Refuting Conservative Dogma: Has there ever been a time in history when a U.S. President has been treated with less respect by the opposition party?
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| Typical anti-Obama political illustration. Graphic Credit: The People's Cube |
Has there ever been a time in history when a U.S. President has been treated with less respect by the opposition party?
My reply:
If you are a Trump supporter (and I’m willing to bet that you are), I’d like to remind you that Donald J. Trump is not the first President that has been treated with scorn, dislike, and even disrespect.
As a matter of fact, I’m willing to state that all 45 Presidents in U.S. history, including George Washington, have been targets of derision, insults, rumors, or accusations of wrongdoing. The political rivalry between the early Republicans (the original name of the Democratic Party) and Federalists was intense, and adherents of both parties often insulted the leadership of “the other side,” using vivid and vitriolic language that would make the Russian troll farm contractors sigh with envy.
The first three Presidential Elections (1788, 1792, and 1796) were uncontested, so George Washington and John Adams were spared the trials and tribulations of campaign strife. But starting with the 1800 election, the process became a partisan contest that often saw the major parties lower themselves to viciousness and pettiness.
The election pitted John Adams, Washington’s successor and the standing president, against his own vice president Thomas Jefferson, whose Democratic-Republicans championed the cause of small farmers and the working man. The Founding Fathers were known as producers of lofty tracts about political theory. Yet Adams and Jefferson, historian Edward J. Larson notes, “could write like angels and scheme like demons.” Newspapers were the medium of the day. Political attacks were common. Both candidates suffered personal attacks; Adams, for his perceived lack of masculine virtues, Jefferson for rumors that he had fathered children with one of his slaves and, enamored with French revolutionary ideas, had plans to install a Bonaparte-like dictatorship in America. His heterodox Christianity also raised charges of atheism.
Back then, just as now, America’s racial divide influenced how Americans voted at the polls, as The First Ugly Election illustrates:
African Americans played a role in Adams’ defeat too, even though they were prohibited from voting. The infamous 3/5 rule in the Constitution, which counted slaves in determining electors via that percentage, helped cement Jefferson’s electoral strength in the South. A Virginia slave revolt by an artisan named Gabriel was inspired by visions of liberty. The ill-fated attempt failed after it was clear that Jefferson’s vision of liberty was for whites only and that the tacit support of two Frenchmen in Philadelphia could not deliver a fleet to liberate the slaves.
And going forward in time to the 1860s, the modern Republican Party’s first winning Presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was so hated by Democrats in the slave-holding Southern states that his electoral victory in November of 1860 triggered the Secession Crisis that split the nation in two and led to the horrors of the Civil War. Democrats (especially those that had supported John C. Breckenridge after the party split along sectional lines) called Lincoln all sorts of disgusting names and claimed he would destroy the South’s civilization and its right to maintain slavery.
Even taking into account the opposition’s reaction to George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 election victories, Barack Obama’s ascent to the Presidency was received, despite many conservatives’ denials, with anger, bigotry, and disrespect that I had not seen in any election cycle since the Vietnam era. (Back then, Richard Nixon was jeered at by many protesters and even Democratic politicians, but it was, at least in the 1968 election, more of an anti-war animus than it was personal attacks against Nixon himself.)
I know that Trump supporters like to pretend that they reacted respectfully toward former President Obama after he won the 2008 election. I don’t doubt that most of the decent conservatives accepted the results and figured they could tolerate a half-black President in the White House for at least one term. That having been said, the Koch Brothers-financed Tea Party movement, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, and even people who should have known better (I’m looking at you, Mitch McConnell) not only treated Obama with discourtesy and disrespect but added fuel to the fire with naked hatred and even threats of violent insurrection.
Typical right-wing media political propaganda cartoon depicting Barack Obama as a Soviet-style Communist.
And the birther movement, kids, that bit of viciousness that has never really gone away. What was that all about? The false claim that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen and that he had been born in Kenya was a blatant attempt to call into question the legitimacy of the Obama Presidency, plain and simple. Its adherents and cheerleaders, including (and especially) Donald Trump, sought to pound into the minds of white conservatives the false notion that the Presidency had been usurped unfairly by someone who was not even a citizen of the United States.
If that is not disrespect, I don’t know what is.
Oh, and here’s a statistic for you:
Four American Presidents have been murdered by assassins: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Many others, beginning with Andrew Jackson, evaded assassination attempts.
Murder, especially if fueled by political animus, is the ultimate act of disrespect.
As for Donald Trump and how he is treated by the opposition:
He is reaping what he sowed. It’s that simple.
Look, if you treat people with nothing but hatred, antipathy, bigotry, and refer to them by snarky, hateful nicknames, then you don’t deserve any deference or respect, period. That applies during a political campaign, of course, but it is more relevant if you happen to win an election and are the “leader of the Free World” now.
Trump has never stopped behaving as though he were in Campaign Mode, Not for one day since his Inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. He basically plays to his supporters without trying to heal the wounds from the ’16 campaign and unite the country.
As my late mother used to say, “If you want to be respected, you have to show respect to others.”
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