As public attitudes towards Silicon Valley and Big Tech continue their rapid pivot from admiration to vilification, the current occupant of the White House has sought to lead the chorus. Several weeks ago, he launched a tweet-driven crusade against Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos, accusing the company of ripping off the US Postal Service and harming Americans by not collecting more sales tax. His Thursday order for a review of the Post Office’s finances is a clear attempt to undermine one of its largest customers, Amazon.

WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED Contributor. Karabell is the head of Global Strategies Envestnet and the president of River Twice Research.

The president’s aggressive---and factually debatable---attacks have triggered concern about the fragility of our democracy and the potential for the powers of the state to be used to quash private companies. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Trump’s attacks on Amazon echoed Mussolini’s Italy, where the state cowed private companies or destroyed them. Sheila Bair, former chair of the FDIC, suggested that Trump is undermining the Bill of Rights by assailing a company based on personal pique at negative coverage in the Bezos-owned Washington Post.

Yet, here as elsewhere, the reaction to Trump may say more about his ability to arouse strong and often negative passions than about how close the US is to a constitutional crisis or an erosion of fundamental liberties. Trump is hardly the first president to attack a large company by name. He is by no means the first to let his personal animus dictate his approach, nor the only to contemplate using the considerable powers of the presidency to harm or hobble a company or CEO that he dislikes. While the past is at best prologue, compared with presidents of yore, Trump hardly stands out as remarkable in his willingness to engage in personal and public feuds with large corporations that piss him off.

Take Teddy Roosevelt. He famously began his tenure in the White House, on the heels of the assassination of William McKinley, with a vow to take on the large conglomerates then referred to as “trusts.” He wrote to Congress at the end of 1901 that “There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as the trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare.” The only way to protect the common good and counter the “crimes of cunning” perpetrated by the business world was to more aggressively use the authority of the recently passed Sherman Antitrust Act.

Roosevelt then proceeded to take on the largest trust of the day, the Northern Securities Company formed in 1901 by an alliance of banker JP Morgan, railroad magnates, and oilmen including John D. Rockefeller. The resulting holding company controlled an inordinate percentage of the nation’s rail lines, with the potential to raise prices for its own profit at the public’s expense. So Roosevelt---personally---instructed his attorney general to prosecute Northern Securities under the Sherman Act. The trust fought back, but the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the government and Northern Securities was forced to dissolve.

Trump has yet to do anything nearly as draconian. Some have suggested that he is responsible for the Justice Department’s suit to block the proposed merger of AT&T with Time Warner, because of his oft-stated dislike of Time Warner’s CNN. But it appears that the case was instead initiated by attorneys in the antitrust division and not on the urging of the White House. Nor has Trump used the Justice Department to go after any other company. His words may be ominous but his actions here have been essentially non-existent.

After Northern Securities, Roosevelt’s trust busting met considerable resistance, as courts showed less willingness to endorse breakups. Franklin Roosevelt had more success tearing down the power of large banks during the Great Depression. The large banks’ role in the crisis remains unclear, but FDR made them his prime target in 1933. “A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor---other people's lives.” Such attacks may have been seen as justified, but many Trump supporters see his attacks on some private companies as equally justified. All is not in the eye of the beholder, but some surely is.