A once-defeated president is headed again to the White Home. He’s a populist New Yorker who gained a popular-vote plurality and scored an Electoral School landslide. He flipped states he misplaced 4 years earlier and gave his celebration full management of Washington. The race scrambled political allegiances, with some voters splitting their tickets. Tariffs had been a key concern.
That paragraph describes the 2024 election. It additionally describes 1892, the one different time that an American president has gained a second, nonconsecutive time period. That yr, Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, defeated President Benjamin Harrison, the Republican who had overwhelmed him.
At this time’s e-newsletter seems to be at The Instances’s protection of that specific second 132 years in the past — and its shocking echoes in Donald Trump’s return at present.
“President As soon as Once more,” stated The Instances’s front-page headline about Cleveland’s inauguration. “The individuals made a mistake in not electing Mr. Cleveland in 1888, they usually have been confronted with proof of this error for the final 4 years,” one reader wrote in a letter to the editor.
Earlier than Cleveland’s inauguration, tales speculating about who would possibly fill his second administration crammed the paper. As with Trump, some appointees had been loyalists. The Instances described Cleveland’s postmaster normal and secretary of struggle as “unwaveringly devoted to the goals that Mr. Cleveland himself has pursued.” His alternative for inside secretary had caught with Cleveland at the same time as different Democrats opposed his third presidential bid.
Cleveland’s aides would assist him together with his largest governing precedence: decrease tariffs. Republicans had raised them to guard U.S. industries, lifting costs and triggering the backlash that introduced Cleveland again to energy.
Some appointees, although, had been converts. Trump’s determination to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, two former Democrats, riled some Republicans. Cleveland likewise shocked Democrats by selecting a longtime Republican who had backed him in the course of the marketing campaign to be secretary of state. “The nation can furnish sufficient males who’re Democrats to run the federal government beneath a Democratic administration,” one among Cleveland’s co-partisans groused.
But, simply as many Republicans have rallied round Trump’s unorthodox picks, many Democrats gave Cleveland a go. One celebration official proclaimed that Cleveland’s alternative was “a adequate Democrat for me.”
Effectively-wishers and favor-seekers flocked to satisfy with Cleveland after his win. Trump has Mar-a-Lago and his golf golf equipment; Cleveland had a home and a legislation workplace in New York Metropolis in addition to a cottage in Lakewood, N.J. For months, Cleveland welcomed friends, cabinet hopefuls, former officials, party insiders, ladder-climbers and journalists (together with Adolph Ochs, The Instances’s future writer).
Spoils of victory
Many enterprise leaders celebrated Trump’s win; their predecessors reacted equally to Cleveland’s. His supporters felt like “a part of a conquering military,” The Instances reported. Republican businessmen “took on an air of acquiescence which indicated that, whereas they weren’t nice as prophets, every thing was all proper anyway.”
A gracious loser
After Trump’s win, President Biden hosted him on the White Home. Harrison, the departing president who had additionally defeated his successor 4 years earlier, took an analogous method. He sent Cleveland a letter “proffering the hospitalities of the White Home,” they usually rode to Cleveland’s inauguration collectively.
The incoming president was “escorted again to the place he vacated by the person for whom he had given up the White Home,” The Instances wrote. It was “an affiliation that’s not prone to be once more witnessed within the historical past of the nation.” That prophecy was unsuitable.
Historical past turns, once more
Then as now, a lot of the nation predicted success for the incoming administration. The Instances assessed that voters had given Cleveland “a transparent, intelligible and clever mandate,” akin to the “unprecedented and highly effective mandate” Trump claims at present. Cleveland’s former Navy secretary known as it “a popular uprising” that “breaks the again of the Republican Get together.”
Cleveland, like Trump, was not above crowing. In a speech to allies, he celebrated “a stupendous and full triumph.”
It was to not final. The nation quickly fell right into a melancholy, which Harrison’s insurance policies probably helped deliver on. It consumed a lot of Cleveland’s time period, dealt Democrats a landslide defeat within the midterms and handed Republicans the presidency in 1896. For some time, voters turned on Cleveland’s celebration. A Democrat wouldn’t occupy the White Home for one more 16 years.
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