One of the more annoying aspects of this week’s Presidents’ Day holiday (well, other than the notion that the February births of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are somehow excuses for shopping bonanzas): historians’ insistence upon ranking the forty-five men who have served as commander in chief.
One such example: this online survey from a year ago, by the Presidential Greatness Project, seeding America’s presidents from first to worst. Sadly, the survey reveals two biases, the first being one of recency: six of the top ten are from the last third of the republic’s nearly 250-year existence. Franklin Roosevelt, in fact, finished second—one spot behind Lincoln and one ahead of Washington, which doesn’t sit well with those who argue that Washington is arguably the most influential of all presidents, as he was the first to voluntarily leave office and set the precedent of a peaceful transfer of power.
The other bias: partisan bent. Dating back to Lincoln, nineteen Republicans have won the presidency. Yet only one—Dwight Eisenhower—cracked the top ten. Where’s Ronald Reagan? In sixteenth place, two spots behind Joe Biden (I kid you not). Five Democrats, meanwhile, finished in the top ten, with the lowest-ranked Democrat, Grover Cleveland, finishing in twenty-sixth place, some eight spots ahead of the arch-conservative Calvin Coolidge.
The funny thing about February and the American presidency: the year’s shortest month still managed to yield four birthdays—in addition to Washington and Lincoln: Reagan and William Henry Harrison. Which serves as a reminder that, in addition to not always being treated fairly and squarely by historians, former presidents also suffer from the slings and arrows of time itself. That’s especially true of Harrison, who’s mostly remembered for a catchy campaign slogan, a presidency the lifespan of a housefly, and a death that’s still something of a mystery.
In the spirit of counterprogramming, I’d like to suggest a different approach to the Presidents’ Day holiday. Rather than dwell on the obvious heroes, let’s choose a president from the “overlooked” pile—and not one who serves as an excuse to bash the incumbent (for example, this column linking Donald Trump to the failed presidency of Franklin Pierce—the parallel being that, before Trump, Pierce was the last president to speak boldly about territorial expansion, in his 1853 inaugural address).
My choice: James K. Polk, who served from 1845 to 1849 and ranked twenty-fifth among the presidencies (in case you’re curious, Pierce wound up only three spots ahead of Trump, who sits in last place). Why focus on Polk? For three reasons that are germane to the current presidency of Donald Trump.
First, Polk is perhaps foremost remembered for his association with “Manifest Destiny” and the idea of America’s inevitable expansion to the west. Under his watch, the republic acquired a then-independent Texas, and Mexico ceded more than 520,000 square miles of land—in all, some eleven future states that were the result of Polk’s aggressiveness. How he went about this would be a good primer for a present-day White House likewise enamored with the expansion of American influence (in Trump’s case, not so much west as north (adding Canada as a fifty-first state), south (“taking back” the Panama Canal), and northeast (taking Greenland from Denmark).
The second Polk-Trump parallel: agenda fulfillment.
Whereas one-term presidencies are synonymous with failure in that the incumbent was asked to leave office by popular demand, Polk’s presidency differs: he left voluntarily. His rationale: why stick around after he’d made good on the cornerstones of his campaign platform (western expansion, lowering tariffs, establishing an independent treasury)?
How this pertains to Trump: his White House might need to revisit campaign promises in the months ahead—once the flurry of executive orders subsides—and decide where to prioritize so that Trump can deliver a farewell address uttering some variation of “mission accomplished” (granted, that phrase has been known to backfire).
The final Trump-Polk parallel: post-presidencies.
Here, Polk’s story takes on a tragic twist. His was the briefest of all American post-presidencies, his death, at age fifty-three, occurring only 103 days after leaving Washington. Historians attribute his passing to a bout with cholera, perhaps worsened by the residual effects of working too hard the previous four years.
This is not to suggest that the seventy-eight-year-old Trump’s destiny is similarly manifest (Ronald Reagan, for example, left office in 1989 just seventeen days shy of his seventy-eighth birthday, and began a fifteen-year post-presidency). However, it does tie in to one of the shortcomings of a president who leaves office as an octogenarian: by the time of their death, there’s limited time for historians to reconsider the accomplishments of their time in office.
For some American presidents, absence from the political stage has made historians’ hearts grow fonder. Consider the saga of Harry Truman, who left office in 1953 after logging a historically awful 22 percent job-approval rating in 1952. Two decades later, with the nation traumatized by Vietnam, Watergate, and years of social unrest, a different Truman emerged on stage and screen (the one-man play and movie Give ’Em Hell, Harry) and song.
In the words of the pop group Chicago:
America needs you
Harry Truman
Harry could you please come home
Things are looking bad
I know you would be mad
To see what kind of men
Prevail upon the land you love
A similar fate befell Truman’s successor, Eisenhower. In 1962, only one year into his political retirement, a poll of historians placed Eisenhower a lackluster twenty-second among what at the time were thirty-three former presidents. Why the low ranking? Because Eisenhower was perceived as a sleepy, elderly caretaker, as opposed to the vibrancy of his younger successor’s New Frontier—for some, an “aging hero who reigned more than he ruled and lacked the energy, motivation, and political know-how to have a significant impact on events,” according to Fred Greenstein, author of The Hidden-Hand Presidency.
But fast-forward sixty years and it’s an “Ike” that historians now like (eighth overall in that 2024 online survey). Why the change of heart? Because academicians bothered to study previously sealed records at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and discovered, contrary to conventional thinking, that Eisenhower was in fact an active chief executive whose “hidden hand” was instrumental in achieving policy goals.
Will historians talk about a different side of Trump decades from now? That’s doubtful, given ideological leanings (this week’s holiday including “Not My Presidents’ Day” protests and at least one leftist pundit suggesting the commemoration should be canceled altogether). But at a minimum, the nation is unlikely to see a repeat of last month’s remembrance of Jimmy Carter.
Carter, of course, holds claim to the nation’s longest post-presidency, at 43 years and 343 days (by contrast, JFK’s lifespan was 46 years, 177 days). As such, his remembrance reflected not so much a complicated one-term presidency as his record of serving after leaving office. Just as when Richard Nixon died in April 1994, a post-presidency verging on twenty years since Watergate made for a mellower recollection that cast Nixon in a more cerebral and statesmanlike manner as opposed to dwelling on his downfall.
For Donald Trump, a “second first term” differs from that of the only other president to serve non-consecutive terms, Grover Cleveland. Like Cleveland, Trump returned to Washington last month with something of a clean slate, thanks to four years out of power.
But unlike Cleveland, who could have sought a third term in 1896 but didn’t (it would have been an uphill run, as his party was divided over tariff and currency policy), Trump can’t run again in 2028 thanks to the Twenty-Second Amendment. The thought of Trump finding a constitutional loophole and seeking a third term provides more grist for the Trump derangement syndrome mill.
What to do, then, with the clock already winding down on the Trump presidency? Why not invite the historians into the Oval Office and begin shaping how the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president would like to be remembered?
The problem with that idea: look at what skull sessions with historians did for the Biden presidency. Progressive academicians convinced a president who narrowly prevailed in 2020 (only 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin spared the nation from a 269-all tie in the Electoral College) that he could be the second coming of FDR and the dawn of a new era of federal expansion. This was not all that dissimilar from Barack Obama’s meeting with historians to kick around the concept that he was somehow synonymous with Lincoln.
Then again, if the second Trump presidency is anything like the first, academics won’t be in fashion. Whereas the spring of the first year of Biden’s presidency’s included time for meetings with historians, Trump set aside time in April 2017 for . . . the rock stars Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.
Historians they’re not. Then again, maybe one of them might compose a song someday that casts Trump in a warmer, nostalgic light.
Hey, it worked for Harry Truman.
