Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump each received two terms, but not consecutively.

After winning the presidential campaign this week over Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump finds himself in rare company, joining Grover Cleveland as the second chief executive of the United States to serve non-consecutive terms.

Trump, the country’s 45th president from 2017 to 2021, is now seeking a second term, this time as the 47th president.

The first was Grover Cleveland, who served as the 22nd president from 1885 to 1889, followed by a second stint as the 24th president in the White House from 1893 to 1897.

And besides the fact that more than a hundred years passed between their eras, the two men had different views on tariffs.

Who was Grover Cleveland?

Cleveland was born in New Jersey in 1837 and raised in upstate New York. Before beginning his rapid ascent up the political ladder, he practiced law in Buffalo. In 1881, Cleveland, running a reform campaign against corruption, was elected mayor of Buffalo. A year later he was elected governor of New York and in 1884 was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president.

Cleveland, once again running on an anti-corruption platform, defeated James Blaine, the former U.S. senator and secretary of state, to become the first Democratic president since the Civil War. Cleveland has overcome scandal in which he admitted that in 1874 he fathered an illegitimate child with a woman named Maria Halpin.

Cleveland won his first term with the support of reform Republicans known as the Mugwumps. his term witnessed both the labor unrest at Chicago’s Haymarket in 1886 and the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, the first federal attempt to regulate the railroad industry.

In 1886, at age 49, Cleveland became the only president to marry while in office, marrying 21-year-old Frances Folsom. His first presidency was marked by other firsts: he was the first president to have a child while in the White House and, according to historian Louis Picone, the first to have a Christmas tree in the White House. hung with electric light.

His administration also sparked controversy when it blocked several bills offering pensions to Civil War veterans and distribution of seed funds to drought-stricken farmers. He said Regarding the latter, federal aid “weakens the strength of our national character.”

Ryan McMahon, an assistant professor of political science at San Antonio College in Texas, said Cleveland’s 1888 campaign goals included reducing high tariffs imposed by Republicans and supported by the wealthy despite opposition from his party.

“Grover Cleveland was a big reformer as a Democrat, and he wanted to lower tariffs because middle-class people were paying those costs in the form of higher taxes,” McMahon said.

Cleveland won the 1888 popular vote but ultimately lost the Electoral College to Republican challenger Benjamin Harrison, whose campaign was backed by a wealthy elite who later became known as the robber barons, McMahon said.

Four years later, Cleveland, who remained a prominent figure in the Democratic Party, was again nominated for the presidency, defeating Harrison on a campaign promise to reduce high tariffs.

During his second term, this time as the nation’s 24th president, Cleveland was on alert almost from the start. His first year in office was marked by an economic crisis known as the Panic of 1893, and the following year thousands of railroad workers began what became known as the “Pullman Strike,” crippling much of the railroad industry and forcing Cleveland to deploy federal military forces. troops to stop work interruptions.

“When he came in, the economy was a disaster,” McMahon said. “He again advocated for lower tariffs, but the U.S. Treasury was desperate for money and could not accomplish what he set out to do.”

By 1896, Cleveland did not have much support even within his own party and chose to resign rather than seek re-election.

While Trump will be the second president to serve an inconsistent term, there are others who failed to return to the White House after serving as former presidents.

Martin Van Buren, the nation’s eighth president from 1837 to 1841, ran an unsuccessful campaign in 1848 as a member of the Free Soil Party. Millard Fillmore, president from 1850 to 1853, accepted the nomination of the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, in 1856, but was not elected. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, who served until 1909, ran for a third term as president but ran unsuccessfully as a third-party candidate.

Could Trump run again in 2028?

Not under the 22nd Amendment.

Congressional Research Service 2009 paper by national government scholar Thomas H. Neal, notes that the four-year terms of presidents and vice presidents are established in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

Until Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to a third term in 1940, U.S. presidents followed a long tradition of self-imposed two-term limits, Neal wrote in his article, “Presidential Term and Tenure: Prospects and Proposals for Change.” Since 1789, only seven of 31 presidents had been elected to consecutive terms until Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944 and began that term before his death in 1945, he said.

Roosevelt’s longevity contributed to the passage of the 22nd Agreement.^nd 1951 amendment stating that no president can be elected more than twice.

“To change this would require a constitutional amendment, and that is a long, painful and difficult process,” McMahon said. “It is highly unrealistic to assume that this will happen.”

Presidential historian Edward Frantz, chair of the history department at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana, made one final point.

Given the historic nature of Trump’s victory, Frantz said, “The biggest winner last night, besides Donald Trump, is Grover Cleveland and everyone who asks about him.”