Every President Gets a Raw Deal

O f all the justifications Trump supporters provide the befuddled journalists who cannot grok their political preferences, one stands out: Donald Trump got a raw deal.

GOP primary voters backing the former president, when explaining their support, are likely to cite their positive impressions of his record in office, their sense of financial and physical security during his presidency, what he’s promised to do in office, or affection for his general demeanor. But when pressed as to why Trump deserves a second term in the White House, Republicans will often tell their interlocutors that the former president was given a bad shake in his first.

“He was over-scrutinized,” one Trump backer eventually told a New York Times focus group in October. “They scrutinized him in a fashion that no other political figure in the United States had yet been through.” The Trump-supporting New Hampshirites who explained their preference to USA Today’s reporters agreed. “I won’t stand for anybody being persecuted the way he’s been persecuted,” one averred. “He doesn’t deserve it.” As one Trump voter told NPR, “Everything that Trump has ever been accused of, has come out to be false.” Whether his shortcomings are attributable to Democrats who just wouldn’t give Trump the runway he deserved or the machinations of nefarious actors behind the scenes, the 45th president was unduly denied the opportunities he was owed. He deserves another shot.

While much of the language Trump voters employ echoes both Trump’s rhetoric and sentiments, their claims are not without merit. What the whole of the American Right has taken to calling the “Russia collusion hoax” produced a financially crippling fishing expedition into Trump’s professional and (sometimes intimate) personal associations. Although he was ultimately exonerated, the investigation was the outgrowth of a lie. The phenomenon of “Trump law” is both real and an abuse of authority. And even though most of Trump’s political headaches are of his own making, his pursuers have sacrificed their own integrity in their efforts to secure outcomes designed to extirpate Trump from the political landscape.

All this is to say that, yes, Trump and his supporters are nursing legitimate grievances. Do you know what other president’s partisans are similarly aggrieved by the historical injustices that were meted out against their guy? All of them.

You might remember the opposition Barack Obama encountered from Republicans and conservatives as fueled by a passion equal in intensity only to Obama’s own antagonism and disregard for the norms of political engagement. That’s not how Obama’s backers remember it. To them, statements like “I hope he fails” and making Obama’s defeat “the single most important thing we want to achieve” were tantamount to sedition. Republicans “sabotaged” his singular legislative achievement, the economy, and the processes by which his nominees would be confirmed. Their obstructionism compelled Obama to stretch the bounds of presidential authority, and the courts were arrayed against him to a suspicious degree. From the implosion of Syria to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine to the rise of ISIS — the world just would not cooperate with Obama’s grand vision for a new American foreign policy. It was all so unfair.

George W. Bush did not deserve credit for the collapse of the mortgage market in 2008. In its own defense, the Bush White House repeatedly, and accurately, reminded the press and the public alike of all the opportunities lawmakers had to reform Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac — and, for that matter, all the times the Bush White House implored Congress to do just that. Likewise, the Bush administration’s project in Iraq is now almost universally regarded as a disaster — the stable, proto-democratic Iraq that exists today, which any honest broker would prefer over Saddam Hussein’s aggressive, expansionist, terror-supporting despotism, entirely notwithstanding.

Bill Clinton’s supporters will be quick to disabuse you of the notion that the 42nd president was impeached for obstructing Congress and lying under oath. No, that was an outgrowth of the prudish GOP of the era, which sought to impose its hidebound morality on America’s first Boomer president. Indeed, the 1995 government shutdown had next to nothing to do with a legitimate impasse over how to bridge a budget gap. Rather, it was an exercise in spite executed by Newt Gingrich as an act of revenge for having been denied a trip on Air Force One. And we’d be calling it “Clintoncare” today (if not “Hillarycare”) were it not for the avaricious “service-sector workers” who were “hostile to any labor law deal that hinted at more employee voice.”

George H. W. Bush presided over a mild and fleeting recession in 1990, but you wouldn’t have known it from the apocalyptic coverage of that ephemeral downturn. “I do think the retrospective coverage has been unfair,” confessed St. Petersburg Times staff writer Eileen Shanahan during a March 1992 symposium on media’s “doom and gloom” coverage of the recession. Indeed, while Bush’s critics emphasized the high unemployment rate and declining real wages, the Urban Institute’s Isabel Sawhill noted that the sustained period of economic growth leading into the conference precluded the use of the word “recession” to describe economic conditions. “Even the choice of words to say that we’re in a recession and isn’t this a terrible thing that might be as bad as the Depression of the ’30s is absolutely outrageous,” she said.

We can put a cap on these retrospectives here, but an intrepid chronicler could keep going on into the annals of history. Excuse-making is an illustrious and often lucrative enterprise. Of course, there are elements of truth to all these gripes. But they’re still merely efforts to evade the primary factors contributing to these presidents’ shortcomings.

George H. W. Bush didn’t lose in 1992 because of economics alone. That Bill Clinton is held in low regard today is not because Republicans opposed him but because of his own problems with impulse control. George W. Bush made his share of mistakes abroad and at home. Barack Obama’s political skills were limited almost exclusively to getting himself elected. As for Donald Trump, he may have been targeted with extraordinary tactics by his vindictive opponents, but it was his own disregard for legal conventions and political norms that mobilized them.

The satisfying narratives that allow partisans to look past their guy’s foibles allow for a retreat into the comfortable predictability of tribal political combat. There will always be a market for that.