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Presidential Rejects (5) Donald Trump

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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.

Presidential Rejects (3) Benjamin Harrison

Twelve years after fouling up the 1876 presidential election, our electoral college once again cheated the voters. There were still people around who had lived through the electoral foul-ups of 1796, 1800, and 1824.

Benjamin Harrison certainly had the wherewithal to be a good president. He commanded first a company, then a regiment, and finally a brigade in the Civil War. He was a successful lawyer, and served six years as U. S. senator from Indiana. His grandfather William Henry Harrison had won the election of 1840, ousting President Martin van Buren only to die after a month in office. William Henry’s father, Benjamin Harrison V, had been a governor, a member of the Continental Congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

All Benjamin needed was the will of the people. The 1824 mess was darkened by accusations (probably untrue) of a “corrupt bargain.” The 1876 fiasco DEFINITELY required corruption and crime to steal the election from Tilden, and send Hayes to the White House.

Things were more sedate and straightforward in 1888, requiting no intervention by commissions (1876), courts (2000), or Congress (1800, 1824). Cleveland won re-election, but the votes in certain states fell out so that Harrison had a majority of electors. He had matched his grandfather’s record of unseating a sitting president, but the voters had actually chosen to KEEP Cleveland. They got Harrison instead.

Harrison announced that Providence had made him president, starting a gag-inducing list of losers proclaiming that God wanted them to be president, and so intervened to overrule the voters. One of the first to gag was the Republican party boss of Pennsylvania, who growled about “how close a number of men were compelled to approach…the penitentiary to make him President”. The Republicans had adopted the grassroots corruption of buying an adequate number of votes.

Having taken the White House by kicking out the president that the voters wanted to keep, and not getting along very well with many of his own party leaders, Harrison struggled in office. The surplus and the gold supply both went down. He couldn’t get civil rights legislation passed. He raised tariffs, tried and failed to annex Hawaii, agreed to carve up Samoa with the British and Germans. He DID enlarge and modernize the navy, and pushed for new technologies, installing electricity in the White House.

For some reason he went to the well again in 1892, and once again came up short, but this time the electoral vote echoed the people’s votes. Cleveland returned to the White House, right where the voters wanted him, serving the only non-consecutive terms as president. He shared with Andrew Jackson the honor of being elected president three times – the only men to accomplish that, other than Franklin Roosevelt – but like Jackson, the electoral college pulled the rug from under his feet, and limited him to two terms.

History is my profession, my calling, and an avocation. In getting ready for this blog I realized that I literally knew less about Benjamin Harrison than about any other president. He had been in the Civil War, he lost the popular vote, he had a distinguished ancestry – and that was it. Every other president I could tell you of their careers, their lives, their ups, their downs. Not Benjamin Harrison. I even knew more about his 30-day-wonder grandfather than I knew about him!

And history in general has done the same, treating him as the most justly forgettable of American presidents. Honest, conscientious, and qualified, he and the nation both suffered from having him installed in the White House for four years, after being told by the voters to go back home. The system was legal and constitutional, but it cheated the voters, and it cheated Cleveland. It didn’t do Harrison any good either.

Presidential Rejects: (2) Rutherford B. Hayes

Last month in this space we looked at the presidency of John Quincy Adams – forced to take the office in 1825, after being rejected by the voters in 1824. Since no candidate had a majority among the presidential electors, Adams was chosen by the House of Representatives.

The next presidential reject was Rutherford B. Hayes, a Civil War general and governor of Ohio. The electoral college system had messed up the elections of 1796 and 1824, and turned the election of 1800 into a train wreck (even before we had trains). Now it turned the 1876 election into a train wreck with a simultaneous clown show, on top of a heist movie.

Hayes lost the 1876 election to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York. But Republican bigwigs discerned that if they could grab the electors of three southern states where the count had been extremely close, they would put Hayes over by one electoral vote.

Both parties charged election fraud, and both sides were probably guilty – American elections were staggeringly corrupt at the time. As day after day the inauguration drew nearer, Congress appointed a 15-man commission – five senators, five representatives, five Supreme Court justices – to allocate the disputed electors. The eight Republicans and seven Democrats voted eight to seven and called all disputed electors for Hayes, to the disgust of people from both parties all across the land.

A filibuster began to stop the inauguration, but Hayes finally swayed southern Democrats by agreeing to pull troops out of the south, which was essentially license for the Ku Klux Klan to run riot, crush the biracial governments set up after the Civil War, brutalize the African American population, and open a century of one-party white-power rule. Hayes went to the White House, and America abandoned millions of its children, who would suffer for generations like Jews in Russia.

“Rutherfraud B. Hayes” (as he was soon angrily nicknamed) quickly announced that he would not run for a second term as president, apparently preferring to make a graceful exit rather than trying to overstay a non-existent welcome. He tried to advance civil rights and civil service, but with only indifferent success.

As for Tilden, who had won an out-and-out majority (not just a plurality) of the voters, and who had apparently won the electoral college only to have 20 votes snatched away, he rejected calls to have himself inaugurated, to put crowds into the streets, or to resist the Hayes inauguration by force. “I can retire to private life,” he said, “with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people.” True enough: Tilden had been elected president of the United States, which was more than Hayes, despite his many virtues, could say. Like the other “reject presidents,” Hayes was hobbled by trying to put through a program that the nation had already demonstrated it didn’t want. He was wise enough, and mature enough, to go gently into that good night. Being wounded five times perhaps conferred a certain perspective.

Presidential Rejects: (1) John Quincy Adams

The first time we had a contested presidential election, the electoral college fouled us up. The next election, the electoral college REALLY fouled us up. The first time we had a popular-vote election, the electoral college fouled us up. The latest time we had a presidential election, the electoral college fouled us up. And it’s fouled us up repeatedly in between.

The founding fathers were nervous about democracy, which was still a brand-new experiment. So they ruled that the people would elect the representatives in Congress, but an elite group – the state legislators – would elect the senators. And a SUPER-elite… the presidential electors… would elect the president and vice-president.

This fouled up the 1796 and 1800 elections so badly that they amended the Constitution, improving things a little. By 1824 there was a new wrinkle. Electors still chose the president, but in most states the VOTERS chose the ELECTORS. This made selection of the president MORE LIKELY to be the voters’ choice, but not ASSUREDLY the voters’ choice.

With four men running in 1824, nobody got a majority of the electoral votes. This meant that the House of Representatives picked the president from the top three, but – get this – the states got one vote apiece, no matter how many people they had! And if the state delegation split, they cast no vote at all!

Anyhow, Andrew Jackson was the clear winner by plurality, with 41% of the popular vote compared to 31% for John Quincy Adams, with Crawford and Clay splitting the remainder almost evenly. The House, though, chose Adams.

A popular book right now is about “accidental presidents” – those who’ve succeeded on the predecessors’ deaths or resignations. Quincy Adams was the first of six “loser presidents” or “presidential rejects” – those who had to assume the nation’s highest office after the nation rejected them.

Young Adams in many ways looked superbly qualified. He had been a senator, a representative, an ambassador, and secretary of state. He’d been active in the Revolution even as a boy, and he’d helped end the War of 1812. None of this would help very much.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams had two handicaps. First, that he was usually the smartest person in the room. And second, that he knew it. Each of them were good at behind-closed-doors politics – not meaning anything crooked, just that they were cerebral men who worked well by quiet, face-to-face negotiations. Neither one was happy with the broader politics of crowds and speeches and nationwide campaigns.

And, of course, Quincy Adams had to do his job even though the voters had decided NOT to have him do the job. It’s as if an employer had chosen to hire the other candidate, but the government swooped in and forced him to take you instead. He wouldn’t be very happy, and you’d be batting with two and a-half strikes against you.

President Adams had some successes, but failed in much of his program: a naval academy, a national observatory, a national university, uniform weights and measures. In 1828 Jackson was back, and by then 22 of the 24 states chose their electors by popular vote. Jackson outpolled Adams 56% to 44%, though winning the electoral college by more than two-to-one (another example of how ridiculous the system is).

John Quincy Adams was a patriot, and a brilliant man, and even after the White House he served our country with distinction until struck down by cerebral hemorrhage on the floor of Congress while loudly objecting (quite rightly) to the Mexican War. Carried to the Speaker’s Room, he died there in the Capitol two days later, in 1848. In the right circumstances, he could have been a great president. Forced to take office after being rejected, his leadership could only be poor. He was doomed to one indifferent term, and the country suffered accordingly. His greatest days came before and after his presidency.