close
close

first Drop

Com TW NOw News 2024

    • Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump both got two terms, but not in a row
    news

    Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump both got two terms, but not in a row

    Vaseline Posted on

    With this week’s presidential campaign victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump finds himself in rare company. He joins Grover Cleveland as the second U.S. CEO elected to non-consecutive terms.

    Trump – the country’s 45th president from 2017 to 2021 – is now set to serve a second term, this time as the 47th president.

    The first was Grover Cleveland, who served as the 22nd president from 1885 to 1889, followed by a second stint in the White House as the 24th from 1893 to 1897.

    And besides the century-plus separating their eras, the two men had differing views on tariffs.

    Who was Grover Cleveland?

    Born in New Jersey in 1837 and raised in upstate New York, Cleveland practiced law in Buffalo before beginning a meteoric rise through the political ranks. In 1881, Cleveland, who campaigned against corruption as a reformer, was elected mayor of Buffalo. A year later he was elected governor of New York and in 1884 he was nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president.

    Cleveland, again running on an anti-corruption platform, defeated James Blaine, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state, to become the first Democratic president since the Civil War. Cleveland overcame a scandal in which he admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock with a woman named Maria Halpin in 1874.

    Cleveland won his first presidential term with support from reform Republicans known as Mugwumps, and his tenure would see both the Haymarket labor riots in Chicago in 1886 and the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, the first federal attempt to regulate the railroad industry .

    In 1886, at the age of 49, Cleveland became the only president to marry while in office, marrying 21-year-old Frances Folsom. His first presidency was marked by other firsts: he was the first president to have a child while in the White House and, according to historian Louis Picone, the first to have the White House Christmas tree fitted with electric lights.

    His administration also courted controversy when it blocked multiple bills that offered pensions to Civil War veterans and seed grain distribution funds to drought-stricken farmers. Of the latter, he said federal aid “weakens the strength of our national character.”

    Ryan McMahon, an assistant professor of political science at San Antonio College in Texas, said one of the goals of Cleveland’s 1888 re-election campaign was to reduce the high tariffs imposed by Republicans and supported by the wealthy, despite opposition of his party.

    “Grover Cleveland was a great reformer as a Democrat, and he wanted to lower rates because middle-class people pay those costs as an increased tax,” McMahon said.

    Cleveland won the 1888 popular vote but ultimately lost the Electoral College to Republican challenger Benjamin Harrison, whose campaign was backed by wealthy elites who would become known as robber barons, McMahon said.

    Four years later, Cleveland, who remained a prominent figure in the Democratic Party, was again nominated to run for president. He defeated Harrison with a campaign promise to reduce high tariffs.

    During his second term, this time as the nation’s 24th president, Cleveland was embattled almost from the start. His first year in office was marked by the economic crisis known as the Panic of 1893, and the following year thousands of railroad workers embarked on what became known as the Pullman Strikes, which crippled large parts of the railroad industry and forced Cleveland to deploy federal military forces to put. troops to break the work stoppage.

    “The economy was a disaster when he came in,” McMahon said. “He was cutting rates again, but the U.S. Treasury Department was in desperate need of money and so couldn’t accomplish what he set out to do.”

    In 1896, Cleveland enjoyed little support even within his party and chose to retire rather than seek re-election.

    While Trump will be the second president to serve non-consecutive terms, there are others who have failed to return to the White House after spending time as a former president.

    Martin Van Buren, the nation’s eighth president from 1837 to 1841, ran an unsuccessful campaign in 1848 as a member of the Free Soil Party. Millard Fillmore, president from 1850 to 1853, accepted the nomination of the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, in 1856 but was not elected. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, who had served until 1909, sought a third term as president, unsuccessfully as a third-party candidate.

    Can Trump run again in 2028?

    Not under the 22nd Amendment.

    A 2009 Congressional Research Service paper authored by national government specialist Thomas H. Neale notes that the four-year term for presidents and vice presidents is codified in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

    Until Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to a third term in 1940, American presidents had upheld a long tradition of a self-imposed two-term limit, Neale wrote in his paper, “Presidential Terms and Tenure: Perspectives and Proposals for Change.” Since 1789, he said, only seven of 31 presidents served consecutive terms until Roosevelt, elected to a fourth term in 1944, began that term before dying in 1945.

    Roosevelt’s longevity led to the introduction of the 22i.e 1951 amendment, which stipulates that no president can be elected more than twice.

    “You would need a constitutional amendment to change that, and that is a long, painful and difficult process,” McMahon said. “It’s extremely unrealistic to think this is happening.”

    Presidential historian Edward Frantz, chairman of the history department at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana, had a final comment.

    Considering the historic nature of Trump’s victory, Frantz said, “The biggest winner last night besides Donald Trump is Grover Cleveland and anyone who asks about him.”

    Vaseline
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like