I’m not sure if this question goes here so moderators please move if it doesn’t.
Comparing FDR to Trump, was there ever a point during FDR’s 4 terms where the vast majority of Democrats had such fear of him that they would blindly go along with everything he said, truthful or not, in hopes he wouldn’t turn on them and destroy them politically? I’m not talking about an isolated case, but when the entire party was in fear of his wrath.
The South was solidly democratic, but it was also solidly conservative. They fought FDR at almost every step.
But the comparison is absurd. There is nothing in American presidential history comparable to Trump’s cult of personality. Washington was revered by almost everyone, true, but he took pains to be exemplary so as to set a model for future presidents.
Not that I am aware of, and I know a bit about that era. In fact, I can think of no President that can compare to Trump in that way.
all 4 times FDR ran he won in blowouts. Both in EC and popular votes.
Is there anything specifically about this statement that has anything to do with the OP, other than it’s also about FDR?
A more apt comparison to Trump might be Lyndon Johnson and/or Richard Nixon. Both of them liked having power and weren’t shy about throwing it around. However, both Johnson and Nixon had spent their careers working their way up through their party’s structures, building alliances, and making deals. Nixon’s worst crimes were committed against the other parties, while Johnson’s most severe punishment might be to make sure a big federal project was put in the congressional district next to his opponent’s.
In Nixon’s case, the party had Ronald Reagan waiting in the wings. There was no danger in tossing Nixon overboard. The Republican politicians knew he couldn’t take the voters with him. That’s the big feat the current crop of Republican politicians have, that Trump will take his voters with him.
Thanks for the responses. I still have trouble understanding the fear Trump instills in long-standing Republican politicians. Can he just snap his fingers and destroy someone’s 30-year political career by deploying his base against them? I realize he has a “cult of personality”, but don’t they realize that someday they will be called out for actively supporting a pathological narcissist and con man? It seems to me like they’re screwed no matter what they do. People are going to remember who did, and didn’t, stand up to this worthless, lying “human being”.
Jeff Flake might say yes. But I think (hope?) that over time his influence will wane.
Look what he did to the other Republican candidates in 2016. And consider how he browbeat House Speaker Paul Ryan until Ryan finally gave up and left Congress.
While not Presidential, I think the closest American precedent for Trump is Huey Long. Both unabashedly stocked their governments with loyalists and corruptly used the levers of power to advance their own ends. Both generated veneration among the followers and seething hatred from their opponents. And both were mercenarily transactional in their politics — neither one really had core beliefs beyond establishing and growing their own power.
According to Carl Hess (speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign) LBJ slapped Hess with an income tax audit as soon as the election was over.
My thoughts as well, and Huey did entertain entering the presidential race. He didn’t expect to win the nomination, but then again neither probably did Trump.
The different between the two is that Long was intelligent and capable at his job, and despite being corrupt as hell, he actually did help a lot of poor people.
I think Trump’s presidency has a strong resemblance to that of Andrew Jackson. Cronyism, wild swings in policy depending on who the President was feuding with, attempts to destroy portions of the federal government, etc.
And for both of them, the belief by their supporters (true in Jackson’s case) that they were of humble origins.
One difference is that Jackson wasn’t a coward, having served in the military, fought in battle, and even fighting in a duel.
Which is why I specified his presidency only. Jackson was obviously smarter, braver, and a leader of men. Trump has none of these traits.
But they both presided over chaotic, venal administrations that treated minorities cruelly.
I think several presidents had enough influence with their base to demand that kind of obsequiousness from other politicians in their party but Trump is the first to insist.
I don’t think it’s Trump in particular as an individual that Republicans are frightened of, but the cleft stick of their own making that they’re caught in, whose formation pre-dates Trump. The Trump-supporter “personality cultists” are deeply uninformed and misinformed, which is not unprecedented in American politics, and also unified by instantaneous communication and dissemination of their misinformation, which AFAIK is unprecedented in American politics.
IMO the not-entirely-deliberate project of creating such a fanatically partisan, low-information and high-distrust volatile base of conservative voters goes back at least to the days of the “Moral Majority” movement in the 1980s. It was nurtured by the growth of Fox News, talk radio and other heavily right-wing media outlets, the jingoism of post-9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, theocracy-lite cabals of evangelical/fundamentalist conservative politicians at all levels of government, and subsequently the Tea Party reaction to the election of Obama. Its anti-liberalism, xenophobic ressentiment, anti-government and anti-expertise disdain, and credulous ignorance have culminated (hopefully but by no means certainly) in Trumpism.
Throughout, the project has largely been bankrolled by fossil-fuel companies that have had a great deal to lose from any kind of environmental regulation, especially of the sort that would be required to seriously combat climate change, and a lot to gain from Middle East wars and an oligarchic political structure.
So in a sense we’ve had a sort of perfect storm of contributing factors, ranging from reactionary backlash against the social reforms of the '60s and '70s, to neoliberal high-tech corporate globalism (for which Democrats are just as responsible as Republicans, AFAICT) that has undercut the working and middle classes, to a major global environmental crisis that oligarchs can’t afford to acknowledge honestly, to drug abuse epidemics, “culture wars” controversies on guns, abortion, education, etc., terrorism, war, and now global pandemic.
It’s not so much that Republicans are afraid of Trump qua Trump: it’s just that Trumpism seems to be the only way their base can be reached. In the eyes of a significant, and critical, portion of their voters, any Republican who opposes Trump is just as bad as a liberal. There’s no point trying to appeal to those voters with facts or logic or practical common sense or critical thinking, because they’ve been sedulously encouraged by decades of conservative propaganda not to value those things.
Here’s a similar take by a liberal blogger from nearly five years ago, when nobody really believed what a disaster this was going to be not just for Republicans but for all the rest of us:
The trouble is it’s served all the rest of us too. It’s not Trump himself that Republicans are so scared of, it’s Trump voters, and the Republican Party’s inability to attract them with anything except Trumpism.