It seems like a lifetime ago that we were anticipating President Donald Trump's inauguration.
Back then, his surrogates were crisscrossing the planet to assure leaders in business and politics that the unpredictable man who was about to ascend to the presidency could create stability across the world.
In Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, financier and (then) would-be White House appointee Anthony Scaramucci described the kind of populist change Trump would bring.
It would be, Scaramucci said, like life under President Theodore Roosevelt, the great turn-of-the-century crusader for the working class:
"This [economic inequality] happened in the United States in about 1890 to 1915. There's a great book on that. It's called 'The Bully Pulpit,' by Doris Kearns Goodwin. That was the robber-baron era in the United States, with a lot of economic rent going to a small group of people. At the same time, there was tenement housing in urban areas. President Teddy Roosevelt understood this. The great irony of the word 'progressivism' is that it actually came from Republican ideology. Teddy Roosevelt coined that term in the first decade of the 20th century. So we're there again. And in order to right-size this, we have to come up with new policies."
Goodwin's book is great, but Scaramucci may have misread it. And to be fair, he's not the only Republican who has made this flawed comparison. Former House Speaker John Boehner did it, and billionaire Carl Icahn, an adviser to Trump, has made it too.
And though it is wrong, it is worth considering just how Trump and Roosevelt differ — and the key way in which they seem exactly the same.
"The Bully Pulpit" tells the story of a man who was a populist crusader not just in word but also in deed. Roosevelt was a war hero with a long career in politics, having served as the New York City police commissioner before heading to Albany to take on corruption there. He believed the world was getting smaller, and he challenged Americans to keep up with the speed of an increasingly integrated global economy.
His progressivism was rooted in making sure that the state provided its people with the safety net throughout that process. To protect Americans from the ravages of a new age of capitalism and further his populism, he turned to regulation. Trump, of course, is doing the opposite.
So how were they the same?
But that is only one part of the story. "The Bully Pulpit" also happens to tell the story of a man whose ego brought his party — the Republican Party — to its knees.
Like Trump, Roosevelt often loudly and publicly lampooned his enemies. And like Trump, Roosevelt was obsessed with his own cult of personality. As a result, he drove the Republican Party to crushing defeat in 1912 when he bucked his own hand-picked successor and ran for president on a third-party ticket.
Of course, that was after decades of incredible, tireless, brilliant political service. In 1901, Roosevelt became president by accident. He was vice president in William McKinley's administration when McKinley was assassinated. It was six months into McKinley's term, and Roosevelt was only 42 years old.
Roosevelt, however, had the experience of someone much older. By his early 20s he had a seat in the New York State Senate. He decided to work his way up the political ladder in New York City when it was not considered a game for gentlemen of his social class.
Roosevelt was a Harvard man who wrote his first book on naval history before he had his first child, but when it came to politics he was not afraid to brawl in bars, visit tenement slums, and — as New York City's police commissioner — go undercover to make sure his subordinates were doing their jobs.
This is how he learned about the plight of the working class, through years of work on the frontlines fighting corruption. This stands in sharp contrast with Trump's quick foray into politics and the concerns of Middle America.
His experience filled Roosevelt with a genuine desire to rein in big business and create what he eventually called "a square deal" for everyday Americans, and he showed that through one of his first acts as president. Immediately he created the Commerce Department to "inspect and examine" corporate finances.
Then he filed an antitrust suit against the merger of Northern Securities Company, the massive railroad holding company that joined the holdings of the day's titans — James Hill, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Rockefellers, E.H. Harriman, and the Goulds.
The titans were gobsmacked, and the stock market was roiled. They thought Roosevelt was one of them, and they thought the administration should've let them know what was going on in advance.
"It really seems hard ... that we should be compelled to fight for our lives against the political adventurers who have never done anything but post and draw a salary," Hill said, according to Goodwin's book.
Some things never change
Sound familiar? If it sounds like Wall Street bankers complaining about Dodd-Frank regulation following the financial crisis, you're not imagining things. It could also sound like Wall Street's complaint about the Obama administration's fiduciary rule that requires money managers to put the needs of their clients before their own — to ensure that Wall Street doesn't sell you products that line its pockets while potentially emptying yours.
Again, this is where the two presidents stand in sharp contrast. Roosevelt was a regulation proponent; Trump is a deregulator.
Trump's plan is to do away with that fiduciary rule and others enshrined in Dodd-Frank, affecting areas such as payday lenders, credit cards, and student loans.
"He campaigned saying he was going to go after Wall Street, and he's doing the opposite," Professor Michael S. Barr of the University of Michigan Law School said. "He's starting his administration by weakening Wall Street reform."
The differences don't end there.
In 1912, Roosevelt ran for a third term as president under a party of his own creation: the National Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party. He called for a "living wage" for all workers; Trump's pick for labor secretary has decried raising the minimum wage and would rather replace workers with robots.
Roosevelt wanted to regulate big corporations more and introduce a graduated inheritance tax. Trump wants to get rid of the estate tax altogether, a measure that would help him and his family preserve their own wealth.
Bully is as bully does
Roosevelt and Trump have radically different ways of communicating their ideas to the American people as well. At the turn of the century, the term "bully" had a positive, congratulatory meaning. Roosevelt's mission was to show Americans the challenges ahead and allow them to rise to them. He traded in facts, and he used the press to communicate the struggles of his office in a seemingly transparent way.
Starting in 1902, Roosevelt struggled to put down a massive coal strike that gripped the nation. Schools were closed because there was no heat, and people feared more violence. Roosevelt tried to force the parties to come to an agreement, but the coal operators were intransigent. They would not listen to the president, so the White House published a transcript of their meeting with the president. Public opinion turned against the operators.
Now, during this time, Roosevelt did have a plan in the back of his mind to send in federal troops to seize the mines and take over operations. The situation never got to that point. Roosevelt decided to play Wall Street's game, and he sent the financier J.P. Morgan in to negotiate with the operators. The White House ultimately made cosmetic political concessions that flattered the coal operators.
"It is never well to take drastic action if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion," Roosevelt would later say. He also publicly shared credit for the victory with Morgan, and privately he wrote to his family that he hoped he would never have to deal with "as wooden headed a set" as the coal operators again.
This is politics. It's consensus building, concession making, ego soothing, credit sharing, and careful planning.
So far we've seen none of this skill from the Trump administration. Trump has failed to build consensus for most of his bigger policies. Polling shows that most Americans hate the idea of building a wall on our southern border with Mexico. Many also don't like the administration's attempt to temporarily bar people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US.
And despite being a man who made his fortune doing deals, Trump's style is not conducive to the give-and-take of international diplomacy. He reportedly yelled at a US ally, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Gov. Graco Ramirez, of Morelos, the president of Mexico's national conference of governors, told a Mexican newspaper that Trump had declared "war" on Mexico.
"With Trump, dialogue is exhausted," Ramirez told El Universal. "It doesn't make sense to sit down with him. He doesn't change his attitude or his position."
None of this has anything to do with Roosevelt's "bully pulpit." It's just bullying.
A man who is great enough to forget himself
Now, back to the similarities, because rather than an assurance, they serve as a warning.
Roosevelt fed off of the adulation of crowds, and the longer he stayed in power, the more that love fed his ego and convinced him that he alone could run the country.
Part of the reason Taft fought so hard against his old friend was that, like Trump, Roosevelt had an uneasy relationship with the separation of powers among the judiciary, executive and legislative branches. Because of that, Taft didn't even care that he lost the presidential election. He just wanted to make sure that Roosevelt didn't take over the Republican Party and do away with the "absolute independence of the judiciary" branch, according to Goodwin.
Trump, less than a month into his presidency, has already railed against a judge who struck down his administration's temporary travel ban, calling him a "so-called judge."
This light flirtation with autocracy is why Ray Baker, a progressive business journalist who followed Roosevelt through much of his political career, didn't support Roosevelt in 1912. He wrote that the country needed a man who was "great enough to forget himself."
Roosevelt was not that man. Trump isn't either.
Neither man is (or was) capable of putting the needs of anyone or anything else — not even the needs of the presidency — before his own ego.
This is the similarity we all need to be paying attention to, a fatal flaw that has the power to bring down not just one man but an entire government.
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