1945’s Brent Eastwood raised an interesting point in an article titled “The End of Donald Trump Has Arrived.” He noted that, of the five former U.S. presidents who have run for the presidency after having lost their previous bids for reelection, only one, Grover Cleveland, was successful.
Eastwood wrote:
But that is precisely what he is trying to accomplish – running again after losing the White House in a comeback.
The former president is doing what five other presidents have also attempted. Martin Van Buren, Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover tried it again after losing a presidential election.
Can Donald Trump make it happen? History says it won’t be easy.
Cleveland’s comeback, he points out, focused on economic policies. In particular, many voters blamed the Tariff Act of 1890, better known as the McKinley Tariff, for the Panic of 1893, one of the most serious financial crises in U.S. history.
It is possible that voters’ disgust with the current state of the economy will translate into a Trump victory. It can’t be denied that, until the pandemic hit, Trump presided over one of the most robust economies in memory.
Yet, nearly every poll shows President Biden ahead of the former president.
To be sure, Cleveland had his enemies. What he didn’t have to contend with was Cleveland Derangement Syndrome.
Irrational as Trump Derangement Syndrome may be, it is real. And for many voters, it trumps (no pun intended) Biden’s disastrous record. They are fine with a senile president whose every public appearance ends in humiliation. They’re okay with his corruption, his calamitous decision to abruptly withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, his administration’s reckless spending that led to the highest inflation in 40 years, his squandering of our energy independence and everything else – as long as they don’t have to deal with Donald Trump.
Eastwood concludes:
Therefore, Trump wants to be like Grover Cleveland – win the nomination based on issues that fire up the base and then eclipse that magic number of 46 or 47 percent to win enough electoral votes in the general. The problem is, Cleveland is the only president who has come back in this fashion. That should make Trump supporters anxious that history is not on their side.
I think Trump was one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had. But it is crucial that Republicans win back the White House in 2024. As illogical as TDS is, it’s not going away. And sadly, Trump is less likely to follow in Cleveland’s footsteps than he is to join the group of former presidents who lost their bids for reelection a second time.
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