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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.

It struck me that Dubke’s use of this analogy is a prime example of how history can mask what is distinct about Trump from other presidencies. Even though many of FDR’s critics accused him of being tyrannical, Roosevelt was still working within the boundaries of the constitutional system in ways that Trump has been willing to ignore.

The Supreme Court of the United States on Jan. 8, 1936. Imagno/Getty Images

Four Supreme Court justices had proved to be especially hostile to the New Deal agenda. The “Four Horsemen” included Justices George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, and Willis Van Devanter. The four justices had sometimes been joined by former Republican presidential nominee—and chief justice—Charles Evans Hughes on several key votes in 1935. And Justice Owen Roberts, whom President Herbert Hoover had appointed to the court, had aligned with the conservative majority in Schechter Poultry v. United States, the landmark decision that undermined the NIRA . Many liberals were up in arms about what they saw as the convoluted logic behind the decisions. Speaking after one ruling in 1936, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes remarked: “If this decision does not outrage the moral sense of the country, then nothing will.”

Following his landslide victory against Republican Alf Landon in 1936—Roosevelt won the election with over 60 percent of the popular vote and 523 Electoral College votes—which also brought in massive Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill that weakened the Southern Dixiecrats, the president proposed legislation on Feb. 5, 1937, that would expand the size of the highest court. The plan had been formulated in secret with the guidance of Attorney General Homer Cummings. Most Americans were shocked by the announcement, including many Democratic leaders. But advisors had convinced the president to propose legislation rather than pursue a constitutional amendment because that would take too long before it could be ratified.

The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill would empower the president to make new judicial appointments for every sitting justice who was 70 years or older. The legislation allowed the president to expand the court by six, which would allow Roosevelt to create a solid liberal bloc with the two stalwart liberals already on the court. The pretext of the legislation was that the sitting justices on the Supreme Court were too old (average age 71 years) and the courts too tied up to achieve results. A substantial reduction in the retirement packages for Supreme Court justices in 1932 had diminished the incentives for them to stop working. (“I do not like the idea of losing half of my salary by retiring,” noted Van Devanter in a private letter.) Most elected officials understood that the real objective of the plan was to create a more ideologically favorable majority.

Roosevelt and others in the administration were optimistic about the chances for passage. As the historian Laura Kalman argued in FDR’s Gambit, the legislation was seen as a rational, constitutional, and realistic plan to deal with a reactionary court. The election of 1936 had created a massive window for the president to move forward with reform. In a fireside address that he delivered on March 9, Roosevelt told the nation: “We have, therefore, reached the point as a nation where we must take action to save the Constitution from the court and the court from itself. … We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution—not over it.”

But Roosevelt had severely underestimated the opposition. Soon after Roosevelt announced the plan, critics warned that the president was attempting to move forward with a dangerous power grab that had echoes of the fascist governments that had come to power in Europe and Asia. One cartoon with the caption “Do We Want a Ventriloquist Act in the Supreme Court?” depicted five justices standing in front of Uncle Sam, with Roosevelt smiling deviously behind them, as they chant: “Yes, Yes, We All Vote Yes!” Senators and representatives were bombarded with letters from angry constituents. The radio airwaves were filled with vitriol about the authoritarian in the White House. Princeton University President H. W. Dodds warned Congress: “If popular government fails in America, it will not be by a blind repetition of European examples but by the creation of a lack of faith in democracy and a growing callousness to the brutality of authoritarianism.” The president of the Church League of America raised concerns that religious liberty was under threat: “In every country where there has been extreme centralization of power, religious liberty is usually first to feel the mailed fist.”

Wyoming Sen. Joseph O’Mahoney, who had been a loyal supporter of the New Deal, came out against the president, saying, “The right of the individual to be protected against the arbitrary use of power can be guaranteed only by the courts and if the independence of the courts is not maintained, all guarantees of freedom and justice vanish.” Former president Herbert Hoover told radio listeners on Feb. 20 that the administration was attempting to send “a troop of ‘president’s judges’ … into the halls to capture political power. … That is not judicial process. That is force.”

Most dramatically, Hughes sent written testimony to the Judiciary Committee, read by Montana Senator Burton Wheeler, picking apart the rationale: “There would be more judges to hear, more judges to confer, more judges to discuss, more judges to be convinced and to decide.”

In June 1937, just a few months after Roosevelt had proposed the bill, the Senate Judiciary Committee completed a report in which a majority of the panel rejected the proposal as a dangerous and unnecessary encroachment on judicial independent independence. The final vote was 10-8. “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected,” the committee majority declared, “that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” One of conservative justices, Van Devanter, retired that same month. In July, Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson, who had provided the administration with legislative muscle to push the proposal, passed away.

Besides the fierce opposition, momentum for judicial reform had slowed because the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings favorable to the administration on landmark policies that included Social Security as well as the National Labor Relations Act. These rulings dampened the liberal perception of crisis. Roberts started voting in favor of administration programs, as well as upholding a state minimum wage law, which some observers called the “switch in time that saved nine.”

A cartoon depicts Roosevelt’s 1937 Supreme Court-packing plan and opposition to it. J.N. “Ding” Darling via Getty Images

On July 22, only 168 days after Roosevelt put forward the proposal, the Senate voted 70-20 to recommit the bill to the Judiciary Committee, a vote that effectively rendered the proposal dead in the water. “For the first time,” noted the Atlanta Constitution, “administration leaders frankly admitted defeat.”

Many historians have agreed that the proposal constituted one of Roosevelt’s worst political mistakes. The proposal opened the president up to brutal attacks as even some loyal Democrats complained that he had gone too far. The failure was part of the backdrop, they argued, for the 1938 midterms, which saw sizable gains by the conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans who had been on the defensive for almost eight years. Roosevelt’s effort to purge several conservative incumbents failed with one exception. Democrats lost 72 seats in the House of Representatives and 8 in the Senate. Even those who concluded that Roosevelt’s proposal was what created pressure on Roberts to switch his position (many don’t agree with this conclusion) concurred that the political costs to Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were immense.

U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, among other members of the court, as he arrives to address a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington on March 4. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Secondly, changing the size of the Supreme Court had precedent. The U.S. Constitution did not specify how many justices should serve on the court. In the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress had set the court at six members, with one being the chief justice. The court changed size seven times between 1801 and 1869, until Congress finally settled on nine justices. While previous congressional adjustments were not made with the same ideological goals that Roosevelt had in mind, changes to the size had been made often on Capitol Hill. Many of Trump’s assertions of power, such as wielding the Department of Justice as a cudgel against political opponents or using emergency powers so liberally, tend to be precedent-making, rather than based on historical precedent.