Grover, Donald and the Second Term Curse

If, as widely expected, next year’s presidential nominations go to Joe Biden and Donald Trump, their battle for the White House will earn several historical distinctions, none of them encouraging.

Most obviously, whoever wins the race will count as the oldest candidate ever elected to the presidency, whether it’s Biden at age 82 (at the time of the inauguration), or Trump at 78. If either candidate survives for a full term, we’ll have the distinctive experience of an over-burdened octogenarian struggling with the world’s most important and demanding job.

Less frequently discussed as a drawback of the Biden-Trump duopoly, is the fact that both candidates would be subject to the “Secord Term Curse”—the grim pattern that shows every re-elected president, from George Washington to Barack Obama, enjoying less success and popularity in his second administration than he did with his first.

Advocates for Trump’s return to power argue that this longstanding rule wouldn’t apply to the MAGA Man because his two terms would be nonsequential, with Biden’s four years interrupting Trump’s service and, potentially, making the reinstated Republican look good by comparison.

Unfortunately, the only prior president to serve two non-consecutive terms still fell victim to an especially virulent version of the Second Term Curse: when Grover Cleveland, who lost the presidency to Benjamin Harrison in 1888, returned to the White House four years later, he presided over economic and political disasters that wrecked his Democratic Party for some twenty years.