The Home of the Brave
Today sees the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. It is an odd American tradition that the inauguration takes place more than two months after the election, resulting in an awkward interregnum during which outgoing president Joe Biden was in office but not really in power. It could’ve been worse, however. Prior to 1936, the inauguration was in March. It meant that for five excruciating months between November 1932 and March 1933, during the deepest depths of the Great Depression, the country was effectively leaderless. Herbert Hoover, the outgoing president, spent most of this time trying to frustrate the transition to his successor Franklin Roosevelt. It is Roosevelt who in turn introduced the much-copied idea of ‘the first 100 days’ of his term as an important initial period of action, and it was indeed laying the groundwork for the eventual recovery.