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If Trump wins back the White House, we may be even more aware of how many presidents there have been.
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By Blake Hounshell
A contradiction has been drawn in American presidential history for 130 years. Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday night that he would return to seek the highest threatens to exacerbate this disjunction in the nation’s self-understanding.
In short: If Trump takes back the White House, we may be even more aware of how many presidents there have been.
This is because our nomenclature is misleading. Joe Biden is the 46th president, but the 45th user to be president.
This numbering anarchy stems from Grover Cleveland, who elected, lost his re-election, then ran and won, making him the 22nd president and the 24th president.
And so one of the consequences of a moment in Trump’s term would be that we’re all a little more bewildered: the one who would succeed him then would be the 48th president, but the 46th incumbent of the office.
This peculiarity is rarely precisely a matter of national security, but it is worth preventing, as it is similar to the fact that Trump can be president only for the time being, after Cleveland, to serve non-consecutive terms. This is a broader and more meaningful distinction. Even though Trump first proved he was an exclusive political figure, Cleveland’s latest presidential election may offer clues as to what the moment Trump’s tenure would look like.
“I think once presidents are elected, if they’ve been elected nonconsecutively, they’re reacting to very different things than they used to,” Michael J said. Gerhardt, a professor in the College of Law and Science at the University of North Carolina. from “The Forgotten Presidents. “: His incalculable constitutional legacy.
He added: “And they rule differently. “
But first: is it true that Trump, if he won again, would be the 47th president within a time after he was 45th?
Americans have numbered presidents this way since Cleveland became the 24th president in 1893, 8 years after fitting in on the 22nd and 4 years after handing over the White House to 23rd Benjamin Harrison. The White House website uses this numerology, in which Cleveland is known as two other presidents. (Similarly, many English-speaking resources have reported that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will soon be Brazil’s 39th president after having been the 35th president from 2003 to 2010. )
According to historian Michael Beschloss, this Cleveland numbering arose from the practice of early Americans referring to presidencies rather than presidents.
Donald J. Trump is running for president again, is being investigated again through a special defender and is back on Twitter. Here’s what you want to know about some of the most recent developments involving the former president:
A House committee had access to Trump after the Supreme Court denied his request to block its publication in the final weeks of the House Democrat. The Chamber had been searching for the documents since 2019.
After a disappointing midterm election for Republicans that many blamed on the former president, Mr. Trump announces his third bid for the White House. But a few days later, key allies have emerged moving away from him and a crowd of G. O. P. Rivals.
The Manhattan district attorney investigates. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office needs to restart its investigation of thieves into Mr. Prosecutors are returning to the original purpose of the long-standing investigation: a silent payment to a porn star who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.
Oman’s government is partnering with Mr. Trump and his circle of relatives on a $4 billion royal cession in the Middle Eastern country. The agreement with a foreign government creates new problems of clash of interests for the presidential crusade that has just been presented through Mr. Trump.
Elon Musk, who recently bought Twitter, reinstated Trump on the platform as part of a revamp of the social networking service. It is unclear whether Trump will agree to return to Twitter. He introduced his own social network, Truth Social, in which he has a monetary stake.
“In other words, George Washington presided over the ‘first presidency,'” he said. Cleveland like two other people, and Trump, if that happened. “
This semantic strangeness leads to confusing statements. When Barack Obama declared in his first inaugural address, minutes after his inauguration, that “forty-four Americans have been sworn in as president,” it was, well, false (the exact number was 43).
A user who devises this formula ridicules Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president. ” Why don’t you list all the current terms of the other presidents and President Roosevelt’s third and fourth terms, and where will you be?”He once said .
He concluded defiantly: “I am the president.
The point would possibly seem pedantic, the equivalent of insisting that the new millennium began on January 1, 2001. Possibly there would even be clever or not so bad reasons to tell as we do. “If we have to be a little inaccurate,” said Alexis. Coe, a presidential historian, “I would magnify Barack Obama with a user who reduces Benjamin Harrison to nullity. “
Tevi Troy, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and director of its Presidential Leadership Initiative, said he hopes that if Trump is re-elected, he will be known as the 45th and 47th president. But Troy added that “one portrait would suffice. “
Trump has already placed himself in rare ventures as president for the third time. If he wins the Republican nomination, he would target the likes of Cleveland, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon (who lost on his first attempt) as presidentswho were nominated 3 times through the primaries.
Cleveland, whose wife, Frances, allegedly asked the White House in its first game to keep the furniture for his return, is the most productive comparison for Trump, historians have suggested.
Although they have been other personalities, there are provocative parallels between Trump and Cleveland. The 1888 election—which Cleveland lost—produced a rare split between the Electoral College and the popular vote, making him the only president besides Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt. to win the popular vote 3 times. (Trump lost the popular vote twice by giant margins. The Electoral College placed him as the most sensible in 2016, but not in 2020. )
“For the 3 presidential elections Cleveland participated in, the country was divided very narrowly,” Beschloss said. to see the same phenomenon with Trump. “
In the 4 years between his two terms, Cleveland “acted like a Trump of his time in terms of campaigning,” Coe said. He gave nearly a dozen speeches a year as he tried to challenge the culture and continue to lead his party after the defeat, though he didn’t do so because of Harrison’s slander.
And Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University, noted with outrage that Trump in 2020, Cleveland “accepted his loss” in 1888.
In his third candidacy, Cleveland and the Democratic Party replaced his former running mate with his unwavering and active former deputy postmaster general. ambassador to Great Britain.
One can argue that Cleveland deserves to be regarded as two presidents because of the divergence in how he governed his two terms.
“Cleveland was different every time he was president, radically different,” Gerhardt said. “It was too passive the first time, too active the second. “
During his first term, from 1885 to 1889, Cleveland failed to rally Congress on his top policy priorities of lowering price lists and selling gold-backed currency (he set the veto record, with 414, nullifying many “private bills” drafted to obtain the veto. in the absence of congressional assistance, he turned to J. P. Morgan to finance silver for gold.
“He’s become much more competitive and belligerent, almost a remote personality,” Gerhardt said. “Arm other people with force, seeking to intimidate them. “
A highlight of Cleveland’s tenure came here in 1894, when he sent federal troops to blow up the striking railroad in Chicago, over the objections of the governor of Illinois, a fellow Democrat. postcard to Chicago,” Cleveland said at the time, “that card will be delivered. “
Gerhardt questioned whether having “four years to think about it” his interregnum influenced the perhaps overly proactive taste for the Cleveland administration after returning to the White House. We can all wonder the same thing about some other president and perhaps a longtime president.
It’s early, but several wealthy Republican donors are indicating they will walk away from Donald Trump.
In Trump’s global turnarounds, Jonathan Weisman writes that all good fortune belongs to him and that each and every failure is someone else’s fault: the 2018 midterm elections, his 2020 presidential defeat, and now the 2022 blues for Republicans.
Twelve Senate Republicans have joined Democrats in promoting the Respect for Marriage Act, putting federal protections for same-sex marriages on track to become law in the twilight of the Democratic-controlled Congress. Annie Karni has the details.
Thank you for On Politics and for subscribing to The New York Times. — Blake
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