At one point in A Crisis Wasted, the author compares the inaugural speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama, two Democratic presidents who took office at times of epochal economic crisis.

While Roosevelt bemoaned the “host of unemployed citizens fac[ing] the grim problem of existence” and promised that his “greatest primary task is to put people to work,” Obama declined to stress joblessness or what was then called “public works.” While Roosevelt assailed the “money changers” over “their stubbornness and their own incompetence,” Obama attacked “recriminations and worn-out dogmas” while extolling “risk-takers,” “doers,” and “makers of things.” Roosevelt “unhesitatingly” assumed leadership over what he called the “trained and loyal army” of the American people, and threatened to ask Congress for “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency,” as if it was a foreign power. Obama took a philosophical tack, claiming the “stale political arguments” of the past were over, deciding that the market’s “power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched” and that the only question about government was “whether it works.”

“In the expression of leadership,” the author concludes, “Roosevelt’s speech resembles Trump’s inaugural address in 2017.”