By the time January is half over, we’ll know whether every poll published about the Iowa Republican Caucus was correct and Donald Trump has won the first contest in his effort to Grover-Cleveland himself into a nonconsecutive second term. It’s not entirely impossible that another candidate won’t win, but disgraced former president, and one-time Ottumwa resident, Richard Nixon stands almost as good a chance of beating Trump on Jan. 15 as DeSantis or Haley, and Nixon’s been dead since 1994.
Being alive isn’t one of the qualifications for president actually listed in the Constitution, but alive or dead, Nixon would be disqualified by the 22nd Amendment, which states, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” No state would allow a candidate covered by that prohibition, added in 1951, on a ballot. Not even if that candidate was immensely popular with people likely to threaten to kill election officials or willing to attack the U.S. Capitol.
The 14th Amendment became part of the Constitution 83 years before the 22nd, and it prohibits anyone who served in public office and then engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to those who did, from ever holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States” again. As 2024 begins, only the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s Secretary of State have concluded this disqualifies Trump.
“I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Maine Sec. of State Shannon Bellows wrote in her decision. “I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”
Both Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court are deferring action on removing Trump from the ballot so the former president can appeal the decisions.
Even though Grover Cleveland is the only one to do what Trump is attempting — win a presidential election, after losing one as an incumbent, by defeating the man he lost to — the two otherwise have very little in common.
Cleveland, a Democrat, won his first term in 1884 running on his decades-long record as a political reformer. Trump, a Republican, won his first term while contesting a class-action lawsuit accusing him of defrauding everyone who paid for “Trump University” courses (two weeks after the 2016 election, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle the case), and a civil lawsuit filed by the New York Attorney General, who found “a shocking pattern of illegality” in how Trump ran his self-named charity (a judge ruled in favor of the AG and in 2018 ordered the Donald J. Trump Foundation shut down permanently).
As he’s running in 2024, Trump is facing criminal trials in state and federal courts on 91 felony counts and is a defendant in multiple civil lawsuits.
If he wins a second term, Trump would undo Cleveland’s signature accomplishment as president: reducing political cronyism in the federal government by greatly expanding the number of civil service positions filled on the basis of merit. Trump and his advisors want to reclassify as many as 50,000 nonpartisan civil servants who work on policy issues, so they can be fired and replaced with people who have been screened to ensure they are loyal to Trump.
Of course, Cleveland was no paragon. Like Trump, he avoided military service (but Cleveland did so legally by hiring a substitute to serve in his place in the Army, instead of getting a suspiciously convenient doctor’s note about “bone spurs” in his heels). And like Trump, Cleveland was accused of sexual assault (for Cleveland there was only one accusation, while more than a dozen women have said Trump sexually assaulted them, and a jury found him civilly liable in one case).
Cleveland also held most of the racist and xenophobic views men of his class and era did, but the racist and xenophobic views Trump espouses are so extreme he felt the need to tell a crowd at a Waterloo rally in December, “I never read Mein Kampf.”
According to all the polls, Trump’s racism and xenophobia are unlikely to hurt him in the Iowa Republican Caucus. On Jan. 15, we’ll find out if those polls are right.
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This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2024 issue.
