What Links Trump With This President?

Like Grover Cleveland, Donald Trump won election as president, lost the next election and won a third election to the US presidency.

IMAGE: Grover Cleveland, America's 22nd and 24th president. Photograph: Kind courtesy Library of Congress/wikipedia.org/Creative Commons

Donald J Trump is certainly making history for many reasons.

One of them is that once he wins this election, Trump becomes an elite member of a two-man Club of Also Rans Who Won, those who lost the presidency to eventually gain it back later.

He, along with America's 22nd and 24th president, Stephen Grover Cleveland, are the only two US presidents to lose a re-election, not give up, and, in due course, come back victorious in the next election and serve non-consecutive terms.

IMAGE: A drawing of President Grover Cleveland's and Frances Folsom's wedding, June 2, 1886, in the White House. Photograph: Kind courtesy Harper's Weekly/wikipedia.org/Creative Commons

Cleveland, who had been governor of New York, was the first Democrat to win the president's office after the American Civil War (incidentally he never fought in the Civil War and, as was permitted, hired a 32-year-old Polish substitute named George Benninsky to fight for him for $150; Benninsky survived).

New Jersey-born Cleveland, then 48, won the 1884 election very narrowly, when he picked up a sliver of a majority in all four of the swing states (yeah, there was this swing-ving stuff back then too).

But when he went for re-election in 1888, he was not so lucky, losing even in his home state of New York, against a well-strategised campaign by Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison.

But he expected to be back, after four years in the political wilderness, while he practiced law in New York City.

IMAGE: Then president Donald J Trump and First Lady Melania Trump depart the White House to board Marine One, January 20, 2021. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

His wife Frances even told a White House staffer (according to his biographer Allen Nevins), 'Now, Jerry, I want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, for I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.'

IMAGE: Melania Trump welcomes the arrival of the White House Christmas Tree outside the White House, November 23, 2020. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

'We are coming back four years from today'. Incidentally Cleveland was also the only president to marry in the White House, when he wed Frances Folsom, 21, the daughter of his former law partner, in the Blue Room in 1886; imagine a bride's first home being the White House!

We don't know what Melania told the WH staff while departing (she's very partial to her walk-in colour-coordinated clothes and shoe closets), but true to her word, Frances and hubby Grover fought against Harrison in 1892 -- an exact déjà vu of the previous election -- and had a clean, clear, win, mainly because Harrison was unable to campaign because his wife, former first lady Caroline, was dying of tuberculosis.

So, Cleveland and Trump now share common history in electoral matters.

IMAGE: A portrait of President Lyndon B Johnson in the Oval Office, leaning on a chair. Photograph: Kind courtesy Arnold Newman/wikipedia.org/Creative Commons

There were a few other presidents, who unsuccessfully ran for re-election not immediately after their terms ended -- Ulysses Grant (third term), Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt.

President Herbert Hoover considered it, but his party would not have him back.

To this collection, one can add LBJ aka Lyndon Baines Johnson, the only other sitting US President, like Joe Biden, to stand down, handing the race over to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

LBJ had finished off the last two years of assassinated John F Kennedy's term, won the 1964 elections and had plans to run for office again in 1968, but somewhere along the way -- maybe because America was in deep unrest over the Vietnam War and race riots -- changed his mind.

Some of the reasons cited then were realisation of his lack of popularity, the Vietnam War, his stance on civil rights that could cost him votes, his wife wanted him to retire, ill health (he was known to smoke 60 cigarettes a day and had a heart attack at 46 that nearly killed him).

IMAGE: The Nixon family portrait taken in the White House living quarters, April 9, 1971. Photograph: Kind courtesy Nixon White House Photographs/White House Photo Office Collection/wikipedia.org/Creative Commons

And how many US presidents, lost their first bid to the presidency, only to be elected later?

There was only one. Guess?

Richard Milhous Nixon, who lost the 1960 presidential election to John F Kennedy.

He then defeated Hubert Humphrey in November 1968, thumped George McGovern in November 1972, but had to resign in August 1974 following the infamous Watergate affair.

Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/ Rediff.com
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com