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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 (4) George W. Bush

Without our 18th century electoral college system, there would have been no crisis in 2000. Al Gore clearly won the election, though not by any great amount. But in America, that doesn’t matter. What matters is who gets the electors from each state, usually allocated on a winner-take-all basis.

Exit polls showed, and news agencies judged, that Gore had carried Florida. Then the actual vote counts ran against the polls – an extremely unusual event. It was then observed that many ballots there had been printed and arranged (perhaps unintentionally) so that they were likely to drive intended Gore votes to either Bush or Pat Buchanan.

Bush now showed a very narrow victory in Florida, and a one-vote majority among electors. Gore and the Democrats demanded a recount, which lower courts granted. As the constitutional date for the electoral college vote roared closer, Bush got a Supreme Court hearing.

Court employees handed copies of the bitter 5-4 decision to reporters even as the justices fled out the back under cover of darkness. They deliberately omitted the customary summary, so reporters read the decision out loud on air until they could figure out what it said. The justices were long gone before reporters informed the world that five members of the Court had effectively made Bush president because (by the count that they in practice accepted) he had carried Florida by 547 votes out of almost six million. Gore had actually won the national election by more than half a million votes, out of 101,000,000+. Many of the new Bush team came in like conquerors, crowing that God had put them in the White House, which only drove Bush’s already-low opinion poll ratings even lower. As did their gleeful efforts to ram his programs and appointments down the throats of a country which had just rejected both.

But Bush won praise for his work to rally the nation and the world after the horrendous September 11 terrorist attacks… then quickly squandered that unity.

America, “the world’s only superpower,” had led the west to peaceful victory in the Cold War, and to the end of the Soviet Union and European Communism. Now we were united in the face of terrible tragedy. The world responded with an outpouring of support, and even love, and rallied to join the U.S. in a campaign against the terrorists.

Unfortunately the often-passive Bush relied heavily on his advisors (mostly brought in from his father’s team), and THEY had learned all the wrong lessons – lessons, if fact, that the elder Bush had publicly warned about.

During the Clinton years, some Bush men had urged that the United States, as the world’s only superpower, should just go ahead and do whatever it wanted to, and ignore the other nations. Rather than consulting, negotiating, or leading, we should just ACT, and the rest of the world would soon learn that it had to comply.

So we quickly jettisoned international support, simply announcing without consultation what we were going to do, and what we expected the other nations to do. When they raised objections or even questions, or even just asked for more information, Bush announced “If you aren’t for us, you’re for the terrorists,” and told domestic critics the same.

They also revived their campaign, vetoed by the first President Bush, to conquer all of Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, falsely charging that Iraq had been behind September 11, or at least had helped. This has been discredited, and was ridiculous on its face, since Saddam and Osama had despised each other for years.

By 2002 we were in two wars – fighting Al Qaeda and the government in Afghanistan, and fighting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The war rationale kept shifting in Iraq, just as it had in Vietnam. Saddam (who was, in fact, a brutal dictator and a sometime sponsor of terrorism) was found, captured, tried, and executed. But rather than universal Iraqi applause, this went almost unnoticed in a decade-long insurgency against U.S. occupation. People began to recognize that just as we had not had an adequate rationale, we also had no exit strategy.

All this hurt Bush, who’d been riding high since September 11 and a quick initial victory in Iraq. He was hurt again by photos and film of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in an official U.S. program. Even so, Bush won the 2004 election – the only “Reject President” to go on and win a second term.

But Iraq kept getting worse, and victory still eluded us in Afghanistan. Many military personnel left the sefvice as soon as possible. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and killed 1500 people – many dieing of thirst while waiting at designated spots for rescues that never came – the disbelieving nation recognized that despite promoting themselves as the “national security” administration, in four years since September 11 they had not made adequate plans or preparations to evacuate a major city.

Bush was term-limited out in 2008, and the public was increasingly unhappy with him, and with his party in general. Republicans, ever against government regulation, had repealed many New Deal restrictions on Wall Street, set in place during the Great Depression. The unsurprising result was a Depression-style crash, right in the midst of the election campaign, and Obama won. Numerous scholars seriously labeled Bush as the worst president in American history. He would not have to bear that burden long.

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.