The 2024 presidential campaign, we were told endlessly, was “unprecedented.” Given the unusually advanced ages of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the multiple assassination attempts on Trump, Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race after already having secured the nomination, and the abrupt substitution of Kamala Harris, it’s easy to understand why many pundits thought the country was headed into uncharted territory.
That diagnosis, however, had one crippling defect: it was wrong. The current state of American politics is aggressively precedented; it’s just that the historical touchstones lie in one of the most poorly understood periods of American history: the so-called Gilded Age that followed the Civil War and endured into the early twentieth century.
Donald Trump’s attainment of a second, non-consecutive presidential term replicates the achievement of only one man—Grover Cleveland, who returned to office in 1892 after narrowly losing his reelection bid in 1888, a race in which Cleveland won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College. Beyond the historical anomaly that now links them, Cleveland and Trump are mostly a study in contrasts. Cleveland was a staid, workaholic lawyer known for unshakeable ideological commitments; Trump is a consummate showman whose substantive views tend toward the protean. But they have this much in common: their political resurrections owed in large measure to policy stances that became more popular during their time out of office.
Trump’s hardline rhetoric on immigration in 2016 was largely interpreted at the time as an appeal to an underrepresented faction of the Republican coalition rather than as a national wedge issue. But the surge of migrants during the Biden administration so catalyzed public opinion on the issue that, by early this year, 44 percent of independents and 27 percent of Democrats were telling Gallup they worried “a great deal” about illegal immigration.
Cleveland’s views underwent a similar reassessment. As an incumbent in the 1888 race, he built his campaign almost entirely around proposals to reduce tariffs—which, in an era before the adoption of the federal income tax, represented about 60 percent of federal revenues. Given that the issue divided Cleveland’s Democratic Party and unified Republicans in opposition, it was a foolhardy gambit and one that likely cost him the race to Benjamin Harrison. But when a Republican Congress enacted sweeping tariff increases during the Harrison administration, the resulting economic hardship made Cleveland look prescient.
The author of those tariffs—Congressman William McKinley, who would later serve as governor of Ohio before succeeding Cleveland as president —also looms large over 2024. Indeed, Trump has repeatedly cited McKinley as proof that his vision of a more protectionist approach to trade is compatible with economic growth. The president-elect has even floated the idea of reverting to the nineteenth-century practice of using tariffs and not an income tax to fund the federal government.
Replacing the income tax with tariffs is almost certainly impracticable; federal spending under the tariff-funded government of the 1890s was about 3 percent of GDP, while today it’s about 24 percent. But there are solid reasons why Trump perceives McKinley as a kindred spirit on this issue. McKinley dismissed opposition to his economic views as “the influence of the professors in some of our institutions of learning, who teach the science contained in books and not practical business. . . . I would rather have my political economy founded upon the everyday experience of . . . the farmer and factory hand than the college faculty.” Stripped of its perfumed diction, this mirrors J. D. Vance’s more pungent assertion: “I don’t think those economists know what the hell they’re talking about.”
And Trump has a third Gilded Age forebear, another three-time presidential candidate: William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Like Trump, Bryan worked to transform a party with deep roots in classical liberalism into a populist movement. Unlike Trump, he failed at every turn, suffering defeat at McKinley’s hands twice and then losing to William Howard Taft in his final bid for the White House. Today, McKinley is best remembered for realigning American politics; Bryan, for giving populism a national platform. Given the surprising electoral demographics emerging from Election Day 2024, there’s justifiable speculation that Trump is now doing both at the same time.
With the substance of the election being so redolent of turn-of-the-twentieth-century politics, it’s even more remarkable that the campaign drama turned out to be, as well. Questions about Joe Biden’s age-related limitations (and the White House’s lack of candor about them) called to mind the efforts to hide the effects of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke during his second term. Trump’s defiant fist pump after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July finds its most obvious parallel in Theodore Roosevelt’s continuing to deliver a speech after getting shot at a campaign stop in 1912.
In hindsight, Democrats may come to wish they had drawn some of their own lessons from the nineteenth century. During that era, the idea of an intentional one-term presidency was far less exotic than it is today. In fact, many leading politicians thought presidents should be barred from seeking reelection. If Biden had entered office intent on serving only four years and focused on stabilizing the volatile electorate that chose him in 2020, he might have given his Democratic successor a more viable path to the White House. At the very least, he would have allowed Democratic primary voters to choose their own nominee.
Even if they disregarded this lesson, other instructive examples could be found in the rough-and-tumble of nineteenth-century backroom politics. While the idea of a brokered convention is usually dismissed as the fantasy of political obsessives, the boss-driven system of the pre-primary era had the virtue of putting decision-making power in the hands of a small group of people who prioritized winning elections and had a sophisticated understanding of how to do so. Given Kamala Harris’s nationwide underperformance, it’s at least possible that the Democrats would have fared better with this approach, distasteful as it may seem to modern democratic sensibilities.
Harris could also have applied a Gilded Age principle: there’s no need for excessive deference to your predecessor. The 1896 Democratic National Convention that nominated William Jennings Bryan denounced the by-then-unpopular Cleveland in the party platform. In a less sentimental era, getting the new candidate across the finish line counted for more than flattering the old one.
Does the Gilded Age offer any clues about what comes next? Only in the faintest of outlines, perhaps. The Grover Cleveland of the second term, mindful of his first-term failures, came to office with a more expansive view of executive power (though it was still remarkably restrained by modern standards). For those who fear that Donald Trump will seek to push constitutional limits, it’s a worrisome precedent.
Another related trend bears noting, however: the second-term Cleveland also fell victim to his first-term track record. The one-time patron saint of limited government saw his popularity within his own party plummet, for example, when he deployed federal troops to Chicago—over the objections of Illinois’ Democratic governor—to put down the Pullman Strike. A potentially symmetrical irony awaits Trump if, like virtually all twenty-first-century presidents, he tries to use executive power to do an end-run around Congress. The foremost obstacle to such a scheme? Probably the Supreme Court majority he assembled in his first term.
The most important lesson the Gilded Age can give us, however, is that the present shape of American politics has little predictive power for its future. In 1892, Grover Cleveland achieved a comeback unrivaled in political history. Four years later, his party abandoned him and his governing philosophy. By the time Cleveland died in 1908, the Republican William Howard Taft, soon to be sworn in as president himself, sounded more like Cleveland than most Democrats, who would soon migrate from Bryan’s populism to Wilson’s progressivism.
In the long view of American history, such dramatic and unexpected reconfigurations of our politics are not remarkable. Only their absence is.
Photos: History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images (left) / JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images (center) / Courtesy of the National Archives/Newsmakers (right)