The Best Presidents

Today is President’s Day.

In token of this high and exalted day, we reflect upon the United States presidency.

Historians heap vast praise upon presidents of energy and of action.

In brief, upon presidents who expand their own powers… and the powers of the United States government.

Over whom do historians slobber and swoon — a Millard Fillmore or an Abraham Lincoln?

A Grover Cleveland or a Theodore Roosevelt?

A Calvin Coolidge — or a Franklin Roosevelt?

We mention Calvin Coolidge. Let us lift a hymn of praise in his honor.

For he was not a man of energy and action. He was rather a man absent of energy and action.

And He Was Not a Nuisance

In H.L. Mencken’s telling, Mr. Coolidge:

Slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night… There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.

Note: Old Henry Louis did not say, “He had no ideas, but he was not a nuisance.” He said rather:

“He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”

Is loftier praise for a president conceivable? We do not believe it is.

He had no ideas and he was not a nuisance.

(Upon fresh consideration, we prehumously instruct our obituarist to describe our existence in these precise words. We further decree that the sentence appear on our tombstone, unadulterated.)

Being a nuisance, alas, is how presidents shoulder their way onto the history pages.

Our central grievance with the previous president, Trump, was that he was not nuisance enough.

The Right Kind of Nuisance

The proper kind of nuisance is just what the country could use. Mr. Trump was elected, in fact, to be a nuisance.

Not a statesman, that is — but a demolition man.

This political outsider would “drain the swamp.”

He would terminate the forever wars… and disentangle the United States from entangling alliances.

And did he not pledge to retire the nation’s debt?

But rather than demolition man, Trump was largely kept man.

The president promised x.

But the deep state immediately showed him its fangs, his swampish advisers seized him by the ear… and before he knew what had struck him… his position was y.

That is, his position was the status quo.

Put to one side the fellow’s cyclonic bluster. Put to one side his herculean onslaughts against the pieties.

Mr. Trump’s chief legislative accomplishments could have been Jeb Bush’s chief legislative accomplishments — tax cuts and deregulation.

Meantime, the swamp remains as deep, as thick, as gaseous as ever.

Perhaps the fellow will get another go at it. Perhaps he will become the nuisance we had expected him to be.

The Worst President Ever?

The abovesaid Mr. Mencken certainly hooked onto something when he wrote:

“We suffer most when the White House bursts with ideas.”

In contrast to Mr. Coolidge, we find his predecessor once removed — Woodrow Wilson.

For he was a man bursting with ideas.

Woodrow — for example — was the only doctor of philosophy to ever seize the White House.

He presided over Princeton University before he presided over the United States.

And the nation is still afflicted with his beautiful ideas.

Who signed the Federal Reserve Act into law? The answer is Mr. Wilson.

Who signed the federal income tax into law? The answer is Mr. Wilson.

The same Mr. Wilson ordered the doughboys “over there.” 116,000 of them will remain forever over there.

And the Versailles Treaty that closed the “war to end all wars” spawned the “peace to end all peace.”

WWI was “the Great War” until an even greater war imposed a Roman numeration upon it.

Could It All Have Been Prevented?

Here former colleague David Stockman hauls Wilson into history’s dock. Does David exhibit clemency?

No. David instead indicts Wilson for every crime on the calendar:

Had Woodrow Wilson not misled America on a messianic crusade, the Great War would have ended in mutual exhaustion in 1917 and both sides would have gone home battered and bankrupt but no danger to the rest of mankind.

Indeed, absent Wilson’s crusade there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace and no war reparations; nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd or Stalin’s barbaric regime.

Likewise, there would have been no Hitler, no Nazis, no Holocaust, no global war against Germany and Japan and no incineration of 200,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nor would there have followed a Cold War with the Soviets or CIA-sponsored coups and assassinations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil and Chile to name a few. Surely there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro, or Russian missiles in Cuba or a crisis that took the world to the brink of annihilation.

There would have been no domino theory and no Vietnam slaughter, either.

Nor would we have had to come to the aid of the mujahedeen and train the future al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Likewise, there would have been no Khomeini-led Islamic revolution and no U.S. aid to enable Saddam’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.

Nor would there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our former ally Saddam Hussein from looting the equally contemptible emir of Kuwait’s ill-gotten oil plunder — or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blowback a decade later.

Nor would we have been stuck with a $1 trillion Warfare State budget today.

Does David simplify events? Perhaps so.

Too Good to Be True

We do not propose the 20th century would have remained bloodless absent Mr. Wilson’s botchwork.

The world was — as it always is — to its neck with fools.

These fools would have certainly gotten themselves up to some mischief or other.

Yet we believe the hottest hells of the 20th century may have been averted.

Averted, that is, had Mr. Wilson simply sat upon his hands in April 1917 — and confined the doughboys to their barracks.

Not Even George Washington Could Do It

Now leap ahead. Is there a man equal to the trials of presidenting the United States in the year 2024?

We are not half so convinced there is. We hazard a George Washington would be out of his depth today.

Even “Old Hickory” Andy Jackson would be under the presidential desk the first day of the job… sinking bottles of Tennessee’s hardest whiskey… and sobbing for his mother.

No, we believe the national rot is too deeply advanced for any one man to turn back.

The termites have eaten too deeply into the floorboards beneath… and the rafters above.

And they are dining well at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave…