This has been the case with conversations about how Donald Trump misuses and abuses presidential power. Often, the president’s supporters, as well as some conservative commentators who want to offer analysis without falling into “Trump derangement syndrome,” use historical comparisons as a way to show that what is happening today is not that different from before. In other words, that the republic will survive.

A perennial danger with pointing to historical precedent is that similar examples from the past can obscure the existing risks a nation faces.

This has been the case with conversations about how Donald Trump misuses and abuses presidential power. Often, the president’s supporters, as well as some conservative commentators who want to offer analysis without falling into “Trump derangement syndrome,” use historical comparisons as a way to show that what is happening today is not that different from before. In other words, that the republic will survive.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an icon of 20th-century Democratic politics, has been the focus of this kind of discussion. During a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Left, Right, and Center, the former White House communications director for Trump in 2017, Mike Dubke, told his colleagues during a discussion of Trump’s efforts to exert federal control over elections: “I go back in history and I look at the court packing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to do when the Supreme Court ruled against his New Deal. And he said, my solution is we’re just going to create new justices. We’re going to expand the court, and I’m going to nominate new justices that are going to vote.” The point being, the United States has had this happen before and been fine.

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