After his announcement this Tuesday, Donald Trump has become part of a small group of six former U.S. presidents who, after having to leave the White House, are once again trying to return to it, and if he succeeds he will make history and be the second to do so since Stephen Grover Cleveland at the end of the 19th century.
While both share the same aspiration of returning to the White House, the style of one and the other is far from being similar even a little bit. Trump left office calling for rebellion and accusing without evidence that he was the victim of fraud; Cleveland, on the other hand, relinquished command peacefully after his term and even held an umbrella over the new president as he delivered his inaugural address.
He was called ‘Grover the Good’ for a reason after the reforms he carried out as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York. Like Trump, he lost the reelection amid accusations of electoral fraud, although in his case it was shown that there were irregularities in some states, especially in Indiana.
Cleveland ran for the Democratic Party for the first time in 1884. He won in a very close election by less than 54,000 votes. Four years later one of those anomalies that sometimes occur in the U.S. electoral system appeared, although he won the popular vote by some 100,000 ballots, he lost to his rival, Civil War General Benjamin Harrison.
Democrats initially questioned the results in New York but especially in Indiana, a state where Harrison was a senator and where Republican vote buying was later shown to have occurred. However, Cleveland lived up to his nickname and handed over the baton without any stridency, unlike a Donald Trump who still to this day has not acknowledged his 2020 defeat.
«I am willing to do everything in my power to make your access to office easy and pleasant,» Cleveland told Harrison in a letter that Donald Trump would never write to Joe Biden. In 1982, and with high approval ratings, he ran again and won by nearly three percentage points.
THE OTHER FIVE The first of these was Martin Van Buren for the Free Soil Party–a Democratic splinter–in 1848. For many, his candidacy was as much about retaining power within his party as it was about returning to the White House.
Next was his reelection rival, Millard Fillmore, followed by Republican Ulysses S. Grant, who after two consecutive terms between 1869 and 1877 failed to be nominated in 1880 for a third.
After Cleveland it was the turn of perhaps the most recognized candidate on this list, Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909. Despite broad public support, he decided not to run for a third term. However, increasingly angry with his successor William Howard Taft, he decided to challenge him in the 1912 elections under the acronym of the Progressive Party.
He partially achieved his goal, defeating Howard Taft in those elections, but it was the Democrat Woodrow Wilson who won. Roosevelt’s last presidential race turned out to be almost fatal after he was miraculously saved from a gunshot when he was about to give a speech in Milwaukee.
The last to try was Herbert Hoover in 1940. However, in the collective imagination still lingered the Great Depression he had to face when he was president of the United States between 1929 and 1933.
THE TRUMP CASE History says that Trump’s hypothetical return would be a historic event given the poor track record of success of the other former presidents.
Like Martin Van Buren’s second candidacy, Trump could be interested in returning to the White House to also consolidate his power at the head of the most conservative movement in American politics and thereby shape a Republican Party in which there are more and more voices questioning the de facto leadership he has assumed in recent years.
Revenge against his political rivals is also not ruled out after a convulsive mandate full of criticism against him and two political trials that he had to face, making history here too, coming out of them with flying colors.
Time will tell if Trump becomes the second exception in another episode of U.S. history or if, on the contrary, he joins the rest of the select losers he has always disowned.
