About a year ago, in an interview in the Oval Office, I asked President Trump if his years behind the storied Resolute desk had made him empathize with his predecessors. In the very room where most of them had called on one another in times of crisis for years — and well before the novel coronavirus pandemic changed the country, and the world — Mr. Trump was dismissive of the men who came before him.
He answered my question without hesitation: “No, no.” His attitude toward his predecessors has apparently only hardened over time. The chaos of the pandemic has shined a spotlight on his contempt for the living presidents.
He has stripped them of one of their only jobs in retirement: their unique ability to unify the country in a crisis. The relative absence of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter is more striking now than ever before.
Mr. Obama’s endorsement of Joe Biden on April 14 was as much — if not more — about calling out Mr. Trump as it was about declaring his support for his former vice president. The endorsement gave Mr. Obama the chance to speak up against not only Mr. Trump’s muddled handling of the pandemic but also his entire presidency in a video that ran nearly 12 minutes.
A former president criticizing a sitting president during a crisis of this magnitude used to be unthinkable, but now that Mr. Trump has ripped up the playbook of civility, members of the so-called Presidents Club have free rein. His decision to jettison his predecessors is highly unusual in modern times. And he knows it.
His administration, he told me, has bested them all and he was not worried about how he would eventually be received in the Presidents Club. “I don’t think I fit very well because I’m a different kind of a president,” he said. “I’ve broken up a lot of policies, a lot of things that they’ve done.” For decades, the sitting president has called upon the former presidents to provide a sense of national unity. Their familiar presence would be reassuring in a world that has become surreal.
John F. Kennedy called on all three of his predecessors during the Cuban missile crisis, two Republicans (Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower) and one Democrat (Harry Truman). In 2005, George W. Bush sent his father on a trip around the world with Mr. Clinton, the elder Mr. Bush’s onetime rival, after the Indian Ocean tsunami. After Hurricane Katrina, the duo (whom Barbara Bush affectionately called the “odd couple”) raised money and their friendship became an enduring and reassuring sight.
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Mr. Obama announced that George W. Bush and Mr. Clinton would lead a fund-raising effort to help Haitians rebuild. In the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama was flanked by the former presidents. “This is a model that works,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the partnership between Bush Sr. and Mr. Clinton. “As the scope of the destruction became apparent, I spoke to each of these gentlemen, and they each asked the same simple question, ‘How can I help?’”
It is difficult to imagine Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush or Mr. Obama rejecting a call for help from Mr. Trump, but it is equally difficult to imagine him calling. When asked at one of his early coronavirus press briefings whether he would reach out to his predecessors for help, Mr. Trump said dismissively: “I don’t think I’m going to learn much. And, you know, I guess you could say that there’s probably a natural inclination not to call.”
If Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Carter were to start an effort together without Mr. Trump, a former Obama aide lamented, the endeavor would be entirely eclipsed by the fact that they did it without the sitting president. Mr. Trump has clearly enjoyed humiliating his predecessors and has called Mr. Bush’s invasion of Iraq “the single worst decision ever made.” In a mid-March tweet, just as the nation’s economy was shutting down and schools were closing, Mr. Trump wasted no time criticizing his predecessor’s management of a previous health crisis. He railed against Mr. Obama’s response to the H1N1 swine flu and called it “a full-scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now.”
Mr. Bush recently wrote a note to his staff that was obtained by The Dallas Morning News. He expressed “absolute confidence in the experts who are in charge” of the nation’s coronavirus response. He said that he was “reading, painting and riding mountain bikes” and that he and his wife, the former first lady Laura Bush, were “handwashing and social-distancing to the max.”
But wouldn’t it be better if he and the other ex-presidents could put the lessons they learned in office to lift the country’s spirit during this unprecedented public health crisis?
Of course each still has unique influence: The Clintons sent hundreds of pizzas to hospital staff caring for coronavirus patients, and Jimmy Carter asked donors to “forgo” their “next gift” to the Carter Center and instead support groups working directly to combat the pandemic.
Mr. Trump has ended up with an opponent who is so much more in the mold of the presidential fraternity. Mr. Biden would not hesitate to call a predecessor or a former political rival during a crisis. Mr. Biden’s dozens of years in the Senate and two terms as vice president included many friendships with Republicans, and at least one with a former member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.
Mr. Biden told me that at the beginning of the Trump presidency he had been in touch with Mike Pence, who, Mr. Biden said, is “a guy you can talk with, you can deal with, in a traditional sense. Like Clinton could talk to [Newt] Gingrich.” Mr. Biden has no trouble working with people with whom he does not always agree: He would fit in the mold of the Presidents Club perfectly.
Election Day 2020 will feature a battle between the candidate who buys into the club idea and seems ready to reignite that tradition and the incumbent who is so eager to make clear he could not care less that he won’t pick up the phone during the biggest crisis this country has faced since 9/11.
Kate Andersen Brower is the author of the forthcoming “Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
