This President is Not Special

The current presidency is of a different type than anything that has come before. On this, if on nothing else, the president’s detractors and supporters agree most vehemently. This president is so unique that he requires a higher order of loyalty or a higher order of resistance, depending on your inclinations. Though the fact has rocketed into the news in the last twenty-four hours as an anonymous official has outlined extraordinary measures taken on behalf of national integrity, this reality has been understood since the beginning. It has been demonstrated by the apoplectic popular convulsions on the left and has been articulated brazenly by the then-candidate’s himself when he suggested that he could shoot someone in the street without losing a supporter. In the time since, he has had many moments that have seemed to be the public relations equivalent of cold-blooded public homicide, and he has proven more prophetic than deluded in his estimation of the public’s loyalty. In Sean Spicer’s memorable phrase, this president is “a unicorn riding a unicorn over a rainbow.”

But he isn’t. Not really. Not by any appreciable measure. This president is not only not special, not different, not deserving of extraordinary loyalty or rebuke, he is positively typical. His ascendance and style have contravened what Americans had led themselves recently to believe was the “normal” president, but when considered against the canon of distinguished gentlemen who came before him, this president is not unusual.

But wait, you say…

• He’s governing without a popular mandate. This perhaps caused the most immediate outrage back in 2016, when it became evident that the person whom most people had voted for would not be president. Yet this has a long and fairly consistent history. Four previous presidents have been elected after losing the popular vote, including in the antebellum (John Quincy Adams), postbellum (Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison), and contemporary (George W. Bush) eras. The 2016 election wasn’t even the largest margin of victory for a candidate who never ascended to the office. JQA lost to Andrew Jackson by more than 10% but still managed to outmaneuver him in the electoral bureaucracy. In every case, Republicans (or their proto-Whig ancestors) have played the game better than more popular Democrats. With an example as recently as 2000 (and involving her own husband’s successor), you would think that Hillary Clinton would have paid more attention.But that’s the election; what about the man?
• He’s a philanderer. Sure, and he did what he needed to in order to keep those women quiet and to keep them from influencing the election. If he’s different from other president’s in this regard, it is only that he wasn’t quite as skilled at keeping those affairs secret, though this likely has more to do with the information age than any particular skill on his part. (Consider, for example, Bill Clinton as a parallel.) Other philandering presidents have been careful to keep in on the low. Such was the case with Warren G. Harding, whose affairs weren’t discovered until after his death. Jefferson’s sexual exploits are still being debated, though most agree that he didn’t start his affair with his wife’s teenage slave/half-sister until after he became a widower. You be the judge of how that would play in an Alabama special election, but it’s worth pointing out that thanks to the compromise powers of fellow future president James Madison, at most Jefferson only had 3/5th of an affair.Of course, the standard line now is that it’s not the sex but the pay-off that is the problem with the current president. After all…
• He’s corrupt and surrounds himself with corrupt officials. Corruption is endemic to government, a point I always try to impress upon my students. Forging private-public alliances to further your own power and interests is just effective statesmanship, and the borders for where that ceases to be moral/legal and becomes corrupt are historically recent and entirely arbitrary. Even so, American exceptionalism is such that the US has produced its fair share of especially corrupt presidents and administrations. It’s hard to name a single past president where private finance didn’t produce scandal. Bush II had the specter of Halliburton, Clinton had Whitewater, Richard Nixon had Watergate, and Harding had the Teapot Dome. (Have I gone far enough back to lose you yet?) Speculation about John F. Kennedy’s mafia ties have at least the superficial ring of familiarity when placed next to the current president’s ties to Russian oligarchs. Sometimes the president himself is brought down by this corruption–they got Nixon after all and nearly nailed Clinton on a technicality–but mostly there are a lot of high level incriminations, resignations, and convictions. Scooter Libby and John Poindexter went down for proper crimes; they followed Albert Bacon Fall, the first member of the cabinet to go to prison. Perhaps more telling for those worried about presidential pardoning power is the readiness of future administrations to rehabilitate these figures. Bush II had already commuted Libby’s sentence, but the current administration pardoned him outright. This wasn’t new though; Poindexter’s conviction held for barely survived the year before they were overturned on a technicality. Fall served his time: one whole year for conspiracy and bribery. Earlier patsies didn’t need to be acquitted, since they were merely censured rather than charged. Corruption, scandals, resignations, and convictions are a great American political pastime, and few are immune. Even squeaky clean preacher, school teacher, and Union General James A. Garfield got embroiled in the Credit Mobilier scandal that erupted in the midst of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency.Yet the current president isn’t just flouting the law…
• He’s actively corrupting the justice system to serve his own ends. Lindsey Graham said in his opening statement for the now ongoing Brett Kavanaugh hearings that if Democrats want to pick judges they need to win elections. (See point #1.) That bit of gritty realism rings true in America politics, and past presidents have been as or more willing to actively “pervert” the justice system to serve their own ends. The practice actually stands at the beating heart of American jurisprudence, going all the way back to the primordial Supreme Court case: Marbury v. Madison. Most of us learned this in school as the case where the court established its right to judicial review (cleverly by refusing to review that case). Lost in that explanation is the last ditch appointment of a group of Federalist judges by outgoing president John Adams to keep the seats from being filled by his ideological rival, Jefferson. Among the intended appointments was William Marbury, a partisan (in today’s terminology) of the most vocal and unabashed type. Jefferson, exploiting a procedural error, instructed Madison to ignore the appointments so he could appoint his own partisans to the bench. It puts the recent stalling of Barack Obama’s nominee in perspective, to be sure.The courts always serve the ideological interests of the president who appoints them (and arguably that is precisely what the Constitution intended by giving the president appointment powers). When they don’t, past presidents have been happy to press their case outside the “normal” rules of civil administration. When Andrew Jackson didn’t like a Supreme Court ruling against him, he ignored it and apocryphally said the court had made its decision but couldn’t make him enforce it. When Franklin Roosevelt saw many of his key New Deal provisions struck down by the Supreme Court, he turned to court packing in a failed attempt to force the justice system to do his will. Say what you want about presidential tweets about the courts or about the Merrick Garland controversy or the suitability of Brett Kavanaugh; all of that is happening within the confines of US law. When the president starts ignoring or packing the courts, then…well, even then he’s in presidential company.

  But…

• He’s cozying up to tyrants. The same argument was levied against Adams by Jeffersonians who resented the thawing of American relations with Great Britain. (The British, recall, were the arch-tyrants of the American imagination in the late eighteenth century.) This, of course, was long before the United States began to cozy up to the tyrants that it had put in place throughout Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southwest Asia. But I guess those tyrants are okay because they’re our tyrants.But…
• The Russians helped elect him; they even funneled him money. Would you prefer it was the China?But…
• He’s filled the government with incompetent toadies and family members. JFK caught flak for appointing his little brother as Attorney General, but that is only because the US had needed only a generation or so to forget its traditional spoils system of government appointments. Until the late nineteenth century (and thanks in part to the assassination of Garfield), the convention in US politics had been to scrub the government clean in each new administration and fill all positions with loyal cronies. Turn of the century reform only went so far, ending the process of a clean sweep but leaving available the highest levels of government for a reboot after every administration. Presidents as recent as Bush II have been accused vocally of cronyism, which it turns out is just another word for presidential appointment power. Invoking Graham again (and again from the recent hearing), where exactly do people expect the president to get his appointees from?But..
• He’s a racist. Never mind all the slave holding presidents. Never mind Woodrow Wilson screening “Birth of a Nation” in the White House. Let’s talk about the most saintly president in US history: Abraham Lincoln (with the big hat). The Great Emancipator, for all the positive effects his actions had for slaves in his times, was not any great warrior for racial justice. He was, as a free soiler, an avowed racist elected by racists to achieve a racist task, something else I struggle to impress upon students. If that strikes you as an offensive suggestion, take the following quote from Lincoln’s 1854 speech at Peoria:
  

  If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.…What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.

  Lincoln was an advocate of colonization, and he makes his point clearly here. He’d prefer to send African-Americans ‘back where they came from’ and could not abide the idea that they should be politically or socially equal. Actual advocates of racial justice at the time understood this, and commented that the worst thing southerners could do for their own cause was to assassinate Lincoln. Historians agree: Reconstruction was more radical in Lincoln’s absence than it would have been in his presence. In other words, while not ALL presidents have been vocal racists, it’s safe to say that most have been (even the one’s we like to pretend weren’t).

  But it’s not just about words. Lincoln freed the slaves, but…

• He’s actively imprisoning brown children just for looking different. With some modification for the racial color-coding “white” people are so fond of, the same is true of many US presidents (including, again, some of American’s most revered). Think of the little Cherokee children imprisoned, deported, and killed (directly and indirectly) by Jackson. Think about the little Japanese-American children imprisoned and impressed into labor by FDR. They got off better than the tens of thousands of Japanese children who were among the civilian populations deliberately targeted by Harry Truman for execution. Republicans have explicitly embraced the precedent (if not the language) of Dwight Eisenhower’s mass deportation scheme, “Operation Wetback.” They’re also (situationally) fond of pointing out that deportations ballooned to a then record high under Obama. US presidents (and the government in general) have been imprisoning, impressing, and executing people of color (children and adults) since plantation owners first populated this country. It’s the American genesis narrative. Jamestown settlers and Puritans said, “Let there be whites.” And it was so. And it was very, very bad (at least if you’re of African, indigenous American, or Latin American descent).But…

But nothing. There is no sufficiently general complaint about the current president that cannot be established in firm presidential precedent. Sure, you could say, “No president has ever tweeted out ‘covfefe” before,” and you’d be right. But there have been inarticulate presidents in the past. For every Calvin Collidge wryly quipping “You lose,” there is a Lyndon B. Johnson making a phone call about his testicles. There have been demagogues and dimwits and puppets in the presidency before, meaning that the current president is in good company no matter which of those you happen to think he is.

None of which is to say that the president is a good man or a good president. By all accounts this presidency is a disaster–whether you think that is because of the man at the helm or because of conspiratorial opposition by Democrats, the deep state, or pedophile pizza shop owners. The president has misbehaved morally, politically, and in all likelihood legally. But this, more than anything is what makes him typical.

As a historian, I look for precedents to cite, but it is important to remember that even without particular precedents the president is clearly “normal” from a Christian perspective. In fact, this president’s gross immorality and the corruption, scandal, violence, and deceit console rather than concern me as a Christian. It is encouraging to see borne out in such an indisputable way David Lipscomb’s observation that “the rule of justice, right and virtue in political affairs is a hallucination.” Our historical ignorance and moral lethargy has led us to believe that civil government (or at least our civil government) is at its heart good. Like an unruly child deserving of our love and guidance, it just needs moral intervention from attentive and engaged Christian stewards to return to the straight and narrow.

It was never on the straight and narrow, and it is dangerous to forget that. There is a tendency to think of the government like we might a person, as if it were imperfect but redeemable. Always remember that Jesus Christ came to earth to redeem people from their sins, but the Bible offers a very different message about civil governments. They are not being redeemed, they are being replaced. When history is brought to its culmination, “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (Dan. 2.44).

I hope the president gets redeemed (if he isn’t already). In my best moments, I know I should pray for this. I know I should also pray for him as a ruler, not that he might accomplish his agenda and not that he might be thwarted in it. I should pray that he will govern in such a way as to allow me to continue to live in peace and quiet (1 Tim. 2.2), something that has thus far been possible for me (though clearly not for others). What I don’t pray for is the salvation of the US government. It doesn’t need to be saved from this president. This president is its culmination–historically and morally the distillation of everything it stands for and has always stood for.

It’s as if we’ve wiped the lipstick off the pig and are appalled to find something utterly new before us. Let’s not kid ourselves. He’s not special. He’s just a pig.