Arizona Republicans are conducting a fake Audit of the 2020 election in the state’s major population center, Maricopa County. The purpose is to satisfy Donald Trump and his supporters that it applies unproven conspiracy theories to the recount process in the hope of “proving” Trump won the state.
Since the most direct way for the Trump movement to gain power would be for Trump himself to be elected again in 2024. We will discuss how a defeated ex-president running again. Of course, it’s also possible that a future Trump-style movement could be led by a pseudo-Trump suck-up like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, or Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The essential dissimilarity between Trump and other ex-presidents is the question of attitude. Former presidents appealed to democratic instincts, or their party leaders believed they were the most electable alternative, or they ran as third-party candidates to advance causes they believed were important.
Contrary, Trump would run in 2024 built on the assumption that power is his right, and something only he is allowed to hold. He has narcissistic symbiosis so many people believed that Trump would try to stage a coup if he lost the 2020 election. Many Trump supporters are also driven by their uncertain beginning of masculinity.
Trump has used totalitarian tactics to make an offbeat personality that his party is expected to slavishly follow, has become the first mandatory president to lose an election and refuse to accept the result, and has spread a Big Lie about his overthrow so that his followers will believe he has a right to be resumed to power. Most significantly, he urged his followers to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a futile attempt to overturn the election results.
However, the Trump movement represents a minority point of view and it doesn’t matter. If Trump stages a successful comeback, it won’t be viewed in normal political terms because he lost once and came back with all bad boy image.
Never happened previously in history. Remember Martin Van Buren, who had been narrowly elected over William Henry Harrison in 1836, and then lost to Harrison four years later. (Harrison went on to have the shortest tenure of any president, dying of severe infection after 31 days in office.) Because of Van Buren’s close ties to Democratic Party founder Andrew Jackson — who had chosen him as his running mate for Jackson’s second term — Van Buren was originally viewed as a leading contender for the 1844 nomination, at least until he came out against annexing Texas because it could spark a war with Mexico (as in fact it did). Democratic slaveholders wanted to annex Texas so they could expand slavery throughout the West, so Van Buren was suddenly no longer a viable candidate. Four years later, Van Buren was nominated as a third-party candidate by the Free Soil Party, which wanted to gradually abolish slavery by prohibiting its expansion into the newly acquired western territories.
The next ex-president’s example is Millard Fillmore, who had been elected vice president as Zachary Taylor’s running mate in 1848 and served nearly three years as president after Taylor’s death. The Whig Party didn’t even nominate Fillmore to run for a full term in 1852, and he wound up running in 1856 as the candidate of the Know-Nothing Party, which was opposed to immigration and especially the large numbers of Irish Catholics then arriving in the country. Fillmore did extremely well for a third-party candidate, winning more than 21 percent of the popular vote and Maryland’s electoral votes. Since the Whig Party had just collapsed, Fillmore had a hypothetical opportunity to turn the Know-Nothings into America’s second major party but did not even come close, with the newly-formed Republicans surging onto the scene. The Know-Nothings dissolved a few years later, as did any chance of Fillmore becoming president again.
After Fillmore, no ex-president actively tried for restoration for 20 years. Then, in the 1880 election, a powerful faction of Republicans wanted Ulysses S. Grant to be their nominee, even though the Civil War hero had already served two terms, leaving office in 1877. Rutherford B. Hayes, the president elected in the notorious compromise of 1876, was not running again, and Republicans needed a candidate. (The 22nd Amendment had not yet been passed, so there was no legal impediment to Grant running again.) Grant had been a great general but controversial president, due to a series of scandals that beset his administration, but was still a widely beloved figure. The Republican convention was sharply divided between Grant’s supporters and his opponents. Although Grant had more delegates than any other candidate, he could not muster a majority, and delegates eventually united around a compromise candidate, James Garfield, who went on to win the election.
In 1892, the above-referenced Grover Cleveland became the first and only ex-president to be elected to a second, non-consecutive term. There were several reasons why that worked: Democratic leaders trusted Cleveland’s conservative economic philosophy and thought he was electable, which was reasonable enough, since Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888, despite losing the election to Benjamin Harrison (grandson of William Henry Harrison), who had become unpopular amid an economic downturn. There were no primary elections to select a party nominee, and Cleveland was well known and well-liked by leading Democrats.
That brings us to Theodore Roosevelt, who had become president in 1901 after William McKinley’s assassination and was then elected in his own right in 1904. After leaving office in 1909, replaced by his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt became dissatisfied with Taft’s leadership and the Republican Party’s direction. He first tried to wrest the Republican nomination away from Taft in 1912, and when that failed, wound up running as the nominee of the Progressive Party. Roosevelt didn’t win the election but outperformed Taft in both popular and electoral votes — his 27 percent share of the popular vote remains the largest proportion won by any third-party candidate ever — and for better or worse was instrumental in the election of Woodrow Wilson.
These campaigns started the gradual emergence of the primary system probably growing cynicism among Americans about politicians perceived as “losers.” Other former presidents, including Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford, have considered running again, but none has done so.
Until, perhaps Donald Trump.
No ex-president was as dumb as Trump. All those were ambitious, but they never thought that presidency was his God-given right. None urged the kinds of party purges that Trump and his crew are leading against “disloyal” Republicans like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. None of them flat-out lied about the reason why they’d lost power or urged anti-democratic means to reclaim it.
Republicans are spending millions on voting restrictions. They hope to win elections simply by preventing certain voters from exercising their constitutional rights. Even if this gambit fails in the near term, Republicans have laid the foundations for overturning unfavorable outcomes.
It is completely imaginable that Trump could become the first ex-president since Cleveland to be elected to another term, given the possible belongings of these voter clampdown laws and the love of his supporters. Whether we will still have anything left that could be called a democracy, if that happens, is anyone’s guess.