The Trump Porch Campaign
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 20th 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.
Living in Marion in the mid 60’s, that was the big thing. Warren G. Harding was from Marion, what they never mentioned was they hadn’t come up with anything else since 1920.
1I’ve read that Harding’s wife was the one pushing him to run for the presidency, and that after he was elected, he said to her, “You got what you wanted– now what?” After some time in a job for which he was completely unsuited, he begged a friend to tell him what to do. “Maybe there’s a book somewhere that will tell me how to do this job, but I probably couldn’t read it if there is one.” At least Harding was aware of his inadequacy. Trump thinks the sun rises out of his arse.
2beautiful piece of writing!! my grandfather, who was extremely knowledgeable in politics despite having only a meager 4th grade education, was able to confer identical thoughts and ideas
3to a 10 year old student (myself)
History repeats itself. Harding, Hitler, Drumpf.
4God save us.
5The Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration would likely be duplicated by Donnie for the Koch brothers, if elected.
6And if people think Trump is only after Muslims and immigrants, think about what he has said about RBG criticism of him.
“her mind is shot”. Translation, she old and can’t think straight.
He will go after anybody that criticizes him. Anybody.Nobody is safe.
7It is bullying at the highest level. No critical thinking skills required.
In a battle of wits, the Shitgibbon arrives unarmed. The Notorious RBG, however, is a whole nother story.
8I went to the Warren G. Harding School in the 1950s – but I never knew it because we always called it the Hollister St. School. I never noticed Harding’s name carved over the main door, and apparently the town fathers wanted it that way.
9piaqt, he’s not completely unarmed. He gets ammo by reaching behind him. But it ain’t wits he’s hurling.
10“It’s like deja vu all over again.”
11— Yogi Berra (attributed)
Karl Marx famously commented that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Did he ever wonder if the tragedy and the farce could happen at the same time?
12“WHAT! No Sarah?”
13how’d that happen? wrong page…never mind.
Thank you, Primo, for bringing this to our attention! I had no idea that Harding was this bad, and harbinger of the Great Depression. Holy cow. We need another Mencken. I nominate Andy Borowitz.
14He is the last person we need as president with his thin skin and lack of judgment. He would, I believe, actually start a nuclear war.
15Harding is indeed regularly rated as one of the 5 worst Presidents along with Pierce, Buchanon and the first Johnson. The longer the campaign goes on, the more convinced I become that Trump made a deal to be the “can’t fail to fail” sacrificial goat to guarantee the Clinton ascendancy. Proably while they were all sitting around over drinks at Jeffery Epstein’s pedophile fantasy island.
16Trump’s been getting so much unpaid TV coverage that I’m sick of his face, and it’s only July.
17