THE REMAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 2024: A Study in Acting by Owen Dudley Edwards

As an historian of American politics, who followed John F Kennedy round the USA on his election campaign in the 60s, is there a writer with a longer view of the Presidency than Irishman Owen Dudley Edwards? – It takes a bit of wit too, to be wider than the current President-Elect. Here is the perennial Edwards, as always, delivering more – as Marx said of Lincoln – than he promised.

 Propaganda Begins — and Ends — At Home.

                — Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘The Embers of Easter’, Irish Times, Easter Week 1966                                     

PREFACE

You cannot hope

to bribe or twist,

thank God! the

 British journalist.

   But, seeing what        

   the man will do

    unbrib’d, there’s

     no occasion to.

            — Humbert Wolfe (1886-1940), The Uncelestial City (1930)

The United States Presidential Election 2024 has as usual prompted prophecies of ecstacy and disaster busily concealing their kinship to so many of their quadrennial predecessors, apart from the candidate actually beaten by three millions on the popular vote by a woman in Election 2016 and the candidate allegedly winning Election 2020 which he lost [see BOX 1]. 

UK TV and press commentators in 2024 might seem to have vanquished so many of their  forbears in banality, but do they surpass the condescending ignorance of David Dimbleby?   And can they really be products of the same media that once starred supreme analysts of US politics Denis Brogan, Alistair Cooke, Marcus Cunliffe, Charles Wheeler, Godfrey Hodgson, Martin Walker, Tim Cornwell?

            Inevitably UK politicians and press regurgitate the Special Relationship.   Perhaps they might try their hand at classical antecedents.   Do they fancy it an Oedipus complex with the USA embracing its mother?   Or is it Orestes murdering his mother, or Medea killing her children?   The UK burning Washington DC to the ground in 1814?   The proximity of war in 1844, 1861, 1921?   As Lady Knox observes in the Irish R.M. tales by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, blood’s not only thicker than water, it’s also a great deal nastier.

The American Presidency was founded in the Constitution of 1787-78, climaxing  the ideological writings of a Revolution of the Intellectuals whose controversial and collective brilliance are probably unequalled in human history.   But it derived from human beings most of whom had grown up as subjects of a monarchy which began the eighteenth century under a Dutchman subordinating all other concerns to the security of his native land, then inherited by a woman whose father had been evicted from his throne and whose grandfather had been beheaded, then by George I and George II who infinitely preferred their own Electorate of Hanover and could not speak the English language.  

George III differed from his predecessors in actually being interested in his  American colonies beyond mapwork and profits.   The rebels ultimately declaring  against him, far from unanimous in the progress, extent and maintenance of their rebellion, finally asserted their independence on 4 July 1776 as their 13 individual  identities now calling themselves States, choosing as military strategy to be united, and realising their survival depended on that Union.   They won their war by temporary alliance with their traditional enemy France.   A British-American version of monarchy seemed the obvious basis for their Union’s peacetime maintenance, with knowledge of what to seek and what to avoid provided by scholarly study, European tradition, and popular mythology taken for history.

  They needed to identify themselves by advertising themselves chiefly among themselves, and built their Constitution around their most obvious common hero, George Washington, born and perpetually resident on American soil, famous and honoured throughout the world for having defeated their former masters and then rejecting the multi-thousand-year tradition established by victorious conquerors when he abdicated the supreme command after peace had been signed in 1783. 

 The final burst of rebellion before declaring their freedom was fanned in 1776 itself by Thomas Paine’s wonder-working Common Sense where he cited God (I Samuel8) on the uselessness and artificiality of kings, their use of power to create artificial and self-enriching class distinctions, and the silliness of following fashions.  Americans often read, learned, and performed their Shakespeare, whose Julius Caesar explained its title as showing a victor assassinated for trying to establish a kingship with himself as king, and their ancestors recalled how their executed king had been replaced by a tyrannical victor Oliver Cromwell, and another king by a Dutch ruler previously at war with them and then expelling his uncle and father-in-law whose name when victorious Duke of York had rebaptised the Dutch city of New Amsterdam and its great hinterland New Holland.  

But New York as a State and Washington’s Virginia as another had to maintain their own identities and those of the other eleven through the Constitution declaring its existence in the name of its people.   So its Congress would have two houses, one fund-raising by popularly elected citizens of each state as in Britain, one representing the States and reasserting the integrity of their identity by two Senators, while the President would be chosen by Electors selected from each State.   As the country grew larger and its States’ electorates more democratic, it had all the more reason to make sure it was centrifugal and centripetal.

A current fashion questions the US Constitution whose Electoral College system  occasionally conflicts with the popular vote (1824-5, 1888-9, 2000-01, 2016-17).    Some persons recommended the abolition of the Constitution itself, Donald Trump among them before deciding to profit by its uses in his advancement.   Anti-American sentiment in the UK derives partly from Left-wing jealousy of American Utopian claims and Right-wing deeper if more muted resentment of US repudiation of the British Empire while themselves open-jawed for American money.   It bears its own historical anomalies:   Winston Churchill is declared its symbol, what with his American mother, but his obviously American genius for self-publicity won him Tory hatred for so much of his life.  

UK Left and Right may imagine that a paperless wordless constitution is somehow superior to the American creation of 1787-88, but such virginical complacency is slightly impaired by UK problems of devolution and forms of national identity.   When he was anti-Constitution, Mr Trump had this logic on his side:  if the USA tried to abolish its electoral college by constitutional amendment(s) the entire Constitution would probably fragment in the process, and the Union soon after.   Anyhow the once and future President Trump has no further reason to complain of the Electoral College.   It is not needed in 2024 to elect him despite the popular vote; it is not needed in 2024 to enhance his illusory fraud of having won States whose counts he sought to have falsified.   This time, he has won honestly, being neither a woman, nor a person of colour, which when combined were the decisive factors in Election 2024.  

            In its innocence of the events to transpire in the next 24 hours, the [London, formerly Manchester] Guardian’s leading editorial on 5 November began:

The last two presidential elections have raised serious questions about the strength of American democracy and, unfortunately, today’s election may deepen these concerns.   Central to this issue is the electoral college, which allows Americans to elect their president indirectly through state-appointed electors.

In the real world, it is the Americans who do the allowing, having on 4 July 1776 allowed themselves as individual States to unite while declaring then and in the later Constitution that their constituent power comes from themselves, henceforth dispensing with the British monarch whose serious questions about the strength of American democracy had denied its existence by force of arms and mercenaries for the 15 months before the 1776 Declaration..

            The editorial concluded:

It shouldn’t need the nightmare of a second Trump Presidency to reform this antidemocratic relic of the 18^th century.

We will have the nightmare anyway, thanks to the voting for electors (or guardians) chosen by the individual states alongside the popular vote (4^th smallest majority in history).

Pluck first from your eye your own foundation of authority, the antidemocratic relic of the 11^th century on the throne which recently provided the UK for its Chief Executive (or Prime Minister) the Rt Hon. Liz Truss. 

Meanwhile the Presidency remains its own leading form of propaganda.

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WHAT NEXT?

On 20 January 2025 in the United States Senate in Washington DC, Vice-President Kamala Harris will perform her last official duty, viz. to announce that the votes of the Electoral College have resulted in the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA over herself.   The Chief Justice will then swear in former President Trump.  

Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio will then announce that Donald Trump is ineligible to serve as President, since he has already served two terms, for which the chief witness is Mr Trump himself as frequently testified by him in public and private on frequent occasions sometimes before large bodies of US citizens some of whom by word, gesture and vociferation have homologated his claim of second election as President in 2020.   Under the 22^nd Amendment to the US Constitution ex-President Trump is therefore ineligible to serve what would be a third term.   Senator Vance, having already been declared by the Electoral College to have been validly elected Vice-President, must now become President.

(This is a mathematical theorem rather than a prediction or pseudo-science fiction, all the more mathematical in inviting Euclid’s favourite punch-line: ‘which is absurd’.   Its possible origins lie in the history of Presidential Election 2024 and its predecessors.)   

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TO RULE OR TO REIGN

Previous Presidents have propagandised themselves by enactments of roles.   George Washington elected President in 1789 acted the role of himself, as specified under Article II of the Constitution which when being drafted was identified with him as the model by one delegate, and contradicted by none, least of all from Washington himself presiding silently throughout the entire creation of the Constitution.   He carried out the performance to the end of his second Presidential term having previously declined availability for a third, and delivered a Farewell Address warning against excessive prolonged alliance with any other power.  

Few other Presidents followed his lead in the Farewell Address, the most  notable being another overwhelmingly popular General, Dwight Eisenhower, who on 17 January 1961 the eve of his departure warned against the USA’s entrapment in ‘the military-industrial complex’ on which he of all persons was best fitted to speak.   His admirable warning has never been followed up by his successors.   It was his greatest performance. 

Both were consciously performing in the moral certainty of their value as  prophets bequeathing their mantles, even of knights finally laying down their swords.   But their testimony was serious, far from mere ceremony.   Washington feared that the USA might become diplomatically entangled with mutually destructive revolutionary regimes and alliances.   Eisenhower feared that future governments might be insidiously ensnared into stockpiling unnecessary and uncontrollable nuclear weapons.    Neither rated themselves of superior intellect, but both could sometimes see superior intellects outsmarting themselves.    Both understood military mentalities where laymen might not.  

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                     Those trees in whose dim shadow

                        The ghastly priest doth reign,

            The priest who slew the slayer,

                        And shall himself be slain.

                                    Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘The Battle of Lake Regillus’ (1842)

———————————————————————————————————————————————-

THE GENERAL FOR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

Aspirants for the Presidency might assume Washington’s military mastery was his most obvious characteristic to follow.  Generals might seem to have an inside track.   They  had trial runs acting the role of commander.  Elections 1828, 1832, 1840, 1848, 1868, 1872, 1880, 1888, 1952, 1956 were won by generals.   The history of regime overthrow down the world’s centuries normally projected generals into power, usually shortly-lived. 

 But it was not the sacrosanct Washington who won responses akin to those  later bestowed on President Trump.   The second President revered as a hero before election and service for two terms was another General, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, victor of the Battle of New Orleans, conqueror of Florida.    Winner of the popular vote in Election 1824, winner of popular vote and electoral college in Elections 1828 and 1832, his advent was hailed with horror across the civilised world.   The Americans might have been rebels and traitors in British eyes, but at least Washington, the Adamses, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were gentlemen Presidents.   The Scotsman, for example, saw Jackson’s possible election in November 1828 as calamitous chiefly owing to the low manners, impoverished garments, and repulsive habits of his followers identified as a rabble.   It was as though an American edition of the French Revolution was en route led by a General originally from frontier Ireland, and that Napoleon had emerged from Corsican conspiracy.   That Jackson was Irish must have made matters worse (his parents and siblings were all Irish-born and maybe so was he).   The Scotsman in 1828 would remember the violence of Irish rebels as reported in 1798.   Its horror at Jackson’s imminence anticipates the global response to Mr Trump.   We have been here before.

            Democracy argued, bullied and fought its way into legislative existence and took Andrew Jackson for its symbol.   It waxed stronger by exploitation and extermination of native Americans, the ‘Indians’ whom Jackson certainly hated with genocidal rhetoric and military slaughter;  it also profited (as he did) by the slaves whose cotton labours built American Southern wealth.  As free land unrolled for whites across the continent European immigrants melted in: Jackson among the latest intake felt no need to attack incomers against whose twentyfirst-century equivalent Donald Trump (himself another product of newcomers) harangued in wild vicious fairy-tales.    Jackson knew the popular affection for stories of sexy male David killing the giant Goliath, and translated it into his war against what he called the ‘monster’, the national banking system controlling an economy his backers greedily sought to liberalize.   His two terms were over when the resultant depression engulfed the USA, but Wall Street developed the real financial stranglehold released by Jackson’s veto of the national Bank’s recharter.  

Two centuries later with world population devouring its way to survival, Trump could revive mythological economic rhetoric once again feeding on real racial antipathy enriched by gender warfare, and these targets were in fact the monsters who made Election 2024 much more inevitable in result than any poll wizards and jobholding strategists anticipated.   Like Jackson, Trump reached his electoral majorities by the sheer vagueness of his crusades.   His sidekicks were deluding themselves in empty contrivances to win the victory already awaiting its nativity.

            The American Revolution had won its breast-feeing from conspiracy-mania — such as that George III might establish the Anglican church as official American colonial religion —  but what was unarguable was that the intellectuals and Washingtons knew far more about the country they demanded to govern than did the London-based plutocrats and their huntin’, shootin’, and wenchin’ stooges posturing in Parliament, against whom the real rebellion developed two/three thousand miles away.    Jackson’s rebellion was against local rulers who did know what they were doing.  

Trumpeana expanded in pub-bore yattering against revolutions which had  already happened:   a black man had become President by popular vote and Electoral College in 2008, a white woman had already shattered the glass ceiling of anti-feminism by winning the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million.   Both had won partly by stepping outside acting: Obama really was black, Hillary Clinton really was a woman.   They acted their way within their roles to assert archetype, he with the preaching dignity of Martin Luther King, she with that of Eleanor Roosevelt.  These things had happened, but by 2024 voters with shrinking funds might alleviate their frustrations by secretly resenting that they had.     Trump’s revolution depended above all on impolite, meaningless words:   it gave the electorate the cheapest seats on a time machine stuck into reverse.   As such, it bettered its own running dogs.

ACTION!

              On 27 June 2024 81-year-old President Joseph Biden debated against 78-year-old ex-President Donald Trump (whom he had defeated in Election 2020 by a majority of 7 million votes in a total of 81 million, the largest in history, 4 million above what would be Trump’s total in Election 2024).  In that 2024 debate President Biden ‘misspoke himself’, accidentally giving wrong names while blatantly meaning otherwise.   In Elections 2016 and 2020 Mr Trump had consistently and deliberately given wrong names, usually offensive, to opponents.  

Problems in Presidential speech are as old as the Republic.   President Thomas  Jefferson was more or less inaudible and sent rather than spoke his required annual Messages to Congress, as did successors for over a century until Woodrow Wilson took his Princeton University classroom lecturing into the Presidency.   President Dwight David Eisenhower spoke in sentences sometimes incapable of grammar or literacy, sometimes deliberately so.   President Gerald Ford denied in Election1976 that the Kremlin had any influence on Communist Poland.  

On 21 July 2024 President Biden announced (as had many predecessors) that he would not run for office for a second term.  Instead he endorsed as Democratic Presidential candidate Vice-President  Kamala Harris.   This threw Republican ranks into disorder as they turned their propaganda against a middle-aged candidate who was neither a man nor a white.    Ultimately, those were the cause of her defeat.    

But meanwhile Trumpeans in and out of Congress combed the dump for other issues against her, prompting a call for her impeachment by Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana (having ousted his fellow-Republican Kevin McCarthy of California from the Speaker’s Chair in October 2023).   Impeachment of  the Vice-President (or the President) must pass the House before trial of the accused in the Senate with two-thirds needed to convict.   Speaker Johnson demanded that Vice-President Harris be impeached, found guilty and removed from office for failing to declare President Joseph Biden incapable of governing after Biden had stated he himself would not seek re-election.   

            The logic of this had certain ludicrous attractions.    Had Biden resigned not just as candidate for re-election but from his uncompleted term as current President, Kamala Harris would have become President at once, as Ford did when Nixon resigned from the Presidency on 9 August 1974.    But if she were forced into resigning the Vice-Presidency with no time to choose a successor she would be automatically replaced as Vice-President and/or as President by the next in line under law, in this case the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the public-spirited Mike Johnson.

            Congressman Gerald Ford as a young Congressman was asked in 1953 what constitutes grounds for impeachment and answered, a majority of the House of Representatives.    Twenty years after, when Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate scandal was seeping into view, others remembered that.  

            Speaker Mike Johnson in Election 2024 overlooked another item in the Constitution.   Article I Section 3 states:

The Vice President of the United States shall be the President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all impeachments.   When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation.   When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: and no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

             Article II Section 4 states:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

But who presides at the impeachment of the Vice-President?   The answer is evidently Himself.

            Perhaps Speaker Johnson may have read a little more of the Constitution than  previously.    Perhaps one of his clerks did.   It certainly explains why no attempt was audibly bruited to impeach Vice-President Spiro Agnew in 1973 and instead he was allowed to resign on 10 October pleading no contest to charges of income tax evasion before a district Court of Maryland (where he had been Governor before being chosen by Nixon for his running-mate in1968).  

TO ACT — OR NOT TO ACT!

            Speaker Johnson based his grounds of impeachment on Kamala Harris’s failure to comply with the 25^th Amendment ratified 1967, which requires that:

Whenever the Vice-President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of  the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice-President shall immediately  assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Eight Presidents have died in office:   Richard Nixon resigned the office of President in 1974.   The Constitution never went beyond the Vice-President becoming Acting President.   William Harrison — having been sworn in as per requirement on 4 March 1841 (only changed to 20 January from 1936) — died on 4 April 1841.  His Vice-President John Tyler of Virginia swore himself into office as President on 6 April 1841 under the guidance of a justice of the peace before anyone stopped him.  Objections were made by prominent politicians in and out of Congress, especially as President Tyler subsequently proclaimed policies frequently reversing those on which Harrison (and therefore himself also) had been elected.   But his seizure of the Presidency has been followed ever since.

            So far from Vice-Presidents being eyed as potential Acting Presidents, the classic case in 1881 worked out with its total avoidance and not the slightest call for its implementation.   President James Garfield had been very narrowly elected.   He had not been a conspicuous candidate for nomination but at the Republican convention delivered so powerful a speech when placing his Ohio Senatorial colleague for Presidential nomination that he himself was drafted and campaigned wholesale for the Presidency in Election 1880 as no previous candidate ever had.   The leading candidate for the nomination had been ex-President Ulysses Grant despite having served two full terms (1869-77).   To solace his faction known as ‘Stalwarts’ marshalled by Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, the Vice-Presidential nomination was thrown to one of Conkling’s minor sidekicks, Chester Arthur of New York.   On 2 July 1881 Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed political job-seeker, shot President Garfield, shouting very audibly ‘I am a Stalwart and Arthur is President now!’.   On 19 September 1881 Garfield died.   During that period he was wholly unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.   Vice-President Arthur did not dare make the slightest move towards an Acting Presidency.    He then became President.

Other Acting Presidencies in fact but of course not in theory included Woodrow  Wilson’s second wife Edith Bolling Wilson initially from 26 September 1919 when he suffered a paralytic stroke while campaigning for his League of Nations, with complete physical breakdown eight days’ later.   Vice-President Thomas Marshall of Indiana made no attempt to Act as President.  Robert Lansing, Secretary of State from 1915 and through World War 1, tried to call a cabinet meeting and was promptly dismissed by order transmitted from the Presidential sick-room.   So there really was a woman President of the United States — and not just once.

PROFESSIONALISING THE PRESIDENCY

            Speaker Mike Johnson, however self-interested, showed he realised how dangerous a candidate Vice-President Harris might prove.   She showed that by making a standard item in Presidential electioneering work for once:  the Debate.  

            Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, formerly a one-term Whig Congressman, geared himself up for Presidential candidacy for the newly-founded Republican party in the volcanically changing politics of 1858 by initial challenge to the re-election of Democrat  Stephen A. Douglas to the Senate.  

Douglas with Presidential Election 1860 very much in focus accepted debate with Lincoln in several venues throughout the state.   The supremely explosive question was whether territorities should prohibit or permit slavery before their admission as  States.   Douglas had championed ‘squatter sovereignty’ by which the decision should be taken by settlers already in occupation of the ‘territories’ or future States.   Lincoln forced him to stand by this principle and admit that the known will of the squatters, validly expressed and monitored, should prevail against Presidential and/or Congressional will.   Douglas won Senatorial re-election, but had thus alienated proslavery Southern Democrats now in control of slave-owning states demanding that slavery should be permissible rather than prohibited everywhere in the USA.   It meant that the Democrats would be split in Election 1860, Douglas one Presidential candidate and Vice-President John C. Breckinridge from slave-owning Kentucky the other.    

The Debates were not revived for a century, and then formally established Acting as the essence of Presidential candidacy and performance.   1960 asserted itself the age of Television rapidly displacing Radio.   Salesmanship was now canonised and politicians were under scrutiny from  the entire electorate, not simply from the local marketplace on the Fourth of July.   The politicians had to act sincere but whatever the limits of their sincerity everyone saw it now entailed acting.

Lincoln in debate against Douglas had certainly to act with sense of local prejudices across the state of Illinois whose southern voters might share proslavery or racialist prejudice with their near neighbours in the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri.   But overall strategy had to outplay local tactics, victory in the successive stages of debate at different locations across the state less important than driving an irreversible wedge between Douglas and the extreme proslavery Democrats so rights of squatter sovereignty be forced into combat opposing universal permission for slavery.  

Once Lincoln won the Republican nomination for President in 1860 and the  Presidency over the divided Democrats, Lincoln had to act in a very different theatre.   To preserve the Union whence 7 slave states had seceded before he was formally declared elected and took office on 4 March 1861 and 4 more would later secede, he had to act perpetually as President of a United States from which secession was impossible and whose so-called seceders were mere traitors.   If need be, this might sound fanatical however reasonable he might sound declaring hopes for peace. 

 His unrivalled sense of humour and capacity for self-mockery made him unique as  President, however disastrous the early years of actual civil warfare.   He was assassinated at a play after re-election and the Union’s victory, killed by a professional actor blindly responding to the human theatre where Lincoln had created, played and won.   Karl Marx said that Lincoln was unique as a politician in delivering benefits he had not promised, specifically slave emancipation.

Other wartime Presidents had different roles to play, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt acting to imply that their healths were unimpaired, despite Wilson invalided for 17 months after strokes, FDR losing use of his legs from infantile paralysis in August 1921 before election as New York Governor in November 1928 or as President for 4 terms serving 1933-45.  Wilson played offstage, but Roosevelt managed innumerable public appearances and developed techniques as radio broadcaster with charm, wit, and humour, dwarfing radio demagogues while profiting from their techniques.   The Republican Theodore Roosevelt became the unrivalled public political performer of his Presidency in 1901-9, but his Democrat cousin Franklin established himself domestically as a family favourite with what he called ‘Fireside chats’.  

WHO ARE YOU?

Before World War 1, Wilson (previously Governor of New Jersey) acted out identity as Northerner while born a Southerner who witnessed his father’s manse occupied  by Northern invading troops during the Civil War, and hence rabidly hostile to Republicans and Blacks in government jobs.   Lyndon Johnson of Texas acted the converse.   He was in deep support of racial integration but concealed it in useful Southern political alliances on his way up, and then won his heart’s desire in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, deliberately delivering  his greatest speech in Deep Southern Louisiana during Election 1964 on 9 October denouncing anti-black racism as destroyer of democracy.

Jack Kennedy in Election 1960, opposing Republican candidate Vice-President  Richard Nixon, needed means of showing where they differed.   Kennedy and Nixon as Congressmen in 1949 had both been Right-wing, sympathetic with anti-Communist witch-hunts,  both very business-friendly, and somewhat anti-Labour.   Kennedy’s millionaire father former Ambassador Joseph Kennedy had contributed to Nixon’s campaigning war-chest in 1950 in his successful bid to become Senator from California. 

 But Kennedy was a Roman Catholic.  In Election 1928 the candidacy for President by the Catholic Governor Al Smith of New York was being besmirched, anti-Catholic propaganda accusing him of obeying the Pope rather than the people.   Smith would have lost to his opponent Herbert Hoover anyway — the Republicans in US government since 1920 were identified with prosperity and the great Bull market in Wall Street.   (The crash came in October 1929.)  

Nixon carefully insisted religion was not an issue, Kennedy told an audience of Protestant clerics that he would never surrender his judgment to a foreign power, the Vatican.   Nixon as Vice-President had had much favourable publicity in the Eisenhower entourage, beginning in Election 1952 when he answered charges of secret support from hidden financiers  by a TV speech declaring his small daughters had received a gift of a dog ‘Checkers’ from an unknown fan and loved it and would not return it.   Eisenhower however doubtful of this performance retained him for both elections and it may have convinced Nixon he was a natural TV star.   (Eisenhower had reigned largely immune from personal criticism as the venerable symbol of US soldiers, sailors and air crews killed in World War 2 and the Korean War, though that immunity would not automatically seep down to Nixon.)     

Kennedy’s adviser the Harvard Professor of American History Arthur Schlesinger Jr had the idea of TV debates in which Kennedy would prove more attractive than Nixon, perhaps even trapping him in some vote-losing error by Lincolnian skill and charisma.

Nixon foolishly accepted the challenge, anxious to show he was not simply depending on shadows of Eisenhower’s perpetual appeal.   Subsequently it was claimed that TV make-up left Nixon the less attractive, but more decisively Kennedy whose youth (at 43) was supposedly against him brought his boyishness and good humour into play against Nixon’s sanctimonious heaviness.   Kennedy also unscrupulously hung delayed Eisenhower government defence and military enhancement around Nixon’s neck, which actually enraged and aroused Eisenhower hitherto standing aside from Election 1960.   Kennedy’s wife Jackie may have been a more effective campaigner than either Kennedy or Nixon.  Debates were not decisive but they made Kennedy seem a gallant challenger more engaging than an overused politician.

            The Debates did not feature in some subsequent later elections, and were staged in others, but with no knockouts.   But in Election 2024 Kamala Harris transformed the process.   Mr Trump in Election 2016 may very well have lost votes in his debate confrontation of Hillary Clinton around whom he prowled like a demented stalker as she was speaking.   He was restrained in Election 2024 (presumably  by newly imposed ground rules) but his performance in the sole debate was not so much senile as certifiable, the table-talk of a mental patient.    Vice-President Harris delivered the best debate performance of any Presidential Election, cool, informed, good-humoured, quick to explode falsehood, confident in welcoming the future, never indulging in  ill-temper, naturally winning allies by supremely efficient performance.   FDR would have been proud of her.   TR would not have been proud of him.   What predecessors inspired them?

Ronald Reagan was probably senile for some of his second term, but the acting  President when required was very definitely his second wife Nancy Regan.   She had trained by close observation of the master himself.   Reagan was the first President  to take on the job  professionally.   He was actor, impresario, stage-manager, producer.   He may have believed in his own policies but that was irrelevant.   He had to perform the role.  He could justifiably have concluded his second term with Augustus Caesar’s exit line ‘Have I played my part well?’   For him the abiding principle was ‘The show must go on’.   He exemplified it by his comments on his own assassination in 1981 ‘I forgot to duck’, ‘I hope the doctor isn’t a Democrat’.    His last performance was one of extraordinary charm, gently predicting his own retirement from impaired mental health.   Nancy would be given  behind-the-scenes accolade.   He must always be front and centre stage even when  forsaking it.

Reagan had obviously given close study to the Presidency as a role for which he might be hired.   He learned from ex-President Theodore Roosevelt when shot in mid-speech in Election 1912, insisting on finishing his speech and preventing the crowd from killing his would-be assassin.   Ex-President Trump’s smooth conduct when apparently shot and injured om Election 2024 showed he had conned the precedents for Presidential response to botched assassination attempts.   He could  not compete with either Roosevelt (who transformed the Presidency into a perpetual performance in quest  for public accolade) or Reagan (who simply fulfilled his contract).   He could pick his way in their flattest footsteps showing he had reconciled his own instinctive crassness with their version of the Presidency as Emperor and Clown.  

Dignity was beyond Mr Trump but he qualified for Thespian colours when foolishly compared to a Garbageman.     Before stepping up to the billion-dollar Presidential plate himself in 2016 he tried a racist caper in apprenticeship falsely accusing President Barack Obama, landslide victor of Election 2008, with being disqualified for the Presidency by a birth overseas.   President Obama disintegrated this by claiming birth in the Planet Krypton whence his father Jor-el had sent him to redeem the earth, in other words Superman as patented by the Jewish comic artists Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.   Obama’s Presidential humour, sharpest since Franklin Roosevelt, salted his supreme gift of oratory derived from the religious leadership of the civil rights movement, and an irreverent swipe at Nietzsche was a splendid deflation of hubris for propagandists peddling the Presidency.   Bult Mr Trump in picking up pieces of the Presidency to clothe his intellectual nudity grabbed the Obama sword which had disintegrated his birth fraud, and found his own new identity as Garbageman.    It actually respectabilised his candidacy.   A solipsist to his finger-tips, the Past of the Presidency meant less to him than it did to all the previous Presidents of whom he knew so little.   He discovered the one Presidential performance he could professionalise — himself.

BUT WERE GREAT MEN GREAT PRESIDENTS?

Great men have occupied the White House, and so did at least one great woman, Eleanor Roosevelt.   Washington was a great man and a great President and if he hadn’t been there wouldn’t have been any more Presidents.   John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams were all great men: their surviving political writings hold some of humanity’s most expressive profound and inspirational thoughts on government.   As Presidents John Adams prevented a potentially ruinous war with France, and Jefferson doubled the size of the USA.   Madison and J. Q. Adams showed themselves men of courage, integrity and principle in their Presidencies but Madison was defeated militarily and J. Q. Adams politically.    The best creative work of all 4 lay outside their Presidencies.    Intellects as great as theirs defy re-enactment.

            Ulysses Grant has some claim to be the worst US President, as well as one of the Presidency’s greatest men.    After Washington he was probably the best American general.   He would be bewildered by claims of his intellectual superiority, but his memoirs are among the greatest of their kind, and his writing them to save his family from bankruptcy when he was dying of throat cancer was the most heroic act of his brave life.   You cannot act him.   But as a good general he, like Washington, knew the value of lying in military strategy and tactics.  

            Theodore Roosevelt may have  been the most blatant and thoroughpaced actor ever inhabiting the Presidency, summed  up as quoted in the epigraph of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948), wishing he wasn’t a reformer but felt he must play the part like a white minstrel  performer performing as negro ‘who blacked himself all over’, a more subtle dirty joke than Mr Trump  could manage.   Among Presidents he was unmatched in the variety, vehemence and volume of his writings whose public appeal knew how to aim itself mildly below the intellect, aided by his sense of humour.   As an autobiographer as in all else he was a dutiful entertainer. He enlivened the public and used the mass expansion of the media to make the Presidency a popular assimilation rather than a sanctimonious shrine, sometimes trapped by his own conquest.

Franklin Roosevelt was a lesser being than his wife, but his own physical  courage made him turn the Presidency into a fight against despair and an infection of self-confidence.   He was both a saviour of capitalism hated by capitalists and an inspiration to Socialists a century later (as shown in the rhetoric of Scotland’s Colin Fox).    Like Cousin Theodore, he made laughter a full-time Presidential weapon, and turned reason into recruitment.

Lyndon Johnson might have been the Presidency’s most radical agent of social justice if foreign affairs in which he had no real interest had never existed, and in which he gave his most unconvincing performance as actor.

Barack Obama combined Washington and Jackson to become a true symbol of human brotherhood before he reached the White House, initially by his Dreams of My Father.   By his conquest of the electorate in 2008 he fulfilled the dreams of so many across racial and national boundaries.   He reigned a great President.   We do not know if he was a great ruler, or how far the prisoner of the military-industrial complex.

We do not know the greatness that may be claimed, performed or achieved by the latest President-elect.

Whatever he may say, neither does he.

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Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796):

Then, when sunk on the down of usurped pomp, he shall have sufficiently indulged his meditations with what monarch he shall next glut his ravening maw, he may condescend to signify that it is his pleasure to be awake; and that he is at leisure to receive the proposals of his high and mighty clients for the terms on which he may respite the execution of the sentence he has passed upon them.   At the opening of those doors, what a sight it must be to behold the plenipotentiaries of royal impotence, in the precedency which they will intrigue to obtain, and which will be granted to them according to the seniority of their degradation, sneaking into the regicide presence, and, with the relics of the smile which they had dressed up for the levee of their masters, still flickering on their curled lips, presenting the faded remains of their courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of his guillotine!

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