Franke: Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump

January 20, 2025

by Mark Franke

Donald Trump’s inauguration today to a non-consecutive second term had the beneficial effect of reminding us of Grover Cleveland, the only other president to have achieved this dubious honor.

Having memorized the presidents as a schoolboy, this being one of those obscure lists that my failing memory can still resurrect, I recognized the name. The other reason Cleveland has stuck in my memory is that his interim year of non-voluntary retirement sandwiched the term of Benjamin Harrison, the only president elected from Indiana. Maybe even more important is the fact that he was president when my maternal grandmother was born, a grandmother with whom I was quite close up to her death at age 105.

Other than his electoral oddity, Cleveland is hardly remembered. The various presidential ranking lists, about as useful as the College Football Bowl seeding, tend to bury him in the middle of the pack. All these lists tend to reflect modern sensibilities, as nonsensible as they may be. 

The only lists I have seen that ranks him near the top are a libertarian-based one and that by the  Federalist Society, a group of modern classical liberals. 

I find it surprising that he used to be ranked higher by the more liberal groups. Historian Arthur Schlesinger’s list had him near the top 10 spot after World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Schlesinger classified Cleveland as “near great.” Now, except for Donald Trump’s electoral fit and start, Cleveland is “near forgotten.”

What gives?

Allow me to suggest that Cleveland hasn’t changed; we have. At least the predominant narrative in our brave new world has moved demonstrably away from those characteristics which made Cleveland near great.

Cleveland served during a period of transition in our history. The three previously elected presidents were Civil War generals. We Americans do like our war heroes. But the times, they were a-changin’. The progressive era was in its birthing throes and political corruption seemed to be the natural order of things. Cleveland ran on his reformist principles, taking on the Tammany Hall political machine that controlled Democrat politics. 

This may be hard to believe today but back then the Democrats were considered the conservatives while the Republicans were the liberals, the advocates of an activist federal government. It was Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt who established progressivism as a governing philosophy. No matter that Democrat Woodrow Wilson co-opted the Republicans and staked out the progressive space for his party. It was the Republican progressives who held sway back then and gave Grover Cleveland his foil for his classical liberal ideals. It is in Cleveland’s counter to progressivism that we can see additional similarities to Donald Trump.

The easy comparison is Cleveland’s taking on the corrupt political establishment and civil service, much like Trump’s determination to defang the Deep State and drain the bureaucratic swamp. 

There are more. Cleveland was focused on governmental economy. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is based at least partially on financial goals (although his first term can’t be used as Exhibit 1 for fiscal constraint). Cleveland was also an international non-interventionist; at least he tried to be in the face of a much more assertive Congress. 

The comparison can be pushed too far. Cleveland was more of a constitutionalist than Trump is. Their personalities could be called opposites, as Cleveland was a reserved New Englander focused on thrift and honesty. Cleveland’s record on immigration was mixed, favoring assimilation under restricted immigration standards, while as yet there is no mixed anything in Trump’s statements on immigration.

The greatest difference can be found with international trade. Cleveland was a free-trader and Trump clearly comes down on the side of tariffs as political and economic tools. While they appear to be opposites, there is an aspect of this controversy that identifies a common root cause of each man’s position. Each took his stand on the basis of populism. Cleveland argued that tariffs were special privileges for the powerful and the politically connected. Tariffs harmed the common people. Trump’s position also arises out of populism, in this case the argument that unfair trade harms the citizenry and can be countered only by assessing punitive tariffs on imports.

These two presidents may look different to us today but that may be a function of different times. If we are able to free ourselves from the disease of presentism, the tendency to judge the past by today’s mores, their similarities begin to show.

That said, I still see them as fundamentally different leaders. Grover Cleveland believed in and practiced classical liberalism, the philosophy that sets individual liberty as the touchstone of human society. This requires limited government under the rule of law. 

Can Donald Trump be classified as a classical liberal? I will give him the traditional presidential honeymoon of six months. Then ask me again.

Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.



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