I might have missed Grover Cleveland’s 188th birthday on March 18 if Paul Jacob hadn’t pointed it out in his own column on the man who (as Jacob mentions) many libertarians consider “the last great president of these United States.” I don’t consider the presidency a venue for greatness, but as presidents go “Big Steve” was arguably one of the least bad.
Cleveland, of course, has been noticed lately for some of his similarities with Trump. He was the first, and until Trump the only, president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Like Trump, he was a New York Democrat. And, like, Trump he won his first presidential election despite a sex scandal — although unlike Trump he openly admitted his past conduct (he’d fathered a child out of wedlock, something more scandalous then than now).
The differences between the two, however, are more interesting.
On foreign policy, Cleveland was an anti-imperialist who opposed the US annexation of Hawaii. He never seems to have considered adding, say, Greenland or Canada to the constellation of American states. Trump’s an imperialist in practice who occasionally talks a not very convincing non-interventionist game while somehow managing to escalate every conflict he inherits and who couldn’t be bothered to complete his negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan before leaving office the first time.
On tax policy, Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and seems determined to wreck the US economy with his capricious demand-then-back-down approach to foreign trade. Cleveland worked to lower tariffs, and laid out the irrefutable case against them to American workers who thought such taxes “protected” their jobs:
“Those who buy imports pay the duty charged thereon into the public Treasury, but the great majority of our citizens, who buy domestic articles of the same class, pay a sum at least approximately equal to this duty to the home manufacturer. … with slight reflection they will not overlook the fact that they are consumers with the rest …”
Perhaps the biggest differences, both of which informed Cleveland’s opposition to high tariffs and Trump’s support for them:
First, in Cleveland’s time, the federal government enjoyed an increasing budget surplus rather than continuing deficits, while Trump inherited a government $20 trillion in debt and left office the first time with that debt at more than $28 trillion.
Second, Cleveland opposed the “spoils” system under which the party in power rewarded its supporters with government jobs and contracts. He wanted a “civil service” based on competence rather than partisan loyalty, and considered the tariff-fueled budget surplus a problem because it made so much money available to pay for those “spoils.”
Trump, on the other hand, clearly sees government employment as “spoils” candy to be handed out on the basis of personal loyalty. And since his biggest supporters are among the American wealth elite, he gets a “two-fer” by taxing your purchases of foreign goods to their advantage (revenue) while rewarding less well-heeled loyalists with those government jobs (spending).
We could use a man like Grover Cleveland again. Too bad we got another Herbert Hoover.
