Trump’s First 100 Days: A Historical Perspective

Panelists discuss the first one hundred days of the second Donald Trump administration in the historical context of the American presidency, comparing the policies implemented since Trump’s inauguration with those of past presidents, and what it means for U.S. democracy and foreign policy moving forward.

This meeting is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.

TEPPERMAN: Thanks, Sam. And hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations virtual meeting on “Trump’s First 100 Days: A Historical Perspective.”

I’m Jonathan Tepperman. I’m currently the editor-in-chief of The Catalyst, and a senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. I’ve worn a number of different hats over the years, including spending many years here at the Council as the managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.

This meeting is part of CFR’s Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy, which aims to identify threats to the health of democracies around the globe, and to recommend steps that policymakers, business leaders, civil society organizations, and citizens can take to reverse the erosion of democratic norms and values—a project that couldn’t be more important today. The project is made possible by the generous support of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation. And I would like to thank Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, who is joining us virtually via Zoom. Thank you, Barbaralee.

Now, I usually start these sort of conversations with an interpretive gloss of my own, but I know that none of you listening today signed up to hear me speak. So, given how much more learned and interesting our three guests are, I want to bring them into the conversation as quickly as possible. So let me introduce them, and then we’ll get going.

We are very lucky to have with us today H.W. Brands, a famed professor of U.S. history at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of more than thirty books, including absolutely stellar biographies of Benjamin Franklin, both Presidents Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson, among many others.

Niall Ferguson is also a historian and a prolific writer of both journalism and very weighty books on economic and diplomatic history. Niall is currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute and a senior faculty member at Harvard’s Belfer Center, as well as a columnist for the Free Press.

Susan Glasser has had a storied career in journalism. She is currently the New Yorker’s Washington columnist. She too is the author of many award-winning books. And Susan and I also share the misfortune of both having run Foreign Policy magazine at different times, although, frankly, she was much better at the job than I was.

OK. So here we go. The word “unprecedented” is one that we’ve heard a lot over the last one hundred days. In fact, if we were playing one of those undergraduate drinking games where you have to take a shot every time you hear a specific word and that was the word, we’d all be in the hospital by now. And in many ways it is hard to believe that it’s only been one hundred days since Donald Trump became president for the second time. After 142 executive orders, but by my last count, forty-two proclamations, forty-two memorandums, and several pieces of legislation, there is plenty to talk about. But the key project for our conversation today, I think, should be to try to dig deeper and beyond that word “unprecedented,” and get at whether what we’ve seen in the last three months is truly new.

I also want to explore whether history can shed light on what’s happened and what’s likely to come in the next one hundred days. Now, I want to start with a simple and brief question. We’re going to start talking about other past U.S. presidents in a moment, but first let me ask all three of our speakers this same short, basic question: In your view, have President Trump’s first one hundred days truly been unprecedented, at least in terms of how active and revolutionary they have been or seemed? And let’s just stick to short answers to that question. And then we’ll get into actual precedence or not in the next question.

Susan, let me start with you, and then Bill, and then Niall.

GLASSER: (Laughs.) Well, I’m drawing the hard thing of having to go first in such an august group. I feel like I’m the outlier here. So maybe it’s good we can start granular and then go in the broader sweep of American history, because I think, from my perspective, one of the things I’ve tried to do over the last very exhausting, disruptive three months, is to at least look at the baseline of Trump versus himself, because that offers a little bit of an answer to the question of, you know, where is he really off the charts or where Is he actually offering us a continuation of his first very disruptive four years in office.

And I think that’s where it’s fair to say Trump 2.0 is, in many respects, the maximalist version of Trump 1.0. It’s the same person. It’s the same person, however, without many of the constraints that shaped and limited the possibilities for him in his first four years in office. And you mentioned the executive orders. You know, you—there was a series of charts on the front page of the New York Times the other day. And it showed the lines between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. That line and the cliff on executive orders, on lawsuits, on the sheer number of agencies and institutions and individuals impacted by the policies set forth by Trump in his first few months returning to office, those are off the charts. Those are off the charts by Trump’s own standard of Trump 1.0.

So is it really unprecedented, or un-presidented, if you will? You know, I defer to those who can tell us more about, you know, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of the U.S. But I think it’s fair to say that in the modern era, it is—it is unprecedented.

TEPPERMAN: Thanks, Susan. Bill, what do you think?

BRANDS: I would say that the Trump 2.0 is 80 to 90 percent precedented, and 10 percent unprecedented. The precedented part has to do with the evolution of the institution of the presidency. Any president inaugurated in January of this year could have done very much of what Donald Trump has attempted to do. The institutional powers were there. The 10 percent relates to Donald Trump personally. He’s quite a different personality, and he’s conducted himself very differently, as an individual, than presidents have before. So that’ll be my short answer for the moment.

TEPPERMAN: Great. That’s fascinating. Niall, what would you add?

FERGUSON: Is it unprecedented for a president to have two non-consecutive terms? No. Grover Cleveland did it. Is it unprecedented for a president to try to do a colossal number of things via executive orders in the first one hundred days of his presidency? No, FDR did it. And I could go on. I think the problem about the word “unprecedented” is it’s code for, I don’t know any history. And that’s why you hear it a lot on the media. But to me, the striking thing about what we’re seeing is that not only have we seen Donald Trump as president before, we also seen other presidents attempt these sorts of things before.

In particular, it seems to me that the project of a greatly enhanced presidential power is far from new. I mean, it’s just a little over fifty years ago the imperial president—the imperial presidency was a phrase much in use as Richard Nixon approached the height of his power. So I’m struggling, in fact, to find the unprecedented here. Part of the problem in academia is that people find it very hard to recognize how much of Trump is a familiar part of American history, particularly the history of American populism. And the notion which now goes back all the way to the beginning of his first term that he’s somehow related to interwar fascists in Europe, it just won’t go away. People will still keep writing the Trump is Hitler op-ed. There’s a market for that that clearly persists. But this, I think, is just a huge category error. Trump’s inner tradition of nineteenth-century political ideas—I think Susan and Bill will have thoughts on this—the unusual thing is to have a populist who gets elected twice to the presidency, but even then it’s hard to find anything here that’s entirely, entirely novel.

TEPPERMAN: Interesting. Thanks, Niall.

So, Bill, let’s now get into specific presidents in particular. As we look to the past, who are the presidents—and you’ve written biographies of most of them—that you think about when thinking about Trump? You know, in earlier months it was voguish to talk about Andrew Jackson and William McKinley in part because they are two of President Trump’s own favorites, but I wonder if you might think or if one might think the best answer today—the closest precedent in some ways, at least in terms of ambition and quantity of or quantum of things that he’s tried to do—would be FDR, who, after all, in the subtitle of your book you called a radical, and Trump is nothing if not radical.

BRANDS: Well, the first thing I’ll say is, to elaborate on my first answer, the personal part of Donald Trump is the unprecedented part. The precedented part is institutional, and it goes back to George Washington. George Washington pushed the boundaries of presidential authority when he proclaimed neutrality in the war that broke out in Europe during his presidency. There’s no constitutional authority for doing this. He did it, there was no pushback, and it started the presidency down the path of presidents doing what they can get away with. And the powers of the presidency grow slowly through the nineteenth century, much more during the first half of the twentieth century. And from 1945 until now, presidents have seized all sorts of authority. So Donald Trump is—he has the possibility to be the most powerful president in American history. But if Kamala Harris had been elected, she would have very much of that same power because they both inherited this presidency, this institution, that was far greater than any of the framers of the Constitution intended; that had, essentially, autocratic control over trade, over tariffs, over war and peace, over immigration, over all sorts of things that presidents weren’t expected or intended to have authority over. So that’s where we get to Donald Trump when he's inaugurated the second time.

Now, Donald Trump came in with additional powers or degrees of freedom. For example, he controls his political party to a degree that no president before has had. He’s utterly unconstrained by his part. And this part is new. And we still have to see how all this is going to turn out. When this is billed as a historical perspective on the Trump presidency, well, OK, we can—we can state what—the history that leads up to this. We really have—I have no idea how this is going to turn out. And when we know how it’ll turn out, we’ll be able to see whether what I’ve been calling the precedented part or the unprecedented part is the more influential.

You mentioned FDR. Yes, FDR accomplished a great deal—attempted and accomplished a great deal during his first term, during his first hundred days. But there’s a very different aspects of what he accomplished. His accomplishments included fifteen major pieces of legislation. That’s crucial, because there’s the authority that comes from statutes that Congress has passed. Legislation is difficult to undo. What Trump has accomplished, such as it is, has been done by executive order, and executive orders are very easy to undo. One could say that Franklin Roosevelt’s accomplishments were primarily positive—to create new things, to create institutions, create expectations and practices that didn’t exist. Donald Trump’s accomplishments so far have been negative. Now, he would say that all the stuff that FDR accomplished during his first term needs to be undone, which is why what he’s done is negative. But those are the fundamental distinctions.

So I would say that we know the staying power of Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days because we still live with very many of those institutions and the expectations that they have created. We have no idea what the staying power of Donald Trump’s hundred days are going to be.

TEPPERMAN: So that’s great and a good segue. Susan, I want you to pick up on that. And let me ask you the following: Has Trump actually done as much as people think he has over the last one hundred days, or has he simply said he’s done that much, or signed pieces of paper that may or may not have legal standing? What I mean is when you factor in the pushback that’s already coming from the courts; the influence of the markets and of public opinion; the fact that he’s promised to keep DOGE away from Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending; and then the fact that he’s done so much through executive order, when all of that shakes out, do you think that we will still be left with a record of radical change, or will it actually look like something more moderate?

GLASSER: Well, I think that’s a great starting point for this. Bill’s point is really—has to be underscored. Right now you have a maximalist assertion of executive powers by the president and court fights already along such a broad array of fronts that it’s actually extremely hard to tell. You know, they fall into buckets, many of which, again, were he to win even part of what he has had the government assert on behalf of the United States, would be a big change in the presidency, but we don’t know.

One of the buckets is about re-shifting the relationship between the presidency and the Congress, and there he is enormously facilitated by this unusual stranglehold over the Republican Party. In fact, I think that when you look back on sort of the story of Trump’s first term, in many ways it’s a story about sort of the final winning of what he and his son-in-law used to call the hostile takeover of the GOP, that that was in essence a large part of the project of Trump 1.0. And having succeeded in that project in a very unlikely way, a way that many did not assume to be the case even in the first year, year-and-a-half after he very unwillingly left office, that is the precursor event to what we’re seeing right now, which is this, I think, monumental contest between Trump’s vision of the presidency and what those who are opposing him in court see as the important role of Congress, of other institutions in society. So that’s a big question mark that’s going to determine this.

You know, in the wake of Nixon’s imperial presidency, to take Niall’s point—in the wake of that, Congress passed a series of laws. Essentially, Trump is the final erasure. That is part of the project I see him undertaking now, is the final erasure of the post-Nixon order in Washington. And in particular when it comes to the balance of power with Congress you have the Impoundment Act of 1974. Many conservatives, many legal—conservative legal scholars have long wanted to challenge this. Well, Donald Trump has done so by, in effect, saying I alone can determine whether to spend this money despite Congress having appropriated it, despite Congress having appropriated it, despite Congress having authorized the entities such as the U.S. Agency for International Development through which this money is spent. So a big question mark there.

But just a final point I wanted to make on that first question. You know, I agree that there are echoes—historical echoes of a lot of presidencies, but the reason that I would suggest that what Trump is attempting to do—even if we don’t know how much he’s succeeded—is unprecedented in a variety of ways is that the nature of the modern presidency has changed so dramatically from when Grover Cleveland was the only American president to return to office—we’re talking more than a century—when FDR had his sort of almost definitional first one hundred days. Again, that pre-World War II era of the United States is a fundamentally different society and different kind of country than the one that Trump is living in. So, from my perspective, sure, it’s like you take aspects of Nixon’s presidency—although I would point out that many of his abuses of power he was at least trying to do in secret rather than communicating them publicly to us in real time every day. You can take elements of Nixon. You can take elements of the McCarthy era, the targeting of individuals, institutions, academia, civil society. You can take elements of FDR’s view of the presidency. I thought it was really revealing when Donald Trump was told by the Atlantic magazine that they were going to write a story about him as the most consequential modern president and he thought that was a big compliment—(laughs)—seeing consequential as the goal regardless of whether the outcome is defined or thought to be in the end by history positive or negative.

TEPPERMAN: So that’s great, Susan.

Now I want to ask Niall and Bill, so the two official historians on the panel, a related question, which is whether—and keeping in mind this question of sort of structure versus agency—whether the last one hundred days, this Trump presidency in particular, has changed your theory of history, or your theory of change, or your theory of how things get done in the U.S. government.

And the reason that I ask this, I’ll admit that I have a personal stake in the question, I spent the years leading up to this election worrying about whether the United States would ever be able to address its major structural problems because it had started to seem to me like our political system had become too unwieldy, too polarized, too captured by special interests, with incentives that pointed away from compromise rather than toward compromise. That because of all of that it was no longer possible to make big changes to the structure and system of U.S. governance. And I wasn’t the only person who felt that way. Even many reform-minded members of Congress would come to the same conclusion and, after X number of years in the building, leave the institution. But now, given how much we’ve seen over the last one hundred days, I wonder if we’re wrong about that. And whether I and others were perhaps underestimating the role of the individual and overestimating the role of structuring systems in how big things happen.

You want to start with Niall, and then we can go to Bill?

FERGUSON: It’s a bit of a false dichotomy, isn’t it, the personal versus the structural. And I don’t think anything that has happened has altered the way I think about how the U.S. system of government works. It’s got conflict built in as a feature, not a bug. That’s what the separation of powers does. It’s got a monarchical element. Hamilton saw to that. But it’s also got a democratic element. And it’s also, in a sense, got an aristocratic element. It’s straight out of the way that the Romans, and indeed the Greeks, thought about the republican polity, the fathers, founding fathers, had read their history. They thought deeply about this and they produced the most successful experiment in republican governance yet, which is approaching its 250^th birthday.

I think if one looks back at times of great upheaval in the history of the republic, it’s commonly because a president seeks to increase the power that the Constitution gives him. Bill’s already made this point, and Susan rightly drew our attention to Nixon. I think Nixon is highly, highly relevant here. It is not accidental that the first person really to pay attention to Trump as a possible political player was Richard Nixon. And I think at some level Donald Trump is Richard Nixon’s revenge on all of the enemies that brought Nixon down. And it’s extraordinary how they have the same enemies. And Trump, as if on a mission from Nixon, is going after them all. He’s going after the federal bureaucracy. He’s going after Harvard. He’s going after the fake news New York Times.

And so I have this strange sense of déjà vu. I’m in the midst of writing the second volume in my biography of Henry Kissinger, and it feels like that’s essentially the world we’re still living in, in which the battles between an outsider who’s got a chip on his shoulder against the forces of elite establishment is once again the theme of the time. I think what’s different—what’s changed is, of course, that the federal government’s become larger and more unwieldy, even more bureaucratic than it was in the 1970s. And that, in some ways, makes the task even harder for Trump.

But one hundred days into this second term, I think certain things are already obvious and familiar. The Nixon shock of 1971 has just been replayed, but perhaps on steroids. You know, basically talking about tariffs, plus we want a weaker currency. We’re fed up of subsidizing our allies. They’re all freeloaders. I mean, this is straight out of 1971. We want to kind of reduce the commitments abroad. What are we doing in this war in a faraway place? You know, Ukraine or South Vietnam. Right on cue, there’s an Indo-Pakistan crisis. The Middle East will probably blow up at some point. And so in some ways, we’re kind of reliving the 1970s.

And what’s predictable is that if, as happened to Nixon, the economy tanks because the plan goes wrong, and you end up with stagflation—not a non-trivial probability. We’ve got certainly higher inflation as a result of the tariffs, and almost guaranteed lower growth, maybe a recession. Some economists think very likely a recession. Well, if that happens, guess what’s going to happen at the midterms next year? That’s right, the Republicans will lose the House. And then what will happen? They will impeach—the Democrats will impeach Trump again. So the problem I have is not that this is all unprecedented. The problem I have is that I’ve seen this movie before. And I’m kind of hoping there’ll be at least some variation in the plot. So far, it’s very familiar.

BRANDS: So, OK. So it’s my turn. So as I interpret the Trump project, as mediated through Elon Musk, the belief is that the system is stuck. It ratchets up, but you can’t unwind it. And so the deficit, the debt, grows. And something has to be done to deliver a blow, a shock to the system. And the shock has come in the form of DOGE, and all the attacks on various government agencies. And I think—I think we’re going to see, I think we’re already seeing that in the domestic side the shock, it demonstrates that the mechanism is sticky, but maybe resilient, because we’re seeing the pushback. The courts are beginning to push back. As Niall suggested, there quite likely will be pushback at the polls next year. The reason our domestic circumstances, institutions, systems of payment and that, are the way they are is that Americans like them. We designed it this way. They didn’t happen by accident. And so to take away Social Security, to take away—to take away the jobs of government officials, to do all this stuff—they were all created for reasons, and it’s going to be much harder to undo that.

Now I distinguish that from the foreign policy side. And the foreign policy side, I think the Trump people would have said the foreign policy side was stuck too. We’ve been stuck in this consensus since 1945 that the United States was going to carry the world on its back. And this was a bad deal for the United States. So we’re going to give this—that system a whack too. Now, I think we’re going to see—I think we’re already seeing—that on that side the status quo is very brittle. One president, almost with just a few days’ work, can give it a whack and break it so that the expectations that other countries, other governments, other peoples had of the United States I think, have shifted greatly.

I liken this to in a marriage where one partner, one spouse, cheats on the other one. And you—maybe—and Donald Trump won’t live forever—there will be presidents after Donald Trump. The Republican Party might regain its grounding in its original principles. But for governments, for foreign nations that had been looking to the United States for eighty years and expecting certain things out of the United States—one of them being that the United States values its commitments. The United States, the president of the United States, values the word of the United States. That the members of NATO—Germany is a good example, Japan is another—that we can rely on the United States. We do not have to have an independent foreign policy with the military policy that that entails. In fact, we don’t want it. And we—you know, we’re not going to have it.

But when Donald Trump says that the United States is not going to be defending the rest of the world, when that expectation breaks, then all of a sudden Germany and other countries in Europe, they have to start thinking for themselves. Japan will have to start thinking for themselves. And if Donald Trump is succeeded by, let’s say, a Rooseveltian Democrat, the memory will still remain in foreign countries that the United States has the capacity to elect a president who says he’s going to annex Canada, for heaven’s sakes. So that’s something—that’s an undoing of the received status quo that has—Donald Trump has accomplished. And I think it’s going to be really difficult and take a long time to bring that back, if it ever is brought back.

TEPPERMAN: Thanks, Bill.

Susan, I want to come back to you. We just have a minute or two before I have to open things up to our audience. But you’re in Washington every day and reporting on the administration. So I want to ask you the following: Do you think the Trump administration itself has learned a lot from its first one hundred days, that mean that the second one hundred days will look a lot different than the last three months have?

GLASSER: Short answer, no. Slightly longer short answer is this, which is that, you know, to a remarkable degree, you know, Trump is still Trump. And so, you know, the patterns of, you know, kind of infighting or kind encouraging advisors of different points of view to fight it out that we’re now seeing in regards to the tariffs, there’s an element of sort of cats fighting in the bag. We’re not entirely sure, it’s not entirely transparent, but, you know, this is the mode by which Donald Trump has operated for decades. So that’s not going to change. You know, the remarkable twists and turns that we’re all experiencing, the global economy potentially being upended by the long-stated preferences of a single individual, that’s something that, you know, while we can say the power of the imperial presidency has been building for a long time, I just—if we do come down to a recession caused essentially by a single person, that’s just—I don’t see a script for that in the past. Again, I see antecedents to it.

And so we’re going to see that fighting out continue among his advisors. But remember, it’s Trump himself who is writing the script here. And right now, he doesn’t seem to have an editor who’s empowered—(laughs)—to make changes in that script. And so, I mean, I personally can’t even tell you at this moment where exactly are the threatened tariffs on any particular individual country or industry. And that’s because they’ve changed so much. That’s a level of worldwide-generated chaos and uncertainty, both in the business world and in terms of the United States’ relations with other powers that I think we haven’t seen before. So that’s going to continue, in part because another difference I see from Trump 1.0 is that some important entities, such as China, are calling Donald Trump’s bluff in a way that—he forced out a specific confrontation in a way that, you know, was kind of danced around a lot in the first term, but never really fully joined. And so I can tell you that he has playbook for when he’s punched. I can tell you, you know, what I think is likely to happen. But we don’t really know.

And the thing that concerns me in the second hundred days is that Trump’s playbook for when somebody punches him, as he has said repeatedly over the years to interviewers, is to punch back harder. He is an escalator when it comes to conflict. That is what he has done throughout the seventy-nine years of his life. He also will back down and, you know, choose another course at various key points. But remember that Donald Trump punched, we know for sure that he will punch back. And that’s why I think the conflict, if anything, is likely to escalate, rather than deescalate, over the next hundred days. And if he is forced to back down, by the way, on the tariffs, or with China, then he will assuredly pick a fight somewhere else. (Laughs.) If nothing else, to distract us from his need to climb down in a different area.

TEPPERMAN: Thanks, Susan. So this is so fascinating that I have about a dozen more questions for each of you, but I have to begrudgingly share the microphone.

So let me now bring in our members. A reminder that this meeting is on the record. The operator will remind you how to join the question queue. So over to the operator, please, for the first question.

OPERATOR: Thank you so much.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

We will take our first question from Paula Stern. Please remember to state your affiliation.

Q: Hi. I’m sorry. I hope you can hear me.

TEPPERMAN: We can.

Q: Oh, great. Thank you. I wanted to take issue. My name is Paula Stern.

And for background, I chaired the U.S. International Trade Commission and also was responsible for the passage of something called the Nelson amendment, which required major arms sales be reported to Congress. All kind of reflective of—both being reflective of a period of the Nixon administration, and Congress’ response to what was then called the imperial president. And so I do believe that—(laughs)—President Trump very much stands in contrast to Richard Nixon. And really, I guess this is as much a comment, I’m sorry, as a question, but the—Richard Nixon was the president when the Congress passed the Trade Promotion Act of 1974, which did delegate to the executive branch multilateral trade negotiation capabilities, et cetera, and set up the U.S. International Trade Commission, so that there would be a quasi-judicial means by which protection would be imposed and tariffs would be levied. So I really have a problem—that’s my comment—with comparing today’s Trump policies on—if you call them that—on trade with the Nixon era, and the multilateral trade system, and our judicial systems that we renewed back in the 1970s.

TEPPERMAN: Thank you, Paula. Niall, that wasn’t really a question. Do you want to respond? Or we can just move on.

FERGUSON: I’m happy to. Thanks for that comment, Paula. But one has to remember that Congress was able to do a great deal to clip the wings of the imperial presidency after the Watergate scandal began to unfold. And so what you got at the end of Nixon’s presidency was something very different from what Nixon was able to do at the height of his power. And I think it’s important to recognize that much that we’re discussing here does echo what Nixon did, both on economic policy—remember, when people talk about Mar-a-Lago accords what they’re really talking about is trying to combine tariffs and a weaker dollar with burden sharing in a way that was right out of Richard Nixon’s 1971 playbook.

I think it’s revealing that some of the foreign policy commentary that we read talks about “reverse Nixon” or “reverse Kissinger” to try and explain why President Trump is so nice to President Putin. The theory is that what Trump is trying to do is to draw Putin away from Xi Jinping and to drive a wedge between Russia and China. And the analogy there is very clear, though I don’t think, myself, that it works very well. That the idea is that what Nixon did when he announced that he was going to Beijing, and when he went in 1972, was to exploit the Sino-Soviet split to the strategic advantage of the U.S. So there are lots and lots of ways in which I think that Trump is a kind of revenge of Nixon. Not just the enemies list, but also the way in which he operates.

Let me throw out an idea which I don’t think has yet been mentioned. But when we talk about the really outrageous things that Trump does—like Canada is going to be the 51^st state, or we’re going to annex Greenland, or I want the Panama Canal back—I mean, that McKinley element to Trump I think is a bit of a smokescreen. Because obviously Canada is not going to be the 51^st state. He’s trolling Canadians in the way that Trump loves to do. If you look behind the kind of imperial bluster, I think what motivates Trump is actually a sense of the weakness of the American position, the overstretch. Too many international commitments and all kinds of domestic economic problems.

In fact, the economic problems are worse today because the debt is much, much larger relative to GDP than it was when Nixon came to power in 1969. In many ways, the kind of challenges is greater because the Soviet Union was certainly a formidable opponent in the 1970s, but China is a much bigger opponent in the 2020s. So I think the sort of trolling aspect, the braggadocio, if you like, of Trump, his McKinleyism—it’s not only tariffs, it’s I’m going to have some new territory, just like McKinley did. This is a smokescreen behind which there is a much more Nixonian sense that the United States has to draw in its horns, it has to renegotiate its relationships with its allies.

And to just go to something the Bill said, shocking your allies is what Nixon did very deliberately in ’71. And I think Trump very deliberately sent Vance to Munich in February to shock the Europeans into realizing they were going to have to take more responsibility for their own defense. And it actually has quite successfully worked so far. So I’ll stick with my Nixon analogy. I think it works pretty well. And I think it may also help us foresee what will befall President Trump. I mean, there’s a reason other presidents since 1974 have not modeled themselves on Richard Nixon. And I don’t need to spell out what that reason is.

TEPPERMAN: Interesting.

OK, let’s go to the next question. And let me ask—or remind people, please, to keep their comments short, and to make sure that they actually are a question.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Sewell Chan.

Q: Hello. Thank you. I’m Sewell Chan, a journalist.

My question is whether, counterintuitively, the first hundred days have not been as powerful as they might appear at first glance, because so few acts of major legislation have actually been proposed. Aren’t Trump’s actions potentially reversible, however damaging they may be? Thank you.

TEPPERMAN: Thanks, Sewell.

So, Bill, you spoke to this in your comments earlier. You want to take this one?

BRANDS: Yeah, so to elaborate a little bit, yeah, I think that Trump has accomplished very little—exclusive of foreign affairs, by changing the minds of other countries toward the United States—that he’s accomplished very little domestically that can’t be undone. And that—and, first of all, I mean, it can be blocked by the courts, so we’ll never get done in the first place. But also, even if—even if he diminishes the size of government agencies, the next Congress, the next president, can build them back up again. Assuming that people decide that there’s a need for the stuff that has to get done. So, yeah, so far it has been, I think, as Niall said, a lot of bluster, but there’s not—there’s nothing—there’s very little that is imprinted in American history, in the American system, that will still—that will quite clearly still be there ten years from now. Or, for that matter, even ten months from now.

TEPPERMAN: Interesting.

Next question, please.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Jonathan Guyer.

Q: Hi. Jonathan Guyer with the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group. Thanks, Jonathan, for hosting this and for this esteemed panel.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about—and Professor Brands mentioned this—sort of Elon Musk’s foreign policy, and how we should think about him not as a tech titan and presidential advisor, but as a foreign policy player within this first hundred days. And if there’s historical analogies we might be thinking about for the role of Mr. Musk.

TEPPERMAN: Thank you, Jonathan.

Susan, I know that it was Bill who raised this but since, again, you’re doing the reporting every day in Washington, and you’re seeing the shifts, do you want to take this?

GLASSER: Well, you know, Elon Musk, of course, I think is something different about Trump’s first hundred days than we have seen before. We certainly had very empowered, ultrawealthy men exercising control over the country, corporations. You know, we live in the post-Citizens United world where, you know, corporate speech is not only unfettered, but, you know, arguably, has become a defining feature of how—of our politics. And, you know, the scale and scope of it, which, goes to one of my, you know, addenda.

I broadly agree, actually, with Naill that this is a kind of Richard Nixon’s revenge and, you know, that template imprinted itself, it seems, on Donald Trump’s brain. However, I think there are such crucial differences, including, you know, kind of insulting Nixon on some level, when you compare, you know, what Trump brings to the presidency, his ideas. There’s certainly no Kissinger in here. Even the notion of a “reverse Kissinger,” the Sino-Soviet split had already occurred. We’re talking about a moment where, in fact, the war in Ukraine over the last few years has further solidified a Russian alliance with China, which is closer or stronger than we’ve ever seen, you know, before in recent decades. And I think that’s part of the nature of the geopolitical risk for Donald Trump in blowing up America’s established alliances and partnerships right now.

And that goes to the interesting thing about Elon Musk as a foreign policy actor, as opposed to just him wielding a metaphorical and actual chainsaw on the federal bureaucracy. And there you see Musk as an international businessperson, right? And he’s really at odds, and has been at odds, with other factions of the MAGA right from day one, in a way that I think we still are watching that conflict play out. You know, Steve Bannon, you know, the self-styled kind of keeper of the original populist MAGA right has been going after Musk and his influence on Donald Trump from the very beginning of Musk’s astonishingly fast rise. And, by the way, when you give somebody $300 million to get elected president of the United States, you know, you get a lot of access, it turns out.

And, again, you know, there are antecedents for this in our history. There is no example of somebody to such a remarkable degree purchasing a stake in a presidency, if you will, while also being one of the largest government contractors, OK? This is like, you know, Richard Nixon’s fever dream of this kind of access, and corruption, and money flowing through. So I really think that’s very important for people, even if it echoes something—no, you know, Richard Nixon might have liked to have somebody spend the 1972-equivalent of $300 million on him, but he wasn’t allowed to do that.

On foreign policy, Musk has huge business interests in China. He has been arguing with the tariff the hell trade war group from the beginning. That fight is not fully resolved, it seems to me. And, you know, Trump, remember, he has still this longing to be a member of the elite business club that he was never a member of as a, you know, sort of low-rent, you know, New York City casino owner and developer. And, you know, that part of him is at odds with wanting to please his base, or wanting to act on his long-held view about foreigners ripping America off. He’s also very ignorant, I think Trump is, about what it takes to be a modern manufacturing powerhouse in whatever industry—whether it’s the space industry, as Musk is in, or the auto industry.

So I think watching Musk and that conflict play out will be very interesting. And just a final point, on the foreign policy side, you know, you have Musk and J.D. Vance openly cheering for some of the far-right parties in Europe right now, going to mat for the AfD in Germany right before Germany’s elections, for example. And, you know, seeking, almost in a very self-conscious way, to turn Donald Trump and Trumpism into a kind of new right Internationale. And I’m interested in that aspect of Musk as well.

FERGUSON: Jonathan, can I throw in a very brief comment, because it might not be possible again? Obviously, the role that Elon Musk has played in Trump’s return to power and in the first hundred days has no analog in the 1970s. It’s a Gilded Age phenomenon, and maybe Bill can comment on this too, to have a billionaire with great political influence. You have to go back to the time of John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, not to mention William Randolph Hearst, because Musk became a press baron when he acquired Twitter, as well as already being a kind of industrial robber baron, though I don’t use that term in the derogatory sense. So he’s a much more Gilded Age figure. And this is what’s interesting about Trump. There’s this kind of sense in which you’re mixing together elements from the twentieth and the nineteenth century to arrive at this very potent cocktail of populism-plus-plutocrats. Bill.

TEPPERMAN: And let me add a gloss to that, or a question—a tweak to the question. If the Gilded Age is the right metaphor, what does that tell us about what’s likely to happen to Musk’s influence going forward?

BRANDS: So one thing I’ll say is after the Gilded Age came the progressive era, when American voters and the American parties concluded that things had gone too far in the direction of corporate unaccountability. Now, I don’t know if there’s a new progressive era that’s coming five years down the road, ten years down the road. But one of the things that happens with populist movements, whether it’s the Jacksonian populism of the 1820s and 1830s or the populism of the 1890s, is the populists are better at promising than delivering because what they mostly promise is a return of some golden age in the past. But the golden age isn’t going to come back. And so the populists get elected. They sometimes can seize the presidency, with Andrew Jackson, or they can take over a party, the Populist Party, and then the Democratic Party. But they can’t accomplish what they promise to accomplish, because times have changed.

Now, sometimes the populist ideas are domesticated, house broken, and they survive as Progressivism. So, much of what the progressives of the early twentieth century did was a watered-down version of what the populists wanted. The populists wanted nationalization of major industries. The progressives delivered regulation of big industries. So the same sort of thing. It’s a little bit hard to say whether we’re looking in the direction of a new progressivism or not. But I think it is fairly likely that the populists who elected Donald Trump, that populist sensibility, is going to be frustrated. It’s going to discover it didn’t get what it wanted. And it either will turn against Donald Trump, or simply they’ll stay home. And the next time around the Democrats and more progressive elements—of course, the Democrats call themselves progressives these days—will win. So that’s the part that remains to be seen.

TEPPERMAN: Fascinating.

Sam, next question, please.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Kevin Conway.

Q: Thank you. And thank you to the panel for all these insights.

My question is really whether or not the earlier discussion about Trump being unprecedented and the implied thoughts as to what to expect, or what will happen, or what will stick is whether or not we’re missing the fact that some of the prior precedents, whether it’s Nixon or McKinley or anybody else, had an underlying political philosophy. And in my own opinion, I think Trump is different and unprecedented in that sense, in that he doesn’t really have norms, I mean, other than self-gratification of his own ego and a love of power. He doesn’t really come from someone who believes, you know, in smaller government, or more states’ rights, or fill in the blank, and more is motivated by his ego, which I know all presidents have huge egos and probably interesting psyche, Nixon maybe at the top of the list. But I personally think Trump is different, and therefore that element of his personality has to be put into the question of what—whether he is unprecedented in what he is doing. In other words, he’s not really the author of what he’s doing as much as he sees an end that benefits him in it.

TEPPERMAN: Thanks, Kevin.

Susan, maybe you can speak to that and say a little bit about, if you agree, what that means about what we’re likely to see in the days and months ahead.

GLASSER: Look, would Richard Nixon issued an executive order to ban low-water showerheads? No. The answer is no. And I think that this is a really important observation from Kevin, and I think Bill started out actually by saying that he thought the part that really was unprecedented here was Trump himself. And I think that’s right. Trump is an outlier. Again, there are elements that we’ve seen in public figures in our even recent history. You know, he is an interesting mix of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. He’s got some of the, you know, temper of LBJ. He’s got, you know, a lack of attachment to kind of norms and restrictions of many other presidents. They all hate the press, by the way, in one way or another sooner or later, so that’s not exceptional either. We all know that one of the things about Trump is that he sort of says the quiet part out loud.

But I think this is really important observation. You know, there are people who support Donald Trump who are in his administration, who are in empowered positions within his administration, who have the ability to act on what we might consider to be more traditional ideological goals or goals of a particular movement, but the fact that they may make progress on any aspects of that does not mean that Donald Trump himself necessarily subscribes to any or even most of the elements of that ideology. I think what comes to him, you know, really at base is the culture war, even though the subjects of the culture war change and he may not actually care that much about underlying it. It’s the struggle is the thing, as—(laughs)—you know, a famous, you know, kind of left-wing version—I think that applies to Donald Trump as well. He’s a creature of the struggle.

The other insight that I got, which maybe doesn’t belong in such an august group of historians, but truly in working on our book The Divider about Trump’s first term in office, one of the most interesting observations came from a senior White House official who worked through most of the four years with Trump, who said, you know, the thing about Donald Trump is that he is so much more fully a creature of the media than we can really appreciate or understand. And I’m sure many of you remember the classic movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Well, do you remember the character of Mike TV? That is the person that this White House official for Trump compared him to and said, you know, Mike TV was a little boy who spent so much time watching television in America that he actually thought he wanted to go inside of the television and be a part of it. And you know, Donald Trump reinvented—if you look at how he spent the time that he was in the Oval Office in the first presidency, he absolutely reinvented how a president literally spends his time. And he basically spent hours and hours of every day in the small dining room off the Oval Office watching television and interacting with it in an almost real-time feedback loop. He would sit there; he would pick up his phone; he would say, here, I’m going to change the chyron on the screen; and he would tweet out something inflammatory and show it to his guests.

And so, again, maybe it’s not, you know, talking about the Gilded Age and McKinley, but it might be actually just as relevant for considering what’s going to happen to us all in the next few years.

TEPPERMAN: Thanks, Susan.

So we’re almost out of time, and in my intense desire to end on a positive note I’m going to ask you all the same question that I want you to respond to. And it may sound a little corny, but I think there’s good reason for it. Which is: As you think about the approximately 1,360 days we have left in this Trump presidency, and you think about the last hundred days and everything you know about U.S. history, what makes you the most optimistic? Bill, let’s start with you, and then go to Niall, and then to Susan.

BRANDS: So I think a fundamental problem that the Trump people, including Elon Musk, saw confronting the United States is this massive federal debt that’s getting larger and larger. So the positive outcome of this would be that somehow Republicans and Democrats take this assault on the status quo as a wakeup call: We really have to do something about this because if we don’t we’ll get another Donald Trump in four years, so we need to get America’s fiscal house in order, and so compromises will be made. Now, whether this happens under Donald Trump, I don’t know if he’s—if he has that compromising bone in his body. But it could—it could bring people together. And so the end goal of the DOGE campaign would be to whack the status quo over the head, get us attention, and cause reforms that will last. So that would be the upside of this.

TEPPERMAN: Great. Thank you.

Niall.

FERGUSON: Well, as we approach the 250^th anniversary of the birth of the republic, isn’t it great to stress-test the system? It’s hard to imagine a figure more clearly pining to be a monarch if not an emperor than Donald Trump. He’s just the kind of person that the Founding Fathers knew would be president one day, and they wrote the Constitution to make sure that that person wouldn’t be able to turn the republic into a monarchy or a tyranny. So the thing that I’m optimistic about is that the system will work, even though all of Trump’s worst instincts trend towards his being Augustus and this being the last few years of the republic. I think the republic wins because the Constitution is a beautifully designed instrument for preserving a republican order.

TEPPERMAN: And Susan.

GLASSER: You know, you always want to end with the you got to give the people the optimism.

Look, every generation—and I think the reason historians are optimists, right, is that the thing about the American experiment, and that Donald Trump has shown it to us very clearly, is that it is individuals who give life to these institutions, or death as the case may be. And it seems to me that institutions that people aren’t willing to fight for, that they don’t perceive themselves to be stakeholders in, is one of the big stories of the last nearly a decade now that Trump has been dominating our national life. And you know, if those institutions have to be reinvented to renew their relevance and their—even to claim their power in our society—Congress is a great example. The hollowing out of Congress began before Donald Trump and in many ways was one of the precursor events to this crisis in our national life, not only in the, you know, steady decline in the number of bills and legislation that were passed by Congress but even its inability to perform its basic functions.

You know, when I was a kid Congress had a religious effort to get all the funding bills done by the end of September every year. That’s the deadline. Do you know how many times Congress has met that deadline in my son’s twenty years of existence? The answer is zero—is zero. So institutions have to be renewed. Congress right now isn’t fulfilling its constitutional role. And if it’s going to survive, it’s going to have to take a form that makes it more viable in the future.

So I don’t know if that counts as optimism, but I’m trying. (Laughs.)

TEPPERMAN: I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I asked for optimism, and you all delivered. So from your lips to God’s ears, as my grandmother used to say.

We are out of time. This has been a(n) absolutely spectacular conversation. Thank you so much to Bill, Niall, to Susan. Thank you to everyone who joined today’s virtual meeting. Please note that the video and the transcript of today’s meeting will be posted on CFR’s website.

I’m Jonathan Tepperman. I hope to see you all again soon. Thanks again. Bye-bye.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.