If he wishes his reign to be long, then Donald Trump, flamboyant as he is, should surface his inner Gerald Ford. Sandwiched between the national low of Richard Nixon’s forced resignation and Ronald Reagan’s triumphant rise six years later, Ford has the distinction of being the most normal human being ever to become president.
Ford never planned to be president, and that’s a large part of the reason why. On his own, he never would on his own run for president or seen himself in the White House at all. The vibe he projected was the middle-class dad: reading the paper after work in his recliner, raking the yard of his middle-class castle, tossing the football around with his kids.
In his Reagan biography, Steven F. Hayward gives Ford his due, praising his words, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.” Hayward cites his “plain-spoken middle American countenance,” comparing his temperament to that of Dwight Eisenhower, saying he “possessed a strong solid character” reflective of his district in Michigan” and calling him a welcome relief for the Watergate-weary after three years of tension and stress.
Trump, on the other hand, resembles his hometown of Queens, New York. He lives in a gold-plated tower next door to Tiffany’s. He has a home life straight out of Dallas and Dynasty and a countenance like no one and nothing on earth. And where Ford brought stability after whirlwinds of chaos, Trump brings explosions where few had existed. That’s why he seems to be facing some headwinds in his effort to win reelection next year.
Trump surely thinks that Ford is a “loser,” and he isn’t wrong. Ford lost the White House by an eyelash in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, having come back from a 19-point deficit when the conventions concluded to a near-tie at the end. His loss is partly explained by the the fact that he had been appointed by Nixon, that he had then pardoned Nixon, and that for some reason, in the one debate that he had with Carter, he weirdly and pointedly denied a fact that everyone knew to be true: the Soviet Union’s obvious dominance at that time over Eastern Europe.
The brash side of Trump may be hardly appealing, but beneath the shock-jock persona, as Rich Lowry assures us, is a mainline Republican who longs to break free. “Subtract Trump’s taste for non-stop controversy and rhetorical brinksmanship, and you’re left with an incrementalist center-right government that has pursued an expansionary fiscal policy and avoided foreign war for a period of peace and prosperity that, in any other universe, would be at the core of a ‘stay the course’ reelection message” for the coming campaign.
Lowry says Trump is a classic old-school pre-Reagan Republican: cautious, center-right, and pragmatic. And case by case, he makes a very strong argument for this theory. But he also says that voters are repelled by the madness and fury that often hold sway in Trump’s White House.
Madness and fury were what the country rejected when Richard M. Nixon was forced out office. And if madness and fury define the Trump image, he may be forced out next year. So, this is the time for our least normal leader to take a leaf from the book of perhaps our most sane one. Try for a time to be Dad.
It can’t hurt, and who knows — it might be an improvement. There are moments when father knows best.
