish
Why Moyn and Goldsmith's Roosevelt-Trump analogy fails
In the hallowed, if increasingly cramped, quarters of Ivy League intellectual life, few pastimes are as cherished as the hunt for the “American Caesar.” The latest entry in this genre, a provocative essay in the New York Times by Yale Law School professors Samuel Moyn and Jack Goldsmith, attempts to draw a straight line from the marble halls of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to the gold-leafed chaos of the second Trump administration.
The thesis has a seductive simplicity: both men were “anti-liberals” who sought to centralize power in the Oval Office and exploited the latest in modern media affordances to present themselves as figures of national salvation. Yet, upon closer inspection, the Moyn-Goldsmith comparison suffers from a terminal case of “process-ism” — an obsession with the mechanics of power that ignores the substance of its application. To compare FDR and Trump on the basis of their shared disdain for liberal norms is akin to comparing a brain surgeon to Anthony Perkins in Psycho because they both use knives.
The Substance of Power
The most glaring omission in the Moyn-Goldsmith account is the fundamental question of cui bono — who benefits? Roosevelt’s expansion of executive power was, at its core, a declaration of war against what he called the “economic royalists.” He utilized the presidency to check the predations of concentrated capital, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to prevent the very corporate looting that had helped to precipitate the Great Depression, and installed entities like Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect individuals from the fallout of corporate misbehavior.
Trump’s “anti-liberalism” operates on an entirely different plane. Where Roosevelt sought to discipline capital, Trump has largely enabled its most extractive elements. His administration has been characterized not by a war on corporate fraud, but by its florid enablement. The regulatory bonfire of the last decade isn’t empowering the “forgotten man”; it has merely provided a smoke screen for a new era of corporate looting, often punctuated by the president’s own unabashed use of the office for personal enrichment. Anyone with two eyes can see this plainly.
Furthermore, the ideological chasm regarding social cohesion cannot be bridged by a shared interest in executive orders. Roosevelt, for all his compromises with the Jim Crow South, made at least symbolic efforts toward racial inclusion and championed the rights of organized labor through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Trump’s project is explicitly built on the foundations of white nationalism and the systematic dismantling of labor protections. To ignore these substantive ends in favor of discussing a shared tendency to “executive overreach” is legal formalism of the most risible sort.
The Mandate Gap
Then there’s the matter of political gravity. Moyn and Goldsmith treat the two men as twin populists, yet they ignore the staggering difference in their democratic legitimacy. Consider their two respective reelection campaigns. In his 1936 landslide, FDR got more than 60% of the popular vote, and carried every state except Maine and Vermont, securing a mandate for change that was both deep and broad. His policies weren’t just executive whims; they were enacting the will of a massive, durable majority.
By contrast, in three election contests Trump has never secured 50 percent of the popular vote. Bluster and intimidation aside, he operates as a minority president, wielding the levers of the “unitary executive” not to fulfill a broad national consensus, but to impose the will of a shrinking, if fervent, base upon a resistant majority. This isn’t a trivial distinction. Roosevelt’s effectiveness as a change agent was rooted in his popularity; Trump’s is rooted in his ability to exploit the structural vulnerabilities of American institutions. One built a consensus; the other exploits a fracture.
Builders and Breakers
Nowhere is the analogy more strained than in the realm of institution-building. Roosevelt was the Great Architect. He left behind a vast landscape of enduring institutions — Social Security, Fair Labor standards, the modernized Federal Reserve, etc. — that became the cornerstones of 20th-century American life. These weren’t merely tools of control; they were providers of security and utility that remained popular long after he left the stage.
What is the Trumpian equivalent? While the current administration has been remarkably efficient at tearing down or hollowing out parts of the “administrative state,” its creative output is embarrassingly narrow. If Roosevelt built the TVA to bring light to the Tennessee Valley not to mention thousands of Work Progress Administration buildings, Trump’s primary institutional output so far has been the vast expansion of a domestic security apparatus — a national secret police force that is attempting to intimidate dissent rather than provide a public good. Roosevelt built safety nets; Trump builds cages and surveillance loops. One sought to make the state useful; the other seeks to make it fearsome.
The Shadow of War
Moyn and Goldsmith correctly identify “emergency” as the fuel for executive expansion, but they fail to account for the pivot point of 1941. It was World War II that allowed Roosevelt to solidify the New Deal order, transforming temporary crisis measures into a permanent governing philosophy. On some intuitive level Trump understands this, which is why he regularly manufactures the narrative of emergency even where there is none. (Ironically, the most pathetic fact about Trump’s presidency is that in the one true exogenous emergency he has so far faced, namely the Covid-19 pandemic, he abjectly failed to do anything useful from an institution building perspective.)
As we watch Trump’s second term take an increasingly bellicose turn, the ghost of Roosevelt’s wartime presidency looms. But the “Donroe Doctrine” — an erratic blend of isolationism and sudden, violent intervention — bears little resemblance to Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy or his meticulous planning of the post-war liberal order. If Trump seeks war to cement his power, he does so without a coherent geopolitical strategy, risking a conflagration that could well destroy the very institutions he seeks to command.
The Anti-Liberal Trap
It’s true that both men are, in the strict sense, anti-liberals. But “anti-liberalism” is a category so broad as to be analytically useless. Stalin and Hitler were anti-liberals. Mao and Mussolini were anti-liberals. To suggest that Roosevelt and Trump are political cousins because they both find the ACLU annoying is intellectual laziness.
The similarities between the two men are superficial; their differences are essential. Roosevelt used the state to save capitalism from itself and to provide a measure of dignity to the American working class. Trump uses the state to enrich himself and his allies while dismantling the protections Roosevelt built.
By centering the style of their rule rather than the substance of their impact, Moyn and Goldsmith provide a sophisticated cover for a radical departure in American governance. Roosevelt sought to build a “more stately mansion” for the American people. Trump seems content to burn the house down and charge the public for the privilege of watching. History may use the same words for both — ”President,” “Commander-in-Chief,” “Strongman” — but the reality of their reigns couldn’t be further apart. In the end, the only thing they truly share is the Oval Office desk. It’s what they did behind it that matters.