Not very far at all from where I’m sitting is the town of Marion, OH, where Warren G. Harding lived when he was nominated and elected President. Like an earlier Ohio President, William McKinley, Harding chose to run a “front porch” campaign in 1920.

Traditionally, it was considered bad form to appear to be too eager for the Presidency.   The dignity of the office required a certain comportment from the candidate, regardless of the absolutely unscrupulous things done in his name and on his behalf by his operatives. By the early 20^th century, however, the hey-day of the railroads signaled the onset of a new kind of campaigning. Peripatetic candidates racked up thousands of miles.

Harding Home: Great front porch! Lousy President.

But not Warren G. He sat on his porch while people flocked from all over to see and hear him. His speeches spoke of “America First.” His campaign promise was to take America back to “normalcy.” A Republican ad in Colliers Magazine on the eve of the election cried, “This country will remain American” and “objected to foreign government of our people.”

This was the end of the Progressive movement in Republican politics. Teddy Roosevelt, the odds-on favorite to win in 1920, died inconveniently in 1919. Robert LaFollete’s Progressive insurgency had died on the convention floor.   Impressed by his anti-union cred, the RNC nominated Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge for Vice President, who later would famously say “the chief business of the American people is business.” The campaign, then, was business and nationalism, with a great deal of xenophobia mixed in as anti-Catholicism (foreigners!) and antisemitism (more foreigners!) joined racism as the guiding stars of the newly-resurgent Ku Klux Klan.

Senator Harding of Ohio, a newspaper owner and editor, was paired off against Governor Cox of Ohio, a newspaper owner and editor. People could hardly tell the two apart, as neither was very progressive and both tended to the isolationism that had characterized America’s aversion to “foreign entanglements” from George Washington until WWI.

In addition to Harding being characterized by newspapers as unqualified, “weak,” “mediocre,” “the flag-bearer of… autocracy,” and bereft of “original ideas,” his speeches from his front porch reminded H.L. Mencken “of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a kind of grandeur creeps into it.”

Nevertheless, Harding won in a repudiation of Democrats and Wilson and his League of Nations, ushering in a period of corrupt administration, the growth of organized crime and the Klan, and unregulated wildcat business practices culminating in worldwide Depression followed by worldwide war and slaughter.

Donald Trump is a similar candidate, running a similar campaign.   With its lack of campaign structure, its amateurish fund-raising, its M.I.A. data operation, its invisible presence in the field, and staffed by the dregs of political humanity, the Trump campaign lacks all of the normal workings of a modern campaign, except for the candidate jetting around and holding rallies. But in a very real sense, these rallies are just the same as the old front porch campaign, except Trump’s front porch is mobile.

Attended by sycophants, curiosity-seekers and a captive press corps, each rally plays out like a rambling, disjointed Harding speech: long on platitudes and attitudes, short on policy and coherence, “the worst English I have ever encountered” as Mencken wrote. Trump just uses modern transportation and his plundered wealth to carry his front porch with him. And from his porch, he holds forth on America First, extols the virtues of unchained business, decries non-whites with xenophobic zeal, cries “Havoc!” and lets slip the dogs of trade war.

This election isn’t 1968: it’s 1920.