Trump should say hello to Cleveland’s presidential approach

Among the ways Donald Trump’s recent election victory made history was his comeback from losing his first re-election bid.

Only one other president has accomplished that feat. And Grover Cleveland won his second, nonconsecutive presidential term back in the days when the president answered the White House doorbell and wrote checks to pay the building’s bills.

Conservative commentator William Bennett predicted in his 2006 book “America: The Last Best Hope” that Cleveland would remain alone in the history books.

“It’s a record unlikely to be repeated,” Bennett suggested, “since parties today shun one-term presidents who fail in their reelection bids. Imagine Jimmy Carter running in 1984 or George H.W. Bush making a second bid in 1996.”

Yet Trump defied conventional wisdom in seeking and securing his party’s nomination after his 2020 defeat. He won both a higher share of the popular vote and more electoral votes in 2024 than during his first successful White House run in 2016.

It’s not clear that the former and soon-to-be-new president has much interest in his predecessors’ history. Yet he could do much worse than following Cleveland’s example.

In 2014, deep into Barack Obama’s second White House term, national conservative columnist George Will labeled Cleveland “the last Democratic president with proper understanding of this office’s place.”

“The Democratic Party of President Cleveland concentrated on growth: laissez-faire at home, free trade, hard money, low taxes, balanced budgets,” Will also wrote.

That recipe contrasted sharply with the one favored by later Democratic stars Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. “Growth often seems to that party less urgent than ‘fairness’ as defined by government and produced by political intervention in market allocations of wealth and opportunity,” Will noted.

In the 2004 book “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” professors Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen branded Cleveland a “presidential giant.”

“Perhaps because his terms were separated by the administration of the opposing party, … or perhaps because he simply refrained from the massive types of executive intervention that so attract modern big-government-oriented scholars, Grover Cleveland has been pushed well down the list of greatness in American presidents as measured by most modern surveys (although in older polls of historians he routinely ranked in the top ten),” Schweikart and Allen wrote.

“Republicans have ignored him because he was a Democrat; Democrats downplayed his administration because he governed like a modern Republican,” the historians added.

“Cleveland’s image has enjoyed a revival,” according to the patriot’s history, “because of new interest by conservative and libertarian scholars who see in him one of the few presidents whose every action seemed to be genuinely dictated by Constitutional principle.”

“Above all, Cleveland saw himself as the guardian of the people’s money,” Schweikart and Allen concluded.

Cleveland regularly rejected expansions of federal government pensions. Payments had been designed to cover disabilities suffered during military service in the Civil War. Yet politicians continued to expand eligibility for two decades after the war’s end.

“Presidents, not wishing to alienate voters, simply signed off on the legislation — until Cleveland, who not only inspected the claims but also rejected three out of four,” the historians recorded. Among those rejected were a man who broke his leg while picking dandelions and another injured by an exploding cannon 23 years before the Civil War started.

An electoral loss in 1888 did not alter Cleveland’s approach when he returned to the White House after the 1892 election. “Cleveland again proved a model of character and firmness on issues,” Schweikart and Allen wrote.

“His seed corn veto — a prime act of political courage in that he had everything to gain by signing it and nothing to lose — blocked the provision of millions of dollars in loans for midwestern farmers to buy seed,” the patriot’s history documented. “Cleveland said that no such federal power was sanctioned by the Constitution.”

The president urged charitable support for farmers. “Private organizations raised many times the amount that the feds would have provided,” Schweikart and Allen wrote.

Conditions clearly have changed in the past 130 years. Trump will see no disputes over Civil War pensions or midwestern seed corn. The president-elect also faces a voting population much more accustomed to government involvement in our daily lives.

Yet the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, like Cleveland before him, will swear an oath for a second time to defend the US Constitution and abide by its dictates and limitations.

Trump could help point America toward a better future — one might even say help make America great again — by learning from Grover Cleveland’s approach to the office of president.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation.