Trump Repeats a Centuries-Old Mistake
This isn’t the first time a president has made the midterm elections all about himself.
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“The President of the United States has so singular a combination of defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation of Providence.” So begins one of the most withering paragraphs on politics in the history of The Atlantic. “He unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of demagogue and autocrat,” the passage continues, “and converts the Presidential chair into a stump or a throne, according as the impulse seizes him to cajole or to command.”
These words, written by E. P. Whipple, date back to September 1866, in the midst of a midterm election battle. The sitting president, Andrew Johnson, had been thrust into office a little more than a year earlier by John Wilkes Booth. By the time Whipple’s essay appeared, Johnson had placed himself at the center of a congressional election that would have defining consequences for the country. With the guns of the Civil War still warm, the fundamental questions of Reconstruction were at the core of national politics. The Republican majority in Congress insisted that Reconstruction must do more than simply restore Confederate states to the Union: It must secure the rights of formerly enslaved people and prevent certain former Confederate leaders from returning to political power. Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee who’d been nominated to balance Abraham Lincoln’s National Union ticket in 1864, took another view.
Whipple’s essays on the theatrics of Johnson’s campaign are the work of a writer at the height of his powers, but who also may be losing his mind. Whipple performed surgical eviscerations of Johnson and his allies’ efforts to nullify the Union triumph in the Civil War. Nearly blinded by his racism and opposition to Black civil rights, Johnson set himself at odds with the Republican majority, pardoning thousands of former Confederates, vetoing Reconstruction legislation, and excusing white violence on Black Americans in Memphis and New Orleans. In his essays, Whipple confronted the maddening diversions of what he called the “Johnson Party,” in which secessionists were portrayed as the true patriots, presidential overreach and usurpation were said to be in service of the Constitution, and those opposing both were seen as the real traitors. “There is no wrong anywhere,” Whipple lamented. “It is all ‘right.’”
Whipple’s shouts resonate in our own up-is-down era of politics, and in a midterm cycle in which Donald Trump, like Johnson in 1866, “sees hardly anything as it is, but almost everything as colored by his own dominant egotism.” Trump’s attempt to hold on to his party’s majority has focused on defending his record and deflecting questions about affordability and high gas prices. Some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from him ahead of Election Day, as his appearances veer into unusual tangents removed from voters’ everyday concerns (for good measure, he recently took to praising the “ass” of Senator Jon Husted of Ohio and the rapper Nicki Minaj).
Johnson, too, defined the election as a referendum not just on the nation and its future, but on his destiny in shaping it. With whispers of a possible impeachment dogging him that year, the midterms represented a showdown between the executive and legislative branches. Whipple’s essay on “The Johnson Party” came after the so-called National Union Convention, an August 1866 event that Johnson and his Cabinet had endorsed to form a new coalition that could displace the pro-Reconstruction Republican majority in Congress. In the case that Johnson’s new party failed to win, some of his supporters reportedly discussed schemes to deny Republicans power. If “Congress cannot be overcome by fair means, it will be by foul,” Whipple wrote. “In short, we are promised, on the assembling of the next Congress, a coup d’état.”
To rally support for his Reconstruction policies and preferred congressional candidates, Johnson embarked on an unsuccessful national tour. (Whipple argued that he did so “with the intention of carrying the country by assault.”) His endeavors wound up hurting, rather than helping, his cause. He took to the stump to advocate for his own interests, with Whipple noting “the immense protuberance” of the first-person pronoun throughout the president’s many speeches. Although he didn’t make the posteriors of his political allies central to his closing argument, in the end, he was deemed a “Presidential Ass” by a Michigan Republican.
Such presidential barnstorming amid a congressional election was something of a novelty that many deemed beneath the dignity of the office; the intemperate content of Johnson’s speeches made it worse. His remarks at times devolved into “a volcanic outbreak of vulgarity, conceit, bombast, scurrility, ignorance, insolence, brutality, and balderdash,” according to Whipple. When Johnson found himself assailed by hecklers (who he claimed were paid disrupters), his material took dark and strange turns. After one audience member called for the hanging of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, Johnson in turn suggested hanging the Republican representative Thaddeus Stevens and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Subsequent jeers inspired him to compare himself to Christ, betrayed by Judas and suffering on behalf of the nation at large. Governors, mayors, and other politicians were reportedly avoiding the president’s appearances, sometimes declining to welcome him or leaving town before he arrived.
As the tour concluded in the middle of September, the magnitude of Johnson’s mistake came into view. By one senator’s estimate, Johnson’s campaigning cost his preferred candidates roughly a million votes across the country—no small number in that era’s electorate. The New York Times reportedly lost nearly a third of its mostly Republican subscribers after its editor, Henry Jarvis Raymond, had openly supported Johnson and the National Union movement. Most important, the very Republicans whom Johnson had wished to displace didn’t lose seats but gained them, beyond the two-thirds majority necessary to override the presidential veto that Johnson had already used against Reconstruction legislation. And Johnson, for his part, later became the first president to ever be impeached.
The 1866 midterms took place in an entirely different world from ours. A president campaigning on behalf of congressional candidates was uncommon then, and a president routinely violating the decorum and propriety associated with the office was more uncommon yet. Whipple hoped that voters would go on to “indignantly record the most overwhelming of verdicts” against Johnson. Now, 160 years later, America once more has a president who has elevated his own ambitions above the nation’s. The people’s verdict awaits.
