Nearly everyone has a strong opinion about Donald Trump. Let’s lower the emotional temperature, take a step back, and look at him through the eyes of history. Which former presidential candidates were similar to him, and which were different? Here I’ll confine myself just to the last 25 elections (1916-2012), during which time the Democrats ran 18 different candidates for president, the Republicans 17.
First, Trump has never run for office. The last time a major party ran a candidate who had never entered an election was in 1952 when the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower. A war hero, commander of the D-Day forces in 1944, Eisenhower was so widely admired that both parties wanted him as their candidate. Far from being an outsider, he had been in government service for decades. The only other candidates of the last century with no previous electoral experience were Herbert Hoover (Republican, 1928), former secretary of Commerce, and Wendell Willkie (Republican, 1940), a lawyer and corporate executive.
Second, Trump became a celebrity through a popular television show, “The Apprentice,” and appeared on the political scene with an instantly recognizable face. The obvious comparison here is with Ronald Reagan (Republican, 1980 and 1984), who became a movie star in the late 1930s and then made the transition to television in the 1950s and early 1960s. Reagan, unlike most beginning politicians, never had to overcome the problem of obscurity — his was already a household name when he first ran for office (as governor of California) in 1966.
Third, Trump has had a turbulent person life — married three times and divorced twice. The first divorced presidential candidate was Adlai Stevenson (Democrat, 1952 and 1956), at a time when divorce still carried a stigma, and it hurt his chances. Since then several other divorced men have run for the top job, including Bob Dole (Republican, 1996), John Kerry (Democrat, 2004), and John McCain (Republican, 2008) but only one, Reagan, has won.
Incidentally, this doesn’t mean that earlier candidates were paragons of marital fidelity. Warren G. Harding (Republican, 1920) was famous for trysts in the White House broom closet with his mistress, Nan Britton; Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944) sometimes strayed from the narrow path; and John F. Kennedy (Democrat, 1960) was probably the executive office’s most reckless philanderer.
Fourth, Trump is a lot older than most, but not all, candidates. In June of this year he celebrated his 70th birthday; he’s 18 months older than Hillary Clinton and, if he wins, will be the oldest man elected to his first term. Bob Dole was 73 when he ran unsuccessfully against Hillary’s husband, and so was John McCain when he ran against Barack Obama in 2008. Ronald Reagan was 69 during his first successful bid (1980) and 73 when he ran successfully for re-election. At the other end of the scale, Kennedy was just 43 when he entered the White House and Bill Clinton (Democrat, 1992, 1996) was 46. Obama, in 2008 was 47.
Fifth, Trump made a fortune in business. Similarly, Herbert Hoover made millions as a mining engineer and consultant before turning to government service. Alf Landon, the GOP candidate in 1936, became a millionaire in the oil business. Mitt Romney (Republican, 2012) made tens of millions of dollars at Bain Capital in the 1980s and 1990s. At the other end of the business scale, Harry Truman (Democrat, 1948) opened a haberdashery store in 1919 with an old army buddy, but it went broke just three years later.
Famously, sixth, Trump is a billionaire. Can any presidential candidate rival him for wealth? Not in the last hundred years, or indeed in the whole history of the republic. The next closest is George Washington, our first president, whose combined wealth in property and slaves, translated into today’s dollars, probably amounted to half a billion.
On the other hand, nearly all the candidates have been members of the top 1 percent. Poor folks just don’t get into the White House. The closest we came in the last century was with Harry Truman. He used to collect spare change and send it through the mail to his wife, Bess, who didn’t like Washington and spent most of her time back in their home state of Missouri.
Finally, which candidate was most unlike Trump? I think the answer is Calvin Coolidge (Republican), who inherited the presidency when Warren Harding died in office, in 1923, then won re-election in 1924. Where Trump is an ostentatious, bustling extrovert, Coolidge was a puritanical, tight-lipped introvert, nicknamed “Silent Cal.” He could face down lobbyists and job seekers with an impenetrable wall of silence, and he once remarked: “The things I don’t say never get me into trouble.”
It’s hard to imagine a candidate like that winning today, but perhaps Trump could learn something from Coolidge’s dedication to self-restraint!
