The Evil FDR

I’m not going to get all ableist and call Donald Trump insane or nuts or decompensating or deteriorating into a syphilitic orange balloon of hate. I’m not even going to call him senile. Because if he is those things, he’s been all of them since he became the world’s most famous birther, at least. And that “nuttiness” got him the presidency.

What I’m going to do instead is the thing most of his opponents and haters (who are all right about him in general) can’t bring themselves to do: explain, in the most cynical possible terms, why what he does is effective. And it’s effective in a way that has put America on the brink of dictatorship for the first time in our history.

To understand why what Trump is doing has worked, you have to understand how President Crybully has inverted the politics of the most successful politician in American history.

The imperfect but good FDR

Franklin D. Roosevelt was born to as much privilege as Donald J. Trump. Both families got rich from real estate, though the Trumps focused more on tax fraud and discriminating against Black renters. And FDR was also imperfect—his inaction on civil rights and the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II stain a legacy that otherwise compares favorably with Washington and Lincoln.

But when the Depression hit, FDR looked at the catastrophe and made a choice: use it to spread the privileges of his class downward, as far and as fast as the political system would allow. Social Security. The FDIC. The Wagner Act. The rural electrification that lit up the farms. The GI Bill. These are pillars that helped build the middle class.

The enemies he made were the ones whose power he was redistributing—the utility barons, the Wall Street consolidators, the men who thought of him as a “traitor to his class” and didn’t see one of the greatest compliments of all time.

He wore that treachery toward the rich as a badge into the White House. You probably know his line, “Judge me by the enemies I have made.” It’s from a 1932 campaign address in which he won one of the greatest landslides in US history. 

It’s worth looking at the full context and how radical he was in that moment and in his presidency.

“While President Hoover now urges Federal control, no administration bill has been introduced in Congress in the past four years.

My distinguished opponent is against giving the Federal Government in any case the right to operate its own power business. I favor giving the people this right where and when it is essential to protect them against inefficient service or exorbitant charges.

To the people of this country, I have but one answer on this subject. Judge me by the enemies I have made. Judge me by the selfish purposes of these utility leaders who have talked of radicalism while they were selling watered stock to the people and using our schools to deceive the coming generation.

My friends, my policy is as radical as American liberty. My policy is as radical as the Constitution of the United States.

I promise you this: Never shall the Federal Government part with its sovereignty or with its control over its power resources, while I am President of the United States.”

Trump has the same instinct for radicalism, for doing what hasn’t been done before, for inviting contempt. But entirely on behalf of the richest humans who’ve ever lived and are now plunging the globe deeper into a series of polycrises that threaten humanity, while pretending to be mad that not enough (white) babies are being born, yet doing everything they can to make those babies’ lives nasty, brutish, and short.

Trump was born to privilege, and he has used power to drive wealth further upward in unconscionable ways that dwarf even George W. Bush’s upward transfer of wealth—$930 billion cut from Medicaid, $285 billion from food stamps, $3.8 trillion in tax cuts two-thirds of which benefit households earning over $217,000.

He did this all backed by the most powerful Christians in America, performing contempt for anyone who tries to check the power of Trump and the rich white Christian straight men whose hierarchy he exists to restore. The enemies aren’t incidental. They’re the product.

The one “joy” he reliably delivers to his base: the domination of people they wish they could spit on.

Mueller’s messy legacy

Robert Mueller died Friday night. Princeton graduate. Decorated Vietnam veteran. Bronze Star. Purple Heart. FBI director on 9/11. A man who moved to Boston so his daughter, who was born with spina bifida, could receive treatment at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Trump’s response: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

That is his governing philosophy in 17 words.

Mueller was not a threat to him by Friday night. The investigation ended years ago. The report, constrained by a DOJ policy that bars indicting a sitting president, couldn’t charge him. Mueller told Congress: “The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed.”

What Mueller remained was a name that could produce a reaction. And producing a reaction is the entire point.

George Lakoff has been explaining this for decades: the strict-father moral framework doesn’t operate on consistency. It operates on dominance. The father’s authority is self-justifying. Rules exist to enforce the hierarchy, not to constrain the one at the top. Kirk was in-group. Mueller was the out-group. The 600 workers fired, suspended, or punished for expressing relief at Kirk’s death, and the president celebrating a decorated veteran’s death in the same week aren’t a contradiction. They’re the system working.

Mueller is also a complicated figure. His FBI systematically targeted Muslim Americans—teaching agents that ordinary Muslim Americans were likely to be terrorist sympathizers, that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader,” that Islamic charities were fronts. He believed in rule of law and limits on executive power and used that institutional framework to build a surveillance apparatus that damaged thousands of lives. He helped domesticate the War on Terror’s abuses and paved some of the road Trump is now driving a tank down.

What Trump’s contempt deserves is not a defense of that record. It deserves an honest account of what the contempt is for: the principle of accountability and limits on power that Mueller imperfectly represented. His investigation produced 34 indictments, eight guilty pleas, and one conviction at trial—and, as Marcy Wheeler documents, as many as four quid pro quos between the Trump team and Russia that Congress was handed and chose to ignore. 

Trump isn’t just dancing on Mueller’s grave. He’s counting on us to have forgotten what was buried with him.

Hypocrisy is his fight song

Every pundit who calls the Kirk/Mueller comparison hypocrisy is not wrong. They’re just playing the wrong game. Hypocrisy requires a principle to violate. What Trump has is a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is working perfectly.

Having a brain that operates largely in the Nurturant Parent model that Lakoff opposes with the Strict Father view can get in the way of fighting fascism. Trump doesn’t lie to be believed. He lies to be repeated. He doesn’t make enemies because they’ve wronged him. He makes them because your outrage is his signal to his base that he’s effective. And it works sickeningly well, especially when he’s running against a woman or some other being who seeks to undermine the natural order of Big White Christian daddy on top.

Pointing at the inconsistency as if it will shame him into retreat makes the classic mistake Hillary Clinton’s campaign made in 2016 when it made one of its most aired ads out of a highlight reel of Trump’s worst, evil rhetoric on the campaign trail. They expected revulsion at those words spoken coldly in public, with a rally crowd signifying approval, and all they did was normalize that bile and actually help spread that hatred to viewers who were only looking for permission to assert their dominance.

Now, you can say, correctly, it’s not working as well as it used to. True. Because the strict father cannot be a loser, and Trump can’t stop losing, often while he’s declaring victory. He’s given us an Iran war that 53% of the country opposes—before the worst of it has even begun. That’s left him with 37% approval, despite at least thirteen American soldiers dead, and the EU Council President observing that Russia is the only winner from the war in the Middle East.

Trump launched a war his own regime said was unnecessary, declared victory, and threatened more war over and over, often at the same time, while demanding allies clean up the wreckage in between, telling them how unnecessary they are. Today, Monday, he posted that he’s negotiating an end to the war. Iran’s Foreign Ministry responded within hours: no talks are happening. Tehran is calling this a retreat, which hopefully it is, but how do negotiations proceed with a man who bombed the country at his whim — killing the father of the current Supreme Leader — the last two times it tried to negotiate with him.

Mueller’s death gives him the perfect moment to set brains on fire and remind his fans why they love him. The outrage is proof of enduring power. Every senator who releases a statement, every cable chyron reading “unprecedented,” every Democrat who tweets disgust: that’s a Trump campaign ad.

Mocking Mueller and sending ICE to staff airport security checkpoints are the same move. One is contempt for a dead man who tried to hold him accountable. The other is his secret police deployed where Americans will see them most, guaranteeing maximum disruption and visibility. Helps no one, except his ego. But the whole game is his ego is a bounce house for his supporters to revel in.

We cannot afford to help him 

FDR’s enemies hated him because he was redistributing their power. Trump’s enemy-making is a substitute for governing; the crumbs he offers to the rubes whose hospitals he’s closing so Elon Musk can buy another sushi restaurant where his kids can mock the servers.

We should be angry at Trump and the way he degrades all of our decency and ability to live free, prosperous lives. How can we ask our children to learn any positive social skill when he thrives by abjuring every standard we’d hold them to? It’s hellish. Sick. Wrong. Everything bad you can summon about Trump would probably be right.

But we don’t need to help him.

The way to be productively angry is to refuse the performance he’s scripted. Call out the failures, not the flourishes.

Mueller’s death got the reaction Trump wanted. Here is what should get yours: 14 million Americans are projected to lose health coverage under the One Big Beautiful Bill he signed on the Fourth of July. Up to 700 rural hospitals are at risk of closure. Gas prices have skyrocketed, and food prices are likely to follow because of an Iran war that his own intelligence said was unnecessary. At least thirteen soldiers are in the ground. Russia, which provided Iran with intelligence to target American ships and bases while American soldiers were dying, received eased oil sanctions in return.

FDR spread privilege downward and made powerful enemies doing it. Trump is reversing every inch of that work and manufacturing enemies to distract from the reversal. While he’s failing at everything else, he’s still using our own brains against us. And what do we get for it? Five-hour lines to get through a TSA checkpoint because Trump refuses to check ICE, his secret police, in any way.

Why? Because that secret police exists for one reason: to deliver, on behalf of people whose hospitals he’s closing and whose children he’s poisoning, the one thing he’s always been able to sell. The pleasure of watching someone they hate get hurt.

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