Trump, FDR, and Adolf Hitler—the first hundred days

We recently passed the end of the first one hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency.  Ever since 1933, the term “First One Hundred Days” of a new administration has come into common use because of the achievements of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt’s record has become the gold standard by which every successor has been measured.

Much has been said and written about what has transpired since January 20, 2025, including some who contrasted what happened in 1933 to that which just took place. It is worth evaluating, however, not only the differences between the two presidents, but also to note, for comparison’s sake, some of the decisions of Roosevelt’s contemporary, Adolf Hitler, who became Chancellor of Germany just five weeks before FDR. In this way, we can draw a more well-rounded assessment of Trump’s First Hundred Days.

Between March 4 and June 12, 1933, Roosevelt proposed and Congress passed at least fifteen major pieces of legislation. Here is a brief refresher of the four laws we all learned in high school:

• The Emergency Banking Act (March 9)—FDR had ordered all banks closed because many of them were about to run out of money trying to meet the demand of depositors who were panicking and trying to get their money out. The Act provided the means for the Federal Reserve Board to issue money to all federal banks to cover all withdrawals.

• The Civilian Conservation Corps (March 31)—Roosevelt had proposed the establishment of a program, commonly referred to as the CCC, to employ 250,000 young people to help develop and maintain state and national parks, forests, and other sites, as well as work to improve flood control, plant trees, and various other projects,  (Civilian Conservation Corps). In its nine-year history, nearly three million young people worked in the CCC.

• The Agricultural Adjustment Act (May 12)—At a time of intense downward pressure on farm prices, the law established several programs to raise prices. Among them, the best known was the program to reduce farm production. (It is interesting to note that one way to do this was to dump milk at a time when millions of young people were malnourished, and faced the threat of starvation never far off. Only under capitalism—go figure.)

• The Tennessee Valley Authority (May 18)—The law established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in that state.  Designed to provide flood control, the dams also generated hydroelectric power, provided flood control, and led to the building of new parks and recreation centers. Between 1933 and 1944, sixteen dams were built.

The First Hundred Days in 1933 was but a prelude to much other landmark legislation, including Social Security, a minimum wage, the forty-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and much more.

In contrast, the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second administration saw “no new legislation of great consequence,” in the words of scholars John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Instead, as we all know, we have seen an unrelenting barrage of executive orders and other policies that will really Make America Worse Again.

Many of our Constitutional rights are being eroded, if not outright attacked. The assault on working people, the poor, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and transgender people is designed to divide and demoralize the working class, while at the same time giving the billionaires and the one percent greater power and control.

Not only is the Trump administration consolidating the position of the ultra-wealthy in our society, but it is being done in some ways similar to that of the fascists in the 1930s.

To show how this is being done, one needs to look at the actions and policies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany in 1933, which incidentally overlaps in time with the beginning of the New Deal. Much of what follows comes from the work of Werner Lange, a retired pastor, college professor, and anti-fascist activist born in Germany just after the Second World War. He writes that the periods in which Hitler and Trump came to power “exhibited many sinister similarities, but also definite differences during their first 100 days of respective repressive rule.”  Hitler was able to enact a series of policies and decrees that dismantled the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic in a relatively short time.

On February 27, a fire broke out and badly damaged the parliament building (the Reichstag) in Berlin. In response, Hitler issued a series of decrees, foremost among them the “Reichstag Fire Decree for the Protection of the People and State.” It was designed to catch “criminals,” but outlawed many civil liberties and was used to imprison those who were seen as enemies of Nazism. It banned publications said to be enemies of the Nazi state, and in addition, “suspended habeas corpus, privacy of the mail and telephone, freedom of expression and the press, the right to public assembly, and protections against search and seizure in relations to homes and property.” Additional laws, such as the “Malicious Practices Act,” further strengthened the repression.

Six days after a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, Hitler issued the “Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service,” which removed Jews and anyone else seen as disloyal to the regime from the civil service and teaching positions. On May 2, the day after the International Workers Holiday, Hitler dissolved all free labor unions. Subsequently, the Nazis set up the German Labor Front, which required all workers to join. Strikes, collective bargaining, and any other worker-initiated actions were banned.

In short order laws were passed against what today we call the LGBTQ+ community, restricted who could be admitted to schools of higher education, rewrote textbooks to reflect the Nazi racist view of history and culture, and began the rearmament of Germany. In 1935 the Nazis enacted the “Nuremberg Laws” which systematically denied Jewish people an equal place in society. It is interesting to note that these laws were inspired by the slave codes enacted in the American South before the Civil War.

Nobody is saying that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler reincarnate. What we are saying is that there are some eerie similarities between some of the actions of the Trump administration in 2025 and the Nazi government in 1933. The major difference between the two countries was that in Germany the Nazi political “blitzkrieg” destroyed any organized opposition. In the United States, however, as Lange, among many others, points out, we still have resistance. The American people are increasingly standing up, uniting, and pushing back against all the depredations of the Trump regime. It is only by fighting back that the people have a chance of removing Donald Trump from the White House and defeating fascism once and for all.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article represents the views of the author.