The list of figures in American history with whom Donald J. Trump has been compared since he announced his bid for the Presidency a decade ago is longer than his trademark necktie, as red as a gash. It’s taller than Trump Tower, gleaming like a blade. It has a higher turnover than his beleaguered first Cabinet. It includes even more goons, toadies, and peacocks than his current Administration. And yet the comparisons keep coming, in the daily papers, in the nightly podcasts, online, online, online. Is Trump more of a liar than Joseph McCarthy; is he slicker than Huey Long? Is he as mean-spirited as Father Charles Coughlin, more sinister than George Wallace? Is he as much of a fraud as P. T. Barnum, even more of an isolationist than Charles Lindbergh? He is trickier than Richard (Tricky Dick) Nixon, but to what degree?
Trump plays this game, too. He loves it, and why not? It only ever helps him, inflates, magnifies, and amplifies him, the drumbeat deafening, ceaseless, Trump, Trump, Trump. He’s Andrew Jackson (or is he more like Andrew Johnson?); he’s Ronald Reagan. He thinks only Abraham Lincoln has been treated as unfairly as he has—or, no, “I believe I am treated worse.” Shall we compare him to a summer’s day?
Everything that has happened in the furor, disarray, and murderous violence of American politics over the past decade has led the commentariat to scramble for antecedents. That includes me. Is this unprecedented? This is the question journalists have been asking historians for a decade now. It arrives by text and voice mail. It arrives by post and e-mail. It knocks on the door and all but raps on the windowpane, tap, tap, tapping. I have been asked this question in the dog park, at the drugstore, in a hayfield, by my mailman, during a snowstorm, while knitting in my kitchen, and in every last blasted Zoom room. And historians—or most of us, anyway—answer, meekly, bleakly, dutifully, hauling out of the archives the disputed election of 1876, the 1970 shooting at Kent State, the parents’-rights movement of the nineteen-twenties, the impeachment of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Compared to x, Trump is y. But why? On the upcoming fifth anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, might it not be best, at this point, simply to stop? Very little in human history is altogether without precedent if you look at it long enough. And what of it? If U.S. history is a map, we are off the grid, over a cliff, lost at sea without a compass. Can anyone honestly maintain that the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, in 1856, or the shots fired by four Puerto Rican nationalists from the balcony of the Capitol, in 1954, offer meaningful points of comparison to the assassination of Charlie Kirk or the events of January 6th?
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no reason to study history, to write and to read history. There’s every reason, even more so in tempestuous times than in quieter ones. Learning to code turns out to have been a terrible call; how much more precious to have studied the past, the mystery of iniquity, the chaos of strife, the messy, gripping, blood-drenched record of yearning that is the twisted and magnificent course of human events. Nor do I mean to suggest that this is the worst moment in the history of the United States. It is not. I mean only to warn that the false analogy offers false comfort. Analogies are tempting because they can be helpful, a flashlight on a moonless night. “The many uses of analogy,” the historian David Hackett Fischer wrote in a 1970 book called “Historians’ Fallacies,” are “balanced by the mischief which arises from its abuse.” A flashlight is not the same as daylight. With a flashlight, you see only what you’re pointing it at, and yet, cheered by its warm glow, you might forget that you are, in fact, in the dark.
Peer into the dark. Earlier this fall, Trump reposted on Truth Social a four-minute news clip generated by A.I. The clip purported to be a segment from Lara Trump’s Fox News show, reporting on Trump’s announcement of the launch of “medbeds . . . designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength” at special hospitals about to open all over the country. Medbeds, which can cure all ailments and reverse aging, appear regularly in science fiction. (Think of the “biobeds” in the “Star Trek” sick bay.) They began featuring in online conspiracy theories in the early twenty-twenties; QAnoners claim that medbeds exist, and have existed for years, and that the rich and powerful use them (and that J.F.K. himself is on one, still alive), and that soon Trump will liberate them for use by the rest of us, as if Trump were Jesus opening the gates of Heaven and medbeds eternal life.
Take out your flashlight and ask the inevitable question: Is there any precedent for a President of the United States doing such a thing? Is American history any guide to understanding why Trump, or someone on his staff, posted (and soon afterward deleted) a fake video about a nonexistent news report concerning a fictional miracle cure, an episode whose political significance strikes me as asymptotically approaching zero?
The Framers of the Constitution did not expect the President to communicate directly with the public; they worried about what might happen if he did—and they did not, for all their foresight, anticipate social media, television, radio, or even the telegraph. They were also decidedly ambivalent about the office of the executive. Some of them wanted no President; some wanted something more like a prime minister; others wanted something closer to a king. They therefore left the description of the office vague. Since so little is specified, much of what Presidents do is improvisational. (Hence the dilemma constitutional originalists have in supporting the current Administration’s unitary-executive theory: unitary-executive theory is a fabrication, an act of make-believe, a medbed.) Nothing in the Constitution requires the President to speak to Congress or to the public. Neither the Inaugural Address nor the State of the Union is required by the Constitution, and the idea of the chief executive speaking directly to the public struck many eighteenth-century Americans as monarchical, not Presidential. “The Founding Fathers were concerned not to erect an executive branch that could become overwrought by constant appeals to the national rabble,” the scholar Roderick P. Hart once wrote. The Constitution says nothing at all about how, or even whether, the President should communicate with the public, and, for the first century and a half of the nation’s history, Presidents hardly ever did.
Yet, even though an unstated but widely held prohibition barred sitting Presidents from making speeches to the public (and those seeking the office from making campaign speeches), there were other ways to reach the citizenry. George Washington did not enjoy public speaking. Because of his dentures, made of a combination of elephant tusks, horse and cow teeth, and teeth pulled from the mouths of people he held as slaves, he found speaking for any length of time painful. He gave annual addresses to Congress in person starting in 1790 but otherwise mostly communicated with the public—and with Congress—via published letters, although in 1789, and again in 1791, he did tour parts of the country to speak about national unity. John Adams continued the practice of addressing Congress in person, but, in 1801, Thomas Jefferson, who hated public speaking even more than Washington did, decided to deliver his annual address to Congress in writing, a tradition that was upheld until Woodrow Wilson overturned it, in 1913. (“That would set them by their ears,” Wilson reportedly said, about heading to the Capitol.)
Andrew Jackson, a man of the people, was keen to communicate with the public more directly, and, for a mouthpiece, he used a newspaper, the United States Telegraph. As Tocqueville put it, “Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.” After the Telegraph started to favor Jackson’s rival and Vice-President, John C. Calhoun, Jackson launched his own newspaper, the Washington Globe. In 1831, he used the Globe to announce that he planned to run for reëlection: “We are permitted to say,” the Globe duly reported, “that if it should be the will of the Nation to call on the President to serve a second term in the chief Magistracy, he will not decline the summons.” Through the Globe, he also published such items as his veto message rejecting the rechartering of a national bank. Thus began what historians call the “Presidential newspaper.” James K. Polk, for instance, deployed the Washington Daily Union. The nineteenth-century press was partisan through and through, and so a paper as a Presidential mouthpiece—not unlike the role played by Fox News for Trump—made perfect sense. But this scheme was largely defeated, in 1861, by two developments: Congress established the Government Printing Office, and Lincoln preferred to get his message out by spreading stories to rival newspapers, which was deuced clever of him. Gradually, the press became less partisan. (By 1900, most dailies were nonpartisan.)
Even if early American Presidents had wanted to speak directly to the public, they would have found it exceedingly difficult, not to mention exhausting. But, with the rise of railroads, travelling to meet your constituents soon got easier. John Tyler went on a thirteen-day tour in 1843, during which he made seventeen speeches. Trump, of course, likes to make speeches, too, and for hours on end. But the likeness ends there because, to be clear, Tyler did not use the occasion to tout patent medicines. After the Civil War, Presidents travelled more, not least because they had to try to stitch the country back together. That meant, in particular, touring the South. In 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes went on a speaking tour, whereupon an account was published that included every word he said, titled “The President’s Tour South. A Triumphal March Through the ‘Solid South.’ Enthusiastic Reception of the President and Cabinet at All Points Along the Journey. Speeches, Sayings and Doings of Those Who Participated in the Ovation to the President.” And, still, he hawked neither gold coins with his face stamped on them nor silver ones.
They talked and they talked. In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, C-SPAN posted five hundred and three videos of him talking. Their content leaves me speechless. In a 2023 study, the political scientist Anne C. Pluta counted the number of words spoken to the American public by every U.S. President, from Washington to Trump. On average, no President spoke to the public more than a hundred times a year until William Howard Taft—whose annual average neared two hundred, and who, in 1911, gave three hundred and fifty speeches on a thirty-state tour. No one broke that record until J.F.K., who may still be alive. Other big talkers: L.B.J. (more than three hundred) and Bill Clinton (more than seven hundred). None of these Presidents, however, sold steaks, contested an election, or fomented an insurrection.
Theodore Roosevelt added a pressroom to the White House. Wilson invented the press conference, but a good measure of how little interest reporters had in the President is that at an early one, in 1913, the first question was about Congress: “Can you tell us anything about currency legislation, Mr. President?” Eventually, Wilson stopped holding them. Warren G. Harding used the radio, but when he took office, in 1921, hardly anyone had one. And when he went on a speaking tour, in 1923, the need to stand in front of a microphone, so that his speeches could also broadcast on the radio, really cramped his style. “Silent Cal” Coolidge belied his nickname; he loved talking on the radio and did it about once a month. In 1927, his radio audience, as the Times reported, was the size of the entire population of the United States in 1865. But no one mastered the medium like F.D.R., with his fireside chats, which he started on March 12, 1933. (“I want to talk a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking,” he began.) In his wheelchair, he would have been unable to tour the country the way his predecessors had. For F.D.R., radio was not an option; it was the only option.
F.D.R. was called “the radio President.” Ike was “the TV President,” especially after a heart attack in 1955 made campaign travel for him, too, essentially impossible. Nixon was generally bad on television, except for a live speech in 1952, given from a studio designed to look like an ordinary living room, that addressed allegations about a campaign slush fund. He said that he’d come on national television to make a complete financial disclosure, something “unprecedented in the history of American politics,” and yes, he admitted, he’d accepted a gift, namely, a black-and-white spaniel named Checkers that a man in Texas had sent as a present for Nixon’s two young daughters. “I just want to say this, right now,” he said, “that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”
For Kennedy, the technological leap was aviation, or at least Air Force One, a modified Boeing 707 that he commissioned in 1962. Ronald Reagan was “the six-o’clock President,” the founder of “the prime-time Presidency.” But Walter Cronkite retired in 1981, the year Reagan took office, and, during the Great Communicator’s two terms in office, major news outlets, chiefly in the form of cable television, became partisan all over again. Reagan was the last American President to reliably and regularly address a national audience, rather than a targeted one. Network-television news coverage of American Presidents fell off with him, hitting bottom with Obama before rising again with Trump in 2016.
A lot of people just don’t find Presidents very interesting, a position with which I deeply sympathize. Bill Clinton, sensing American indifference, used the media in a way that no earlier President could or would have, favoring entertainment outlets, like “Larry King Live” and ESPN, over network news. He discussed whether he preferred boxers to briefs on MTV (where he sat for four interviews). Esquire ran a cover story, headlined “The Last Will and Testament of William Jefferson Clinton,” that featured his views on Barbra Streisand, Diet Coke, and his dog, Buddy. “He is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” Esquire declared. “He is the American flag . . . McDonald’s, stealth fighters, and Satan; a late-night joke, Elvis, and God.” Clinton made the Presidency about his personality; his critics made it about his character. There was little difference between the two. Clinton’s affairs and the allegations against him made him the butt of late-night-TV comics. “An exhaustive study of the jokes on late night television reveals that Clinton stands alone,” one historian wrote, in a study that, notably, predated Trump.
Yet it was Obama who can best be said to have inaugurated what the scholars Joshua M. Scacco and Kevin Coe have called the “ubiquitous Presidency.” Beginning in the Obama years, the President became inescapable, appearing seemingly everywhere and all the time. Obama’s was, after all, the “Between Two Ferns” Presidency. If the Presidency became ubiquitous, it had a lot to do with the press’s growing fascination with Presidential power—which had the unhappy effect of amplifying it. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the number of doorstop biographies of American Presidents skyrocketed. So did books about “Presidential communication.” Network news spent less time on Presidents; cable news and cable-news websites spent far more. So, beginning with Obama, did magazines, including this one. The ubiquitous President became not only a personality but a celebrity, two preconditions for demagoguery.
With so much more being said and written about American Presidents, and American Presidents speaking to and writing for the public so much more than ever before (if you count tweeting as writing), the Presidency became more intimate, and not only because of the underwear. Disclosure, Scacco and Coe argue, became the coin of the realm. On @POTUS, Obama described himself as “Dad, husband, and 44th President of the United States.” He tweeted about Michelle and the girls, and about the Cubs. He did not, however, tweet about miracle cures.
Trump is ubiquitous and has been since June of 2015, when he descended that golden escalator and waved at the assembled cameras. He has rarely been Presidential, except insofar as he has redefined the word. He thinks that being Presidential is dumb. “I’ve always said I can be more Presidential than any President in history, except for Honest Abe Lincoln when he’s wearing the hat,” he said at a rally in Dallas in 2019. “That’s tough, that’s tough, that’s a tough one to beat. No, it’s much easier—being Presidential is easy. All you have to do is act like a stiff.” He stood straight, closed and opened his eyes, stepped slightly back from the podium, straightened his jacket, held up his hand, and spoke solemnly: “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas, it is a great honor to be with you this evening.” All he needed was the hat, and the press handed it to him.
Historians will need to account for Trump when, as Gerald Ford said when he succeeded Nixon, “our long national nightmare is over.” Analogies won’t help them. Because nothing in American history anticipates or explains the way Trump speaks to his supporters at his rallies—or his use of Twitter, between 2015 and 2021, and Truth Social, beginning in 2022. He riffs; he cusses; he dodges; he weaves; he raises money; he spreads lies. He is lurid and profane. He targets his political opponents, threatening them with prosecution, prison, and execution. He is the world’s most outspoken troll, and its most dangerous. He posts day and night, about everything from taco bowls to possible ceasefires. He is getting worse. In his second term, he has posted three times as often as he did during his first. Tonally, nearly everything he posts is unhinged, even when it’s a simple endorsement or amplification of a policy, like tariffs:
Most of the rest is pure nonsense. A sizable percentage consists of outright lies and, especially, false or unsubstantiated accusations. Since so much that Trump has posted has been, at the very best, deceptive, it’s hardly surprising that he likes deep fakes. He’s posted A.I.-generated photographs of himself as the Pope, as a Jedi knight, as Superman, and videos of himself doing everything from wrestling to praying. (The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel has suggested that this has become a partisan aesthetic: “The G.O.P. is becoming the party of A.I. slop.”) He adores conspiracy theories. A 2024 Times study of Trump’s more than fifty-six hundred posts and reposts (in the bizarro lexicon of Truth Social, these are “Truths” and “Retruths”) over six months found that more than three hundred “described both a false, secretive plot against Mr. Trump or the American people and a specific entity supposedly responsible for it,” and another four hundred “used language to refer to conspiracy theories but did not spell out the full theory on their own.”
None of this is Presidential, any more than it’s precedented. It is, instead, pestilential. If the Constitution had said more about the Presidency—if the Framers hadn’t expected that the office would be, especially relative to Congress, so inconsequential—much that Trump has posted would surely be considered unconstitutional. Is any of this like Nixon, in 1968, appearing on “Laugh-In,” or Reagan, in 1983, on “The Merv Griffin Show,” or Clinton on MTV, or Obama tweeting about the Chicago Bulls? It is not. We are off the map.
American history is a flashlight. Lately, it’s a flashlight whose battery has died. Any analogy to this Presidency can be found only in the history of other countries, in the whims and cruelties and fantasies and insanities of the tyrants of antiquity, tin-pot dictators, Latin American caudillos, and modern strongmen. Nero, Stalin, Kim Jong Il. Call the historians who write about those guys, please.
But what about the daylight? In the daylight, Trump’s communication with the public looks different.
In the daylight, it’s not hard to see why some number of Americans believe that medbeds exist and that the rich are keeping them to themselves. In the grotesquely gilded twenty-first century, the rich use all kinds of fancy goop and goo and intricately engineered machines and impossibly priced services that allow them to live longer and look better while everyone else gets stiff and sick and grows old and dies miserably, as anyone who has ever watched “The White Lotus” or spent a night in the emergency room of a rural hospital knows from close and painful observation. Impoverished, homeless veterans wander legless on the streets and the children of the poor die in understaffed clinics awaiting treatment that never comes while the rich get treated in glistening spas and have their butts waxed by people who have been trafficked into the country and live twenty-three to a room with no running water. It’s not just first class, second class, third class. It’s not even just platinum, gold, titanium. It’s private jets, personal trainers, in-home chefs, Ozempic-face, liposuction, private fittings, bespoke medical care, the whole glass onion. This past spring, while releasing a new House report on health, education, labor, and pensions, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “In America today, the bottom fifty per cent of our population can expect to live seven years shorter lives than the top one per cent. Even worse, Americans who live in working-class, rural counties can expect to die ten years younger than people who live in wealthier neighborhoods across the country.”
True, it makes no sense whatsoever to believe that Trump will be the one to end the rich’s monopoly on excellent health and bottomless self-indulgence in the domain of “wellness and healing.” He is among the many forces driving this dismal state of affairs. But believing that medbeds exist isn’t that crazy. There is a conspiracy. It’s a very public and not remotely secret plot to deprive middle- and lower-income Americans of decent health care, one that’s led by congressional Republicans and contested, unsuccessfully, by congressional Democrats to the point of shutting down the entire federal government, at a cost of still more suffering.
Medbeds are not coming soon to a hospital near you. But they do exist. In 2022, a company called Tesla BioHealing (no relation to the Tesla automotive company) began opening MedBed Centers, converted motels that offer a “new wave of scientific healing” and promise patients “improvements in their wellbeing even after only an hour of resting on a Tesla MedBed.” On the company’s website, you can click on a link that says “Looking for Medbeds?” The company also offers an Anti-Aging Pet Bed for seven hundred and fifty dollars. Maybe Nixon kept Checkers, his daughters’ beloved spotted spaniel, longer than anyone ever knew. He might be thumping his tail right now, on a dog bed by J.F.K.’s side. ♦
