Trump is unique as is any individual, but contrary to critics, he has not so far, as far as can be gleaned from the press, done anything distinctly out of the ordinary when using the behaviors of past Presidents as a guideline. Indeed, compared to most, he has been pretty much a Boy Scout. And if you look at the most recent administration's use of the intelligence services and Federal agencies for partisan purposes, the bar is pretty high for Trump to demonstrate a greater danger to the civic norms of the nation.
The interesting point of the article is in Hanson's account of Truman. When Trump was elected, I thought a fair amount about the similarities between his election and Truman's; both being great surprises to the punditry, establishment parties and the Mandarin Class. Truman's election led to the iconic photo used in every polisci class and statistics class to illustrate the perils of forecasting.
But I did not think about the personal similarities between Truman and Trump which is Hanson's point. I wouldn't press those similarities too far (plutocrat successful businessman and political hobnobber versus serial failed businessman and local machine politician) but there are more resemblances than I would have instinctively identified.
In some sense, Donald Trump was replaying the role of the unpopular tenure of loudmouth Democrat Harry Truman, the president from 1945 to 1953.I would add that perhaps the greatest similarity is that expectations for both were so low that it was hard not to exceed them.
“Give ’em Hell” Harry came into office following the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He miraculously won the 1948 election against all expert opinion and polls.
Truman left office in January 1953 widely hated. Indeed, his final approval ratings (32 percent) were the lowest of any departing president except for those of Richard Nixon.
The outsider Truman had always been immersed in scandal, owing to his deep ties to the corrupt Kansas City political machine.
When the novice Vice President Truman took office after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he knew little about the grand strategy of World War II — and nothing about the ongoing atomic-bomb project.
For the next seven-plus years, Truman shocked — and successfully led — the country.
Over the objections of many in his Cabinet, Truman ignored critics and ordered the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war. Against the advice of most of the State Department, he recognized the new state of Israel.
He offended Roosevelt holdovers by breaking with wartime ally the Soviet Union and chartering the foundations of Cold War communist containment. Many in the Pentagon opposed his racial integration of the armed forces. National-security advisors counseled against sending troops to save South Korea.
Liberals opposed fellow Democrat Truman’s creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Truman was widely loathed for firing controversial five-star general and American hero Douglas MacArthur.
There were often widespread calls in the press for Truman to resign. Impeachment was often mentioned. Truman, in short, did things other presidents had not dared to do.
Truman occasionally swore. He had nightly drinks. He played poker with cronies. And he shocked aides and the public with his vulgarity and crass attacks on political enemies.
Truman cheaply compared 1948 presidential opponent Thomas Dewey to Hitler and attacked him as a supposed pawn of bigots and war profiteers.
Truman hyperbolically claimed a Republican victory in 1948 would threaten America’s very liberty.
In the pre-Twitter age, Truman could never keep his mouth shut: “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”
When a reviewer for The Washington Post trashed Truman’s daughter’s concert performance, Truman threatened him with physical violence.
“It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful,” Truman wrote in a letter to critic Paul Hume.
“Someday I hope to meet you. When that happens, you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes and perhaps a supporter below!”
Such outbursts were Trumpian to the core.
It took a half-century for historians to concede that the mercurial and often adolescent Truman had solid accomplishments, especially in foreign affairs — in part because Truman conveyed a sense that he did not much care for staying in Washington, a city in which he was not invested, did not like and would quickly leave at the end of his tenure.
Even Truman’s crassness eventually was appreciated as integral to his image of a “plain speaking” and “the Buck Stops Here” decisive leader.
Had Truman access to Twitter, he could have self-destructed in a flurry of ad-hominem electronic outbursts. Yet Truman proved largely successful because of what he did, and in spite of what he said.
I have read elsewhere that one of the things that set Truman apart was his personal integrity despite his functionary role in the Pendergast machine.
But perhaps integrity is not quite the right vector of comparison between Trump and Truman. I think the commonality between them, beyond being a surprise, is that both were outsiders to the Mandarin Class, both had great affection for and awareness of the lives of ordinary Americans, and both were self-confidant enough in themselves and their values to make good decisions independent of, and indeed contrary to, the so-frequently-wrong experts.
We'll see. But it is an interesting point from Hanson.
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