Dan Snow's History Hit - Trump and Presidential History

Episode Date: October 25, 2020

Two weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Richard Brookhiser joined me on the podcast to discuss Trump and presidential history.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've got Richard Brookhiser back on the podcast. He's one of the best presidential historians working out there, best-selling author. He's written tons of books about presidential US history. He's a great friend of the podcast. And this podcast was first broadcast with a couple of weeks to go until the US presidential election. Donald Trump is trailing badly in the polls, but will he pull out another underdog victory in election 2020? Let's wait and see. In the meantime, I want to talk to Richard about how he thinks Trump compares to other presidents. Are there any precedents for his remarkable, strange behavior, communication skills, and embrace of new technology, for example?

Is Trump truly different, or does he sit within the tradition of other presidents like Jackson, for example? If you want to listen to Richard Brookhouser's last time on the podcast, you've got to go to historyhit.tv. It's like our Netflix for history, but we've got video and audio up there. We've got tons of documentaries, hundreds of hours of audio

featuring some of the world's best historians. We've got new material going up all the time. It's still Trafalgar Week, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. So we're offering the crazy cheap offer of a month for free and three months, just one pound, euro or dollar for each of those three months if you use the code TRAFALGAR. It ends this weekend, so get it while you can, folks.

Use the code TRAFALGAR at checkout, historyhit.tv, and you'll be paying just $1 a month for the first few months of your journey. Good to have you on the team. Anyway, here's Richard Brookhiser. Enjoy. Richard, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. I last had you on just as Donald J. Trump was about to become inaugurated as president. Compare him to other presidents. His critics always say he's one of the worst, but tell me about his style. Let's start with his communicating. Again, his critics can't stand it, but he does have an ability to talk to a core audience. Is that something you see from other presidents? Yes. And you have to remember that

for 30 years before he got in the White House, he was essentially a public figure, an entertainer. Now, he said that he was a great developer and builder and so on. And his record at that was very mixed. But he had numerous appearances on TV shows, his own and other people's. He was always in the news whenever he wanted to be. And then as a septuagenarian man, he mastered Twitter. So he had these abilities to put himself out there and put himself in the public eye. Definitely. What presidents from the past does he remind you of?

Well, a little bit. Andrew Jackson. That's the one that's often cited. Let's talk about the parallels there. I'd be fascinated to hear your opinion. Well, now, minus the military experience, because Trump, of course, had none. He claimed he had bone spurs. And this is why he didn't serve or had no possibility of serving in Vietnam.

So that is simply not there. Also, Jackson did have some political experience before he became president. He'd held various offices in Congress and then as a territorial official. But the similarity is the ability to fashion an image of yourself and put it out there. I think Trump is a more active and successful communicator than Jackson was, but Jackson was certainly able because of his war record and the efforts of friends of his to have an image of him that everybody knew. His military nickname, Old Hickory, was something that the general public knew. They knew him as the hero of New Orleans. They knew him as an Anglophobe. And then they came to know him as a champion of

the common man. Well, yes, Jackson had risen in the world. He was a wealthy man by the time he became president, but he was seen as the common man. Jackson was also a very domineering personality. He was extremely contentious. He killed a man in a duel, and he'd been himself injured in an armed brawl with some of his own officers on another occasion. He believed in conspiracy theories, as President Trump does. A madman shot at Andrew Jackson in his last year in the White House. Jackson was coming out of the Capitol where there had been a funeral for a member of Congress, and a man fired two pistols at him in succession, and they both misfired. And it turned out he was crazy. This man thought that he was the legitimate king of England,

and Andrew Jackson was keeping him from the throne. That was his grievance. He was simply mad. But Jackson told everyone that he'd been put up to it by a senator that Jackson was feuding with at the time. You know, visitors to the White House, Jackson would say, well, this is why this guy did it. There's a famous account by an English woman who was traveling in the United States and wrote a book about her travels. Her name was Harriet Martineau. And she met Jackson. She'd been to the White House a number of times. And she was just flabbergasted by this conduct. She was there at the time that Jackson was saying this. And she said it was just astounding to hear the

leader of a nation accusing one of his citizens, for no reason at all, of plotting to kill him. Trump toys with conspiracy theories. He touts QAnon. He says he doesn't understand it. He doesn't know anything about it, but he retweets it. He likes the fact that QAnon followers admire him. He said that Ted Cruz's father helped assassinate JFK. He said that maybe Justice Scalia was smothered. He says that Joe Scarborough, who's this TV host who's become very critical of him, may have killed one of his own interns. You know, why aren't the police investigating this? I mean, just these crazy, reckless and irresponsible conspiracy theories. Jackson was also an anti-establishment candidate when he ran in 1828

because he was bullied off the ball in 1824, despite winning a plurality of the votes. And he became this kind of hugely charismatic outsider, I guess. Right. The election of 1824 was a four-way race and no candidate won a majority in the Electoral College. So the decision had to be made by the House of Representatives. And there each state votes as a unit. And John Quincy Adams, who was one of the four candidates who had finished second in the tally of electoral votes, Jackson had finished first, Adams had finished second. And then the third place finisher was a man named William Crawford. And under the Constitution, the top three go to the House if there's no majority winner. And Adams won the vote in the House and he became president. And then Jackson claimed this was a corrupt bargain because the fourth place finisher who had been eliminated, this was Henry Clay, he was Speaker

of the House. And lo and behold, his supporters in the House had voted for Adams, and then Clay becomes Secretary of State. Now, the fact is, Clay was a very good Secretary of State. Clay had diplomatic experience. He and Adams had met negotiating the treaty that ended the War of 1812. So they had first met on a diplomatic assignment. And Andrew Jackson, in the same position, would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, if he'd gotten to Clay first, he might have made a deal with Clay. But he didn't.

So Adams won. But then he just bitched and moaned about this for four years. And people thought it's not just that he lost that race. It's that Adams was the son of a president himself. He was the son of the second president, John Adams. He had been in public service all his life as a diplomat, as a congressman, as secretary of state. He was kind of the model of the insider. And so Jackson, even though he had held political office and he was certainly a military figure, he could present himself as the challenger from outside. Clay, from memory, he ran for office like four times.

Henry Clay was like the perennial presidential wannabe. Well, he said, you know, he'd rather be right than president. So, you know, I thought he must have wanted to be right very hard. For decades. And how about the way Jackson politicized the White House, the executive branch? Do you see any other similarities between Trump and Jackson there? Jackson was part of a process. I mean, the process was already underway. When the Constitution is first written and ratified, people are not expecting there to be a two party system.

This was just something the framers had not anticipated. A lot of them are on record as disdaining parties. Jefferson famously said, if I could only go to heaven as a member of a party, I'd rather not go. You can find other quotations from Adams and Washington and everybody talking this line of talk. But lo and behold, a two party system appears almost immediately. It starts in George Washington's first term as president. So the expectations that people had of a kind of apolitical national system did not pan out very early on. And so we shouldn't blame Jackson for the sort of partisan stranglehold on executive branch jobs

and things that he's sometimes been credited with. Okay, yes, we can blame him for that. But it's not like he was the very first person to be partisan and political. That's all I'm saying. This was a process that was already underway. One of the theorists of partisanship was James Madison. He was Thomas Jefferson's right hand. And he really grasped the shape of a partisan political environment ahead of the other founders and framers. And he wrote about this. He's one of the first people in the English language to use the phrase public opinion. It was a French phrase that people had begun using in the late 18th century. And Madison is one of the very first people in the English speaking world to use that phrase. It's interesting. And he understood the

importance of catering to public opinion and making it your ally in your political career. You know, it's a two-way street. There's the public, and then there are the people striving to lead the public. In other words, James Madison and his friends, they have this relationship, this dialogue back and forth. He saw that it was a 24-7 thing. It didn't just happen at election time that the people were able to render a judgment on their office holders or their would-be office holders. This process would go on all the time. There had to be continuous communication back and forth. This is one reason Madison is very forward in partisan media. He helps found the first opposition newspaper in the United States, a thing called the National Gazette. He writes essays for it. They're not as famous as this Federalist paper essays, and they're not nearly as good. But they're like bumper stickers, they're slogan pieces, they're campaign pieces. That's what

James Madison was doing as early as the early 1790s. So, you know, I only say this as a way of saying that Andrew Jackson, though he accelerated this process, he didn't invent it. And also, before we leave Jackson behind, people talk about partisanship in the US today. But we shouldn't forget partisanship drove Jackson's wife. He always blamed partisanship on causing her death. She died of a heart attack, I think, during the election, was it? Apparently broken by the partisan attacks that both he and her were on the receiving end of. I mean, it was savage times.

Oh, yes. I mean, the charge was that they'd had a bigamous marriage, that her first marriage, divorce had not come through, and the Jacksons had married ahead of time. Now, in fact, this happened, and it was not that uncommon on the frontier, because for the legal wheels to turn, it was very slow, because you were living in one place. The territorial capital was hundreds of miles away. It was all on horseback and people were used to this and it was not a cause for shame. Years later, when Jackson was running for president, proto-Victorian mores have come in. The country has changed and Jackson preferred to forget this fact. But his partisan enemies

raked this up. They broadcast it over their newspapers. And Rachel Jackson did die after the election before Jackson was inaugurated. And Jackson blamed this gutter campaign for her death, probably rightly. And it was even worse in the founding era. Politicians killed each other, right? I mean, they shot and killed each other in duels. When Dick Cheney shot that guy, it was an accident and he lived. When Vice President Burr shot Alexander Hamilton, it was intentional and Hamilton died. I mean, this went on. Hamilton died. I mean, this went on.

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Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. What other presidents do you think we can compare Trump to? If there's similarities with Jackson, are there any other presidents who perhaps seized on new technology or broke norms and seem to defy political geography in a similar way?

I should say we're talking two weeks before the election in 2020. Donald Trump's considerably behind in opinion polls now, but he certainly has a shot at winning a far greater shot than one might expect if you have a traditional sense of disqualifying comments and the way that politics was done. So are there any other parallels you'd like to draw out? Harry Truman. And again, Truman is a man of considerable accomplishment. He becomes president by surprise when Franklin Roosevelt dies only months after his fourth inauguration. Truman had been kept out of the loop on everything by the Roosevelts. He didn't know that there was an atomic bomb that had been developed.

He learns this as soon as he becomes president, and then the decision to use it or not is suddenly on his desk. So there's a lot to admire about Harry Truman. But he was also a demagogic fellow. When he runs for election himself in 1948, he accuses his Republican opponent of being a tool of fascists. He accuses his Republican opponent of being a tool of fascists. And this is three years after World War II ends. You know, we've just fought a world war against two fascist nations. And here is Harry Truman accusing his Republican opponent of being a tool of such people. So I would say that's very out there. We forget this because we tend to think of Truman as a good guy and a guy who was a good president in a lot of ways, but that's how he conducted politics. Another example of it, he brought Herbert Hoover back into public life. This was the president that Franklin

Roosevelt defeated in his first election in 1932. And then Roosevelt blamed Hoover for the depression, froze him out, never invited him back to the White House, made him a political punching bag all the years that Roosevelt was president. And then when Truman comes back, and I think it's partly because he felt disdained by the Roosevelts himself, he invited Hoover to head a commission to study the executive branch. I mean, did we need to clean things up? Did we need to make structural reforms as how the executive branch works? And it was called the Hoover Commission. And Hoover was very grateful for this, that he'd been summoned back from the wilderness. And yet 1948, when Truman's running for president himself, you know, once again, oh, you know, the Republicans and Hoover, they started the depression

and we saved you all from it. You should vote for us. And Hoover actually asked him about this. You know, he said, Mr. President, why are you still doing this to me? And Truman just said, well, look, you know, it's politics. I don't hate you. Look, I brought you back, but yeah,

there's an election on. So suck it up. How are historians like you seeing the Trump presidency? Opponents are pointing to his behavior, his corruption, his golfing, the fact he's been impeached by the House of Representatives. When you look back at presidents with a long view, where do you think Trump is going to sit in that procession? Presidencies are a combination of who the president is and what he does and the circumstances in which he serves. So I think that the losers in the presidential sweepstakes, barring some new awful catastrophe, will always be James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, because Buchanan was just before the Civil War. His dithering was very damaging

as the country was falling apart. And then Andrew Johnson, after the murder of Abraham Lincoln, he handles the beginning of Reconstruction as badly as it would be possible to handle it. And the Civil War is the great national trauma of this country. So these two guys and their connection to it will always give them the bottom slot. Now, having said that, for Donald Trump, I think historians will have to try and look at his mannerisms, his personality, his personal failings. personality, his personal failings, and then they'll also have to look at the policies. What, if anything, did they accomplish? Analytically, they'll have to separate them in this task, and then they'll have to reunite them again, because of course you can't completely separate the messenger from what he does. How he talks about it is always part of the picture. So this is going to be not an easy task. But it's one that you will take on, I'm sure, with aplomb like the

rest of your book. Can I ask a question? We had Ben Sasse, who's a US senator with presidential ambitions, who's kept a very low profile over the last four years. And he was outed in a call to constituents as being very rude about President Trump. Has the president always had a communion, an ability to reach beyond local statewide representatives like senators and congressmen and women and commune with grassroots activists, with party members? What is the process by which the primary has become the tool by which the president or the head of the party can bring enormous pressure to bear on other represented officials from the party. Right. What you're talking about, in a way,

is a violation of federalism, because the US system is, in a way, very Baroque, and congressmen win offices by themselves. They have their own power bases. The president has his own power base. He went to war in the elections of 1838, midterm of his second term. He felt that there were members of his own party, the Democratic Party, who were too conservative, who were not sufficiently supporting his New Deal agenda. And he actually openly campaigned against a couple of them. There was a senator from Maryland, Democratic senator, that he wanted to lose. Most of these guys won, so it was a defiance of his wishes. I think the process has gone on since then, since 1938. The president has more and more influence, and I think this is related to the change in media, the proliferation

of media, that there are so many different kinds of media, and it truly is 24-7. And if a president can master that, his reach is greater and stronger. I think the office has acquired more powers. This is partly because presidents have grabbed them, and it's also because Congress has ceded them. So therefore, yeah, someone like Senator Sasse, who is popularly thought, and I'm sure rightly thought, to not like Donald Trump, he has to keep his head down, or he feels he has to keep his head down. Now, even if Trump wins, let's assume that he wins next month, the minute he lowers his hand after taking the oath of office, he's going to be a lame duck, right? And all these senators and all these congressmen,

they will know that. And second terms are typically not happy. And Donald Trump will find that if he wins one. That's a very interesting point. Winning your second term is seen as a huge presidential achievement and cements you as one of the fabled two-term presidents. But you're actually suggesting that that'll be the high point. The day of the inauguration or election night will be the high point. I mean, I guess you look at Obama's second term, there's certainly no legislative achievements to think of. Well, that's right. And you know, you may have them, things happen in the world, things happen that you have to deal with. You may deal with them well. But politically, your clout begins to drain away, I would say, from that moment. And certainly in the last two years after your last midterm election.

Because people are looking ahead. I mean, SAS is looking ahead. Cotton is looking ahead. Hawley is looking ahead. You know, you think of all the Democrats who are looking ahead past the Biden administration. Even though we haven't had it yet, it may not, in fact, happen. Probably will, but may not. But people are already, you know, they're already looking ahead. There's a famous, wonderful moment at the 1936 convention. H.L. Mencken, who was a great American journalist, and he was there with James T. Farrell, who was a young novelist, very he was there with James T. Farrell, who was a young

novelist, very popular in the 20th century. And Mencken was kind of showing Farrell around, and they were standing behind the podium at this Democratic National Convention. And Mencken says to Farrell at one point, he says, Farrell, you see all those politicians? Farrell says, yes. Mencken says, every one of them thinks he can be president of the United States. So they all do. They all do. And Donald Trump will find that out. And some others besides, like Nikki Haley, there's a whole bunch of people lining up. Just finally, I guess on that point, it's customary to talk about the president of the US being the most powerful man in the world, most powerful person in the world, partly because of

the nature of modern nuclear arsenals, I expect. But actually, what comes through talking to you and talking to experts on presidential powers, it's not a super powerful position, is it? There's so much frustration by the holders of that office. There's huge frustration. It ages everybody. You look at the youngish men who've held the job, and we've had a string of them recently. Jimmy Carter was kind of young when he got it. W was kind of young, and Obama himself. And they all got gray hairs. You know, all these people who came in without gray hair, boy, they had it by the time they

left, you know, even if they were only in for four years, as Carter was. It drains you. On the other hand, the president can command attention like no one else in the United States. If he's good at it, he has the opportunity to do that. You know, the successful ones are very good at it. It's a wild roller coaster ride to be in that office. If you don't have a majority in Congress, there's not that much you can do. Well, you know, then one thing people do in that situation is they focus on foreign policy, because there, you know, the president does have a considerable role, no matter who is running Congress. And that's a typical thing. It's also something that happens in second terms.

As presidential power at home drains away, they look to the world where they can still be the players that they were in their first four years. Tell me what the latest book's called. It's called Give Me Liberty, A History of America's Exceptional Idea. And I have 13 case studies beginning in 1619, which is the Jamestown colony, and going up through 1987, which was Ronald Reagan's tear down this wall speech in Berlin. And each of these episodes produces a document of some sort, either the minutes of a meeting, or an argument in court, or a petition by American citizens, or a statement or a declaration of some kind. And I look at these 13 documents to assert that the characteristic of America's identity, even before we were a country,

was a concern with liberty and efforts to define it and achieve it. So that's the thesis of the book. I found some episodes that everybody would expect, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, but also some things that very few people have heard of. The second one is the Flushing Remonstrance, and that was a petition to the Director General of New Netherlands. This was when New York was owned by the Dutch before the British got it. And these 32 men in Flushing said, we cannot support you in your effort to crack down on Quakers, because we would do unto others as we would have men do unto us. This is the law of the Savior and the prophets. So it's an early statement for religious liberty,

a very eloquent one. Well, Richard, thank you so much for talking to me. I'm sure you're a very busy man at the moment over this election. But as ever, Richard Brookhiser, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Okay, thank you, Dan. It was great. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all

the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.