Secret Service speeded up George W. Bush’s inaugural parade in 2001 because hostile crowds were throwing raw eggs at his limousine.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, there were demonstrations against him on all seven continents, including Antarctica – where no one actually lives, but where tourists and scientists marched out onto the polar icecap to make their feelings known.

Trump and Bush, like three presidents before them, had suffered the indignity of moving into the White House after being rejected by the voters. It was legal, constitutional, ridiculous, and anti-democratic. It’s unsurprising that people were angry that they’d been cheated of their choice.

John Quincy Adams became president after weeks of maneuvering in the House of Representatives. Hayes’s election was stolen (partly by a special commission), and Bush’s was at least finagled (for which the Supreme Court perhaps shares some blame). Harrison and Trump got in more staidly, losing the election but getting in anyhow, because of the way the state-by-state totals drove the undemocratic electoral college. (Some states get more electors that their population warrants, and more than their voter turnout warrants.)

Rutherford B. Hayes made clear from the start that he would not run for a second term, showing a dignity unusual for his era. Benjamin Harrison, on the other hand, announced that obviously God had made him president, overruling the voters. (The voters beat God on their next matchup, four years later.)

Bush continued the God-made-me-president routine, but Trump went one better, crowing that he had actually WON the election – and by the biggest landslide in history! When even his followers proved unable to swallow this, he backtracked to say he had won the biggest ELECTORAL COLLEGE landslide in history, which of course also wasn’t even close to true.

Many of Trump’s religious followers point out that Trump was behind in the polls, and even lost the election, so clearly God intervened to make him president despite the voters. St. Augustine, almost 2000 years ago, pointed out that you can’t know God’s will from events on earth, but anyhow that would also suggest that God had intervened to put Hitler in power. He too had no experience, had been rejected by the voters, and had then been slipped into office constitutionally but undemocratically.

Like Harrison, Bush, and even Quincy Adams, Trump has spent a lot of time and energy trying to ram his rejected policies, programs, and appointments down the throats of resentful voters. He was the most unpopular candidate since we started polling (Hillary Clinton was second-most), and he hasn’t helped himself any since getting into the White House. Rather than trying to win others to his side, he’s instead dedicated himself to excoriating and antagonizing them.

This no doubt says more about his personality and emotional state than it does about any governing skills he might have, but it’s of a piece with (though far more extreme than) the behavior of his two predecessor Reject Presidents. Having gotten into the White House (constitutionally) after being rejected, all three have reacted with entitlement and arrogance. It would have been far more sensible to react with embarrassment, and far better yet to react with humility.

Rather than parading themselves as the elect of God, and expecting us to kneel down before them, they might have gone to the nation and spoken along these lines.

*The election is over, and under our constitutional system I will be your president for the next four years. This places me in an awkward position… for by your votes you have made clear that you don’t want me to be your president. You chose my opponent instead.

*Even so, under our constitution I will take office in January, and I intend to fulfill my constitutional duties. I also intend to stay true to my convictions.

*But in addition to that, I intend to do a lot of listening – honest listening, not just meetings for the show of it. You haven’t so much rejected me as rejected my programs. We need to work together. I need to work with you the voters, and I need to work with our elected representatives in Congress. Together we need to govern and legislate with compromise – compromise that surely won’t completely satisfy any of us, but compromise that we can agree on, live with, and work with, as Americans together, together wanting the best for our nation and our world.

*One more thing I promise you: on January 21, the first full day of my term, I will send a message to congress asking for a constitutional amendment to abolish our troublesome and undemocratic electoral college. When we vote four years from now, I want us to be voting directly for president for the first time in our history. Maybe I’ll be back in the Oval Office after that election. Maybe it will be someone else. But whoever it is will be there for the best of all possible reasons, and the only sensible reason: because the American people chose him – or her.

A reject president who approaches his people that way… instead of lording it over them like the kings of the gentiles… will garner great good will with which to govern. He or she will go down in history as a person who strive to unite a divided people. And he or she will be the very last reject president.