In light of Trump's latest sexist comments coming into the public consciousness, a friend asked if there has ever been a worse or as bad candidate for president from a major party in the United States. It is more difficult to answer this than is first apparent because the traditions of acceptable behavior have evolved along with the technological ability to capture people at their worst. The ever-lengthening list of vulgarity, narcissism, and barbarity from Trump has made it difficult to keep up. But for this one I'm going to give it a shot.
On what criteria can we judge the epic and unprecedented awfulness of the Trump candidacy? As a human being he is the worst example of unprincipled power, lacking in every conception of decency or ability. As a candidate for chief executive of the United States there is no question that he is the worst. But over more than two centuries of nominating presidents there have been a few who came close to equaling Trump in one category or another. How to begin?
A few political figures sprang to mind immediately. However, the line of counterfactual history is tenuous at best. There were several candidates who embodied deplorable personality traits, there were others who demonstrated awfulness in office, but no one has ascended to the presidency who combined evil, vulgarity, narcissism, criminality, bigotry, or the absolute lack of self-control that Trump exhibits. One word of caution though, this is the inevitable result of the concerted effort by the republican party and the larger conservative movement. Trump merely seized the opportunity to put himself at the head of the out and out fascism stirred up in this country, on purpose, through a campaign of lies and hate going back decades.
The first figure is Strom Thurmond, a diehard segregationist who happened to have an out of wedlock love child with his African-American domestic servant. Thurmond ran for president against Harry Truman and Henry A. Wallace within the Democratic Party as well as Thomas Dewey from the GOP. He represented the privileged aristocratic feudalism of the South, and embodied all of that region's worst tendencies but Thurmond was nowhere near Trump in awfulness. It is a low bar to consider but Thurmond had political experience and was representing a tradition, not fascism. Nor was he threatening nuclear war. And he kept his indiscretions private instead of broadcasting it. Strom Thurmond was bad, but not Trump bad and he never made it as a nominee for president of a national party. The Dixiecrats had little appeal to those outside the Deep South.
The second figure in recent American political history is Barry Goldwater. The senator from Arizona did capture the GOP nomination with support from a passionate, determined, but extremist minority within the party. He did campaign as a national candidate with national, albeit limited, appeal. And he was extreme for his time, but Goldwater did, along with his campaign staff, reject the support of the basket of deplorables from that time, the John Birch Society. Goldwater had a famously bad temperament, and would have been a particularly bad successor for JFK when considering the high stakes of foreign relations and the Cold War. He supported a more aggressive posture with America's nuclear arsenal and was no fan of immigration, but he stopped short of anything like deporting millions or banning an entire religion from the country. Goldwater was an extremist ideologue, but he was not the opportunistic narcissist with no core values that Trump has repeatedly displayed.
Third is Woodrow Wilson, or more accurately his Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, though Wilson had his faults. He was famously racist and campaigned for reelection on a peace platform but soon became a hawk. Palmer however, used the pretext of scary immigrants and revolution in Russia to make his name by rounding up hundreds, if not thousands of recent arrivals who might have been Bolsheviks, socialists, or against the war. Though Palmer never made it to the top of any ticket for president, his example shows what an unprincipled opportunist can do with the power to command law enforcement. Wilson suffered a stroke through his nonstop work to ratify the Versailles Treaty and force the isolationist Republican Senate to accept American entry into the League of Nations, Palmer was one of many members of government who saw a chance to shine over the stricken chief executive.
The man who actually succeeded Wilson shared much of Trump's, well, laziness. Warren Harding was also a man who played fast and loose with women and fidelity, times were different though so his mistresses were not in the public memory. The corruption and scandals of his administration were however, and we should remember the last time we elected a man who put his drinking buddies in charge of huge executive departments; foxes guarding the henhouse comes to mind. Also, Harding ran for president basically from his front porch, recalling how Trump has basically phoned in so much of his campaign with the media.
Trump has convinced many of his mouth breathing supporters that he is such a successful businessman that he is uniquely qualified to be president despite never having held elected or even appointed office. We elected two businessmen as president, neither proved to be worth a damn. Herbert Hoover gets something of a bad rap, he was a successful businessman and self made, unlike Trump. Hoover made his own fortune through intelligence, hard work, and skill; three attributes no one who really knows about Trump's record of failure, laziness, incompetence, and stiffing people who worked for him will ever ascribe to the vulgar talking yam. Hoover saved the people of Belgium from starvation during WWI, Trump would have extorted them as hard as he could and pocketed the money. The other businessman, the "MBA president", well do we even need to bring him up? This country will be cleaning up Dubya's mess for generations.
Bringing us to another president who started a war for empire, James K. Polk. However many Nineteenth Century awful presidents we examine, Polk has to win a prize. Dubya really is the only one who could identify with using the bully pulpit to launch a war of conquest for the benefit of special interests. Instead of committing the entire national resources of the USA to a far away land rich in oil, then turning over the spoils to cronies and oil companies, Polk stood by while Americans took over Texas from Mexico and provoked a war to conquer half of our southern neighbor for his slave-owning friends. The planters turned on him when he would not give over California to the slave power, just as the Republican establishment turned on Trump by and large for blowing their game of slow-moving authoritarianism.
"Grabbing them by the pussy" good grief, if that is what finally ends up sinking Trump in this election it will be a pathetic testament to how vulgar and awful the Republican electorate really is. After all the racism, misogyny, laziness, unpreparedness, vulgarity, lies have revealed almost half of our country to be willing collaborators with madness. Trump is the symptom, the disease is how stupid and sympathetic to fascism the Republican primary voters are. Before fox news and the right wing hate machine turned these people into blithering and bloodthirsty idiots, America would never have allowed someone this awful, this vulgar to become a major party candidate for president.
We haven't exactly lit up the world as a shining example of self-government, but this vulgar talking yam is the brightest stop sign ever to grace the top of a major party ticket. Everyone should be able to say without reservation that Trump doesn't belong there and should never be president, he is the worst candidate ever to threaten our experiment in democracy. The fact that we even need to seriously ask if he is the worst says volumes about how far our expectations for good governance have fallen in the age of Republicans putting party ahead of country.
By all means, comment to further this examination, I am sure I have missed many examples.
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