December 3, 2025

HOW IT STARTED: Trump Is the New FDR.

Progressives have long pined for another FDR. Here in the first couple of months of 2025, they’ve gotten one.

President Trump’s mad opening dash is like nothing we’ve seen since Franklin Roosevelt’s historic first 100 days.

It’s a cliché to say that we live in an unprecedented era, but it’s not the first time we’ve had a frenetic, action-oriented president who cares more about the results than the rules and, oh yeah, is interested in serving more than two terms in office.

Like Trump, FDR was an improviser who didn’t sweat the details and a big personality who prided himself on his showmanship and never displayed anything other than supreme confidence in public.

Like FDR, Trump doesn’t quail at remaking the economy on the fly and can’t stand judges who get in his way.

Obviously, it’s a mistake to exaggerate similarities between the patrician Democrat who overcame polio and drastically increased the size and power of the American state, and the billionaire Republican who, tariffs aside, has been a deregulator and tax-cutter.

—Rich Lowry, NRO, April 9th.

How it’s going: Maddow Suggests Trump’s America Is Akin To Japanese Internment.

MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow traveled over to CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday for a three-segment interview that concluded with her hyping her new podcast about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, which she and Colbert suggested is analogous to the present day.

Colbert set Maddow up by asking, “You have a new podcast. All right. Burn Order. It’s about the Japanese internment in the U.S. in the 1940s. You’ve said that history is here to help in times of crisis. What is the story of Burn Order, and how does that history help us now?”

Maddow began her reply with a history lesson, “So, when we went to war with Japan in World War II, there were zero Japanese Americans who worked as spies for Japan. There were zero Japanese Americans who participated in any sabotage or helped Japan in the war against us in any way. There were some people in this country who were spying for Japan, but they were generally white, homegrown American fascists who liked Japan for the same reason they like Germany and Italy. Like there really—Japanese Americans were not implicated in any bad stuff at all, and military intelligence knew it, and the DOJ knew it, and the FBI knew it.”

In other interviews, Maddow has more explicitly compared internment with the Trump Administration’s deportations efforts. However, unlike Japanese Americans during the war, illegal immigrants have, by definition, done something wrong by being in the country illegally.

—Alex Christy, NewsBusters, today.

Tacitly admitting there’s a new FDR at the helm, Maddow is arguing that America is once again at war, but not everybody in her party has gotten the message:

Maddow herself envisions an enemy much more underpowered than they actually are: Rachel Maddow Has a Theory for Why Trump’s Targeting Totally Innocent Fisherman in Rowboats.

Related: Fascist Government Shows Its Authoritarianism By Responding to Voters’ Wishes.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll