Ever since Election Day 2024, various supporters and conservative journalists have been voicing the prediction that President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office will be “the greatest ever.” Former aide Steve Bannon has prophesied for months that Trump’s start will be “the most aggressive” rollout since FDR’s first presidential term in March 1933. The New York Post went even further on Inauguration Eve. With visions of a new Camelot, the newspaper headlined that Trump’s second term promises to inaugurate “a golden age in the U.S.” As if on cue, President Trump used the same phrase in his inaugural address on January 20.
Come April 30, Donald Trump — and countless allies — will compare his opening salvo favorably with the achievements of FDR and LBJ.
More than 200 executive orders are expected to have been signed by early February, dwarfing FDR’s own record of 77 in his first 100 days. The blitz has given rise to predictions that the first 100 days of POTUS 47 will exceed the previous case of “the most successful in American history,” a term Trump used in 2017 to describe the start of his first term as president.
“The Greatest.” Donald Trump has never been reluctant to speak in superlatives about his achievements or aspirations. These days, however, what is notable is that millions of people are doing the same — and loudly so, not in whispers. Yet such superlatives are usually voiced with no serious reflection on what they really mean, namely on the historical comparisons that could possibly justify or refute such a claim. As a cultural and political historian, I propose to undertake that task here.
As the analogy drawn by Steve Bannon to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term in office suggests, the term “Hundred Days” gained currency as a characterization of FDR’s unprecedented, dramatic start during his first 100 days in 1933, when he exploited a sweeping electoral victory (472 to 59 in the Electoral College) to issue dozens of executive orders and a slew of legislation.”
No less than 15 major pieces of legislation were passed during this pathbreaking legislative period, which was bookended by the Emergency Banking Act (March 9), which reopened solvent banks and restored public confidence in the financial system, and the Glass-Steagall Act (June 16), which created the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) to insure bank deposits as well as separating commercial from investment banking. In between came relief programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and infrastructure initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). FDR’s Hundred Days thus set in motion the New Deal and established a 100-day standard against which all future U.S. presidents would be measured.
The term “hundred days” in relation to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency was first used by President Roosevelt himself during a radio address on July 24, 1933. It was just a passing phrase in his so-called fireside chat, however, and neither Roosevelt nor his advisors made anything of it, let alone used it to characterize the New Deal’s launch or as a target date for achieving any legislative goals.
Instead, FDR casually invoked the phrase in the course of expressing satisfaction with the productive early months of his presidency and his efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression. Sharing credit with the Democrat-led Congress that convened from March 9 to June 17, FDR stated: “We all wanted the opportunity of a little quiet thought to examine and assimilate in a mental picture the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
So Roosevelt technically coined the phrase, but it was the Washington press corps that popularized it as a summation of FDR’s dramatic opening act. And they, along with presidential historians, subsequently promulgated it as a template and touchstone to apply to the first 15 weeks of future presidential terms. Into our own century, bestselling books — such as Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (2006) and Anthony Badger’s FDR: The First Hundred Days (2008) — have treated FDR’s presidential launch as both a symbol of decisive leadership and as the benchmark of “success” for new presidents.
In my own lifetime, I would thus far cite the first 100 days of Lyndon Johnson, who also gained widespread kudos for a presidential commencement frequently compared to FDR’s Hundred Days, as the “greatest” blastoff since FDR. (Interestingly enough, he topped FDR’s electoral college landslide with a 486 to 52 victory in the 1964 election.)
Historians have characterized his presidential start as an FDR-like kickoff ever since. For instance, in early 1964, Time exalted LBJ’s “hundred days” of bold action, hailing Johnson as “The Man Who Changed America.” Written by presidential historian Robert Dallek, the article drew direct comparisons between LBJ’s quick legislative accomplishments, which launched his Great Society initiative, and the early successes of FDR’s New Deal in 1933. (At the end of the year, Time’s editors further elaborated on those claims in naming Johnson their 1964 “Man of the Year.”)
Historians such as Robert Caro in The Passage of Power (2012) have sustained this judgment, using the phrase “hundred days” to sum up LBJ’s legislative push toward fulfilling his Great Society agenda, including detailed comparison with FDR in order to s showcase the extraordinary pace of legislative action that paralleled the urgency and scope of FDR’s own first term. (By contrast, JFK’s Hundred Days’ liftoff was an unmitigated disaster. On Day 83, the Soviets fired the first man into space; four days later, JFK ordered the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion.)
Beyond America
Of course, while it is true to say the phrase “hundred days” is traceable to FDR and his administration, that is only so in a technical sense and represents a revealing instance of American provincialism and even solipsism. I find that my students do not know that the phrase Les Cents-Jours, let alone that French historians since the 19th century have used it as shorthand for Napoleon Bonaparte’s dramatic but short-lived return to power in 1815 (March 20 to June 22).
Even less well-known is the fact that Les Cents-Jours did not (initially) allude to the brief second imperial rule of Napoleon at all. Rather, it had to do with the interval marking the absence of King Louis XVIII from Paris. The phrase gained currency when Chabrol de Volvic, the Prefect of the Seine, welcomed the king back to the throne on July 8: “Sire, one hundred days have passed since the fateful moment when Your Majesty, forced to tear yourself away from the dearest affections, left your capital amidst tears and public lamentations.” (Technically, it was 110 days.)
Within a decade, however, admirers of Napoleon such as Benjamin Constant (Memoirs of the Hundred Days, 1819) and Chateaubriand, poet-diplomat and France’s leading man of letters, “appropriated,” as it were, Chabrol’s phrase from the royalists and reapplied it to Napoleon’s heroic, failed return.
For the last two centuries, the phrase has been associated with Napoleon in France and is widely known to the French public — and, in translation, even to Europeans more generally as a tribute to Napoleon. For example, the phrase Cento giorni is ingrained in the Italian national consciousness because Napoleon was exiled to the Italian island of Elba, which is part of the Tuscan Archipelago just off the western coast of Italy. Napoleon spent ten months during his first exile in 1814 before escaping to France to start the Cents Jours. Italian schoolchildren are taught about this period in a national context and the Elba tourist bureau promotes the island’s connection to Napoleon.
Napoleon’s campaign, of course, ended in defeat at Waterloo and definitive exile to St. Helena, whereas Roosevelt’s first hundred days have been widely seen as a spectacular triumph, laying the foundation for the New Deal and ushering in the modern presidency and the idea of Big Government by vastly expanding the power of the American executive.
Whereas FDR’s 100 days witnessed success on a grand scale, therefore, Napoleon’s Hundred Days has a more ambiguous status, depending which phase of the period one highlights: the first half or the dénouement and epilogue. Do you concentrate on his stunning return to power from exile on Elba and retaking of power? Or do you focus on Waterloo and his permanent banishment to St. Helena? His admirers address the first half: they immortalize the valiant retour as a romantic episode fixing Napoleon forever in the imagination as a daring and charismatic figure. His critics spotlight le fiasco total du dénouement, whereby Les Cent-Jours stands as a symbol of dramatic illusions and timorous grandiosity.
As a consequence, given the numerous critics of Napoleon, “Hundred Days” inevitably rings in far more discordant tones for many European ears. By contrast, mindful of FDR, most Americans, including my students, are unaware that FDR’s supporters, taken with his own charisma and “Napoleonic” ambitions as president, did precisely as had Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand, and other partisans of Napoleon: they “regifted” the term for FDR and inflected it in a positive direction. Today, most American journalists use it in complete ignorance of the connection with Napoleon.
For knowledgeable Europeans, FDR is not at all a frame of reference for the concept of “Hundred Days.” Instead the phrase signifies for them not only Napoleon, but also two 20th century European contemporaries of FDR who identified strongly with the French emperor and whose Napoleonic ambitions ended in their own Waterloos: Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.
With Italian playwright Giovacchino Forzano, Mussolini co-authored the play Hundred Days (I Cento Giorni) in 1931. Mussolini’s lifelong interest in Napoleon extended far beyond the play. He arranged for Cinecittà, the Italian state film studio established by Mussolini to produce films supporting Fascist ideals, to sponsor the Italian adaptation (of the same title) in 1933. Under his orders, Cinecittà promoted the biopic to embellish Il Duce’s mushrooming cult of personality by associating him with Napoleon as a world-historical personality.
Mussolini venerated Napoleon and sought to emulate aspects of his rule. While no lines in the play or movie explicitly cast Mussolini as a new Napoleon, Italian reviewers did not fail to make the connection. They echoed Il Duce himself. Just as Napoleon had transitioned from military leader to emperor of France, wrote Mussolini in his pamphlet Napoleone (1936), he himself had evolved from the moving force of the Fascist movement to the head of the Italian state. Mussolini saw both Napoleon and himself as men of destiny embodying la grandeur et la gloire, central values of the Corsican. They were men ordained to impose their wills not just on their own nations but on the entire continent of Europe and even beyond.
Meanwhile, the 1935 German movie Hundert Tage (Hundred Days) — also based on his play — spread Mussolini’s name and vision to the German-speaking world. It was also recognized by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine as useful material to lionize Hitler as Der Fuhrer. As in the Italian adaptation, the film focuses on Napoleon’s life without overtly drawing any parallels between him and contemporary personalities or events. Nonetheless, even without explicit references within the film, Nazi reviewers drew the implied analogies not just to Mussolini but also to Hitler, the “Teutonic Napoleon.”
Back to Trump
If anyone still doubted before January 20 that Donald Trump is a phenomenon sui generis, his Hundred Days’ launch should settle the matter. It has already exceeded in scope of ambition and action that of any previous president.
I will venture a prediction. Come April 30, Donald Trump — and countless allies — will compare his opening salvo favorably with the achievements of FDR and LBJ. Lacking their congressional majorities, his Hundred Days will even be lauded as exceeding theirs and lionized as “the Greatest” if that date witnesses an impressive raft of legislation already passed.
Meanwhile, his adversaries will condemn his Hundred Days as a blitzkrieg of tyrannical power grabs evoking the despotic regimes of a Mussolini or even Hitler. A similar verdict may prevail, with scattered dissents, throughout Europe.
Far more so than even the case of Napoleon Bonaparte, therefore, Donald J. Trump is likely to remain a divisive figure. Like Napoleon, however, he has already made an astonishing comeback to power from a political Elba. Regardless of what Trump’s second term brings — love him or hate him — he already stands as an historic figure.
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