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We’re at Donald Trump’s first 107 days of his second term and here’s a human (not AI) read-through of This Week, Those Books post:
Some additional resources:
NOT LIKE FDR: In 2001, the late Richard Neustadt wrote a scholarly appraisal of the pointlessness of comparing the first 100 days of any contemporary American president with that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There is just no comparison, he said. A brand new president is up against a Congress already in session and is also too “ignorant” to know what might be possible to get done.
Neustadt, a Harvard professor who had served as adviser to several presidents, had good reason to hold that view. As a political scientist he specialised in the American presidency. He could see the ill-logic of using the first 100 days as both “measurement and opportunity” for a US president because FDR’s first 100 days were unusually consequential.
He was not, of course, talking about Trump 2.0. In Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House, he has decisively shown his ability to navigate around the institutions and norms of American public life.
Neustadt’s five-page commentary1 is worth reading, if only to see how much has changed of, by and for the US presidency in the quarter-century since the paper was published.
THESE PAST 100 DAYS: In 2025, cartoonists did what could to raise a smile.
THE REAL FIRST 100 DAYS: Trump’s very first 100 days – in his first term as president. Feels lighter than this second 100 days?
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Neustadt, Richard E. “The Contemporary Presidency": The Presidential "Hundred Days". Presidential Studies Quarterly, March 2001.
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