Trump’s Dark New Deal

Every so many decades, American politics goes through a soft revolution.

Some of these moments are more dramatic in scope than others, but they represent a pivot point when one consensus dies and another emerges. It’s hard to deny that we are going through one of these transitions now.

What President Donald Trump is doing in his return to the White House goes far beyond his actions in 2017. In fact, I’d say that to make a comparison to Trump 2.0 you would have to go back to the New Deal, the early days of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency.

Roosevelt brought a progressive movement decades in the making to the White House at a time of deep economic and political uncertainty. He used Jeffersonian and Jacksonian language to promote his New Deal programs, which is ironic given that the progressive theory of governance was almost entirely antithetical to the movements Jefferson and Jackson represented.

The New Deal was chaotic, confusing, and went at a blistering pace. It was under Roosevelt that Americans started to regard the first 100 days of a presidency as so critically important. His administration was a machine. Though the New Dealers made many missteps and jostled mightily with the courts, there’s no doubt they ushered in a new era of American politics.

Similarly, Trump is launching a counterrevolution. Just like Roosevelt, he’s doing it with a strong dose of populist Jacksonian rhetoric about a corrupted ruling elite, to upend what very well may be the last gasp of the New Deal Era.

This is Trump’s Dark New Deal.

Trump is signing a flurry of executive orders that are reversing DEI and woke ideology that became the central focus of executive agencies under his predecessor. He’s unleashing entrepreneur Elon Musk and his young, brilliant DOGE boys to audit and uncover the deep corruption, waste, and tyranny baked into the deep state. More is to come, too.

Russell Vought’s quiet but significant appointment to the Office of Management and Budget, the HR department of the federal government, could result in even more wholesale changes to the federal bureaucracy than what DOGE promises.

Vought witnessed #Resistance 1.0 in his first stint in the Trump White House and now has a detailed plan to prevent bureaucratic sabotage, which will allow Trump to be the president rather than the nominal head of an executive branch that runs itself with its own prerogatives.

It’s funny looking back on it, but when former President Joe Biden ran in the 2020 election, he billed himself as a new FDR who would carry on the legacy of the New Deal.

Biden’s New Deal, under the slogan “build back better,” was pumped by White House historian speechwriters like Jon Meacham and Michael Beschloss. In addition, much of the legacy press drew this New Deal connection too. They pointed to Biden’s friendliness with labor unions and his promotion of “infrastructure week.”

It was all nonsense. The reality was starkly different.

Unlike FDR, Biden was taking power at the last stage of an era instead of the beginning of a new one. He mimicked the form of the New Deal but was lacking the spirit that drove it. He was on the side of the ruling elite. And Biden certainly didn’t have the ingenious advisers who brought the old New Deal into being.

The Democrat Party promoted people based on skin color and sexual orientation rather than merit. It relied on a federal infrastructure certainly mighty in its official power but weak and getting weaker in its credibility. The Left took for granted that it owned every big institution, public and private. The Left’s elites took for granted their unlimited ability to impose cherished narratives onto an increasingly suspicious American public.

In more ways than one, Biden was a dinosaur, a relic of another era. He was the caretaker of a governing philosophy that had run its course.

In many ways the Left had the “conservative” position as the defender of malignant, zombified institutions even as they attempted to usher in radical social change.

In 2021, Biden and company assumed with the defeat of Trump and his populist insurgency that they could continue on the path set in motion a century earlier. They assumed opposition would be easily crushed and that Democrats would continue to be America’s ruling party now, tomorrow, and forever.

What they misjudged is how much public faith in the institutions they controlled had corroded and would further crumble.

The energy that brought forth the alphabet soup of government agencies under FDR and later presidents had long run out. The Leviathan was bloated, decaying, and festering, but they closed their noses and continued as if they had a mandate.

Biden was rarely seen in public, didn’t do media appearances that weren’t carefully cultivated, and hardly seemed to be a president at all outside basic formal functions. His speeches were canned and sometimes gave off the impression of “old man yells at cloud.”

Everything seemed to be on catatonic autopilot except for the administration’s vigor in persecuting political enemies.

America was feeling a lot like a late-stage Soviet Union.

On the other hand, you have Trump, who has surrounded himself with rising young men of talent.

The Trump campaign and now administration has thrived in the new media environment of podcasts and outsiders, much like how FDR mastered radio and his Republican opponents were stuck in the age of in personal oratory. Trump even held a 21st century version of FDR’s fireside chats when he did a live X space alongside Musk during the campaign.

Trump and his team have brought vigor and competence to a White House that seemed to have been missing for a long, long time. Even when they make mistakes, they own up to them and carry on.

It’s been relentless. Again this is much like how things were when FDR ascended to the White House in 1933.

Perhaps Trump will be derailed, perhaps the energy will burn off, perhaps Democrats will get their act together and stop acting like children throwing a tantrum.

But until then, it’s hard to argue that Trump’s comeback and first days back in office haven’t been historic.

What happens now may well define American politics for decades to come.

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