Matt Latimer is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a co-partner in Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm based in Alexandria, and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

There he is, wheeling and dealing with Capitol Hill, cajoling wayward legislators and tangling with members of the opposing party. All this to sell his first major piece of legislation, a House plan to replace Obamacare. “It’s a big, fat, beautiful negotiation,” he says.

It’s almost like Donald Trump is a normal president.


He’s not, of course. He gets in Twitter feuds with Arnold Schwarzenegger, he offends world leaders and publicly insults members of his own party, his agenda is occasionally diverted by a segment that’s caught his eye on cable news, and some of his campaign staffers are the subject of an FBI investigation. But all that tumult sometimes blinds observers to the fact that many of Trump’s actions, including those that have caused red-alert panic among the intelligentsia on America’s coastlines, actually have a number of precedents in history. Indeed, a closer look at the president’s record reveals he is far more normal than you might think. With the aim of putting things into proper perspective, a historical reality check:



Alleged Abnormal Trump Action No. 1: Wanting to Make America Great Again

Presidential precedents: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Democrats claimed to be offended by Trump’s campaign slogan, emblazoned on the candidate’s ubiquitous red or white hats: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” Hillary Clinton, for one, scoffed at the idea that there was ever a moment that the United States was not great. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, called the phrase a dog whistle for southern white racists. “If you’re a white southerner, you know exactly what that means, don’t you?” he asked. The dual charges, made by dual Clintons, fit well with the Democratic effort to brand all things Trump either clueless or racist.

But, as has been pointed out previously, Trump wasn’t the first candidate to call for making our country great again. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan, for example, added just one extra word: “Let’s Make America Great Again.” And even Bill Clinton repeatedly used the phrase when he sought the presidency in 1992. To my knowledge, no one called the phrase a racist dog whistle then.

Verdict: NORMAL



Alleged Abnormal Trump Action No. 2: Casting members of the media as the “enemy”

Presidential precedent: Richard Nixon

Trump’s open war with the traditional media is unsettling, even threatening, to reporters in the DC/NY orbit. But in a larger context, Republican complaints about the liberal bias of the news media are neither novel nor without justification. In his struggling 1992 reelection campaign, George H.W. Bush blasted Bill Clinton’s “apologists” in the media. And he delighted holding up a bumper sticker at rallies that read, “Annoy the Media. Re-elect Bush.” More than a decade later, his son, George W., came close to labeling the New York Times treasonous for revealing details of a secret government program intended to track terrorist financing. A House Republican committee chairman, Peter King, said exactly that and called for hearings to investigate the newspaper’s activities. Neither Bush ever went so far as Trump, who recently called the “fake news media”—singling out the New York Times and most of the major news networks—“the enemy of the American people.” But, as George W. Bush critic Ken Aueletta wrote in 2004, the second Bush administration did come close: “They reject an assumption embraced by most reporters: that we are neutral and represent the public interest.”

By far the closest parallel to the constant, daily battles between Trump and the media is, of course, the Nixon administration’s feud with the press. Nixon’s own animus toward the media was deep-seated, rooted in his failed gubernatorial campaignin California in 1962. When he lost, he railed at reporters in his concession news conference, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” As president, his sparring sessions with reporters were legendary, and his infamous “enemies list” included a number of prominent reporters. Vice President Spiro Agnew, with Nixon’s undoubted approval, famously labeled the media “nattering nabobs of negativism.” In another speech, Agnew sounding almost Trumpian when he read off a long list of media attacks on the Nixon administration and went on to call the media “illiberal, self-appointed guardians of our destiny who would like to run the country without ever submitting to the elective process as we in public office must do.” He added, “Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of the various professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me.”

Verdict: ABNORMAL BUT NOT UNPRECEDENTED



Alleged Abnormal Trump Action No. 3: Employing/Relying on Children in the White House

Presidential Precedents: Rutherford B. Hayes, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, cont.

Trump has received frequent criticism for employing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a White House adviser and for including his daughter, Ivanka Trump, in various meetings and calls with foreign leaders. Numerous outlets have questioned the propriety of these interactions while government watchdogs have warned of “potential” conflicts of interest.

The tangling of the Trump presidency with his family business interests poses ethical challenges, to be sure, but other presidents have relied on family members for advice and assistance. Rutherford B. Hayes enlisted his son, Webb, as his secretary in the White House. Franklin Roosevelt’s son, James, had various and controversial business interests while serving as his father’s political right-hand man and later as his presidential secretary. James’ influence was thought so great that at one point, he was dubbed “assistant president.” For a number of years, FDR’s daughter, Anna, frequently stood in for her mother, Eleanor, in the role of confidante to the president and first lady. Dwight Eisenhower’s son, John, worked as a White House assistant, advising his father on national security issues. And it was well-known that George H.W. Bush had his son, George W., to serve as an unofficial (and it should be pointed out unpaid) political consigliere, reaching out on his father’s behalf to conservatives and at one point reportedly taking a role in the removal of his father’s chief of staff.

Verdict: FAIRLY NORMAL



Alleged Abnormal Trump Action No. 4: Contemplating Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Presidential Precedent: Dwight D. Eisenhower

Perhaps the revelation that has alarmed Trump critics most is that the president reportedly asked about the efficacy of using nuclear weapons on the battlefield against enemies such as ISIS. The disclosure was branded “terrifying” and “apocalyptic.”

But the threatened use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, however alarming, is not without precedent. Nixon, in what was called “a passing rant,” reportedly discussed the idea during the Vietnam War. In the early years of the war on terrorism, the Bush administration appeared to deliberately muddy the waters about whether the U.S. would consider it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration was much more overt—far more so than Trump, too—about the possibility of the first-use of nuclear weaponry. In the early months of his presidency, American officials hinted to the Chinese that a nuclear option was on the table in Korea. Later, the president made what were called “fairly explicit statements” on the question in order to maintain a cease-fire. Many decades later, it was reported that Eisenhower “thought it might be cheaper, dollar-wise, to use atomic weapons in Korea than to continue to use conventional weapons against the dugouts which honeycombed the hills along which the enemy forces were presently deployed.”

VERDICT: ABNORMAL (THANKFULLY), BUT NOT UNPRECEDENTED



Alleged Abnormal Trump Action No. 5: Activities leading to repeated questions about his mental state

Presidential Precedents: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush

Trump’s mental state has been a subject of media concern since he announced his candidacy for office. He was a “narcissist.” His “grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism” were clues. He had more psychopathic traits than Hitler had. The speculation returned with urgency after Trump’s mid-February news conference, which critics said hinted at “sociopathic” behavior. It seems hard to imagine another president, so early in his term at least, facing a headline such as a recent one that greeted him in the New York Daily News: “President Trump exhibits classic signs of mental illness, including ‘malignant narcissism,’ shrinks say.”

Other presidents (mostly Republicans) have, however, encountered questions about their mental state while in office. The media didn’t outright call these presidents nuts, but the innuendos were clear all the same. Did Ike’s health problems deprive him of “vital executive energy”? Did Ronald Reagan’s age lead to a lack of “vitality and understanding” to cope with a crisis? Did George H.W. Bush’s Graves' Disease diagnosis impair his behavior and judgment? These expressions of concern are coming far earlier in the Trump years, and with more severity, but we’ve certainly heard variations of this before.

VERDICT: NEVER GOOD, BUT NOT UNPRECEDENTED



Alleged Abnormal Trump Action No. 6: POTUS controlled by mysterious shadow figure/evil genius

Presidential Precedents: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama

Much of the anguish about the Trump administration’s actions has centered on two figures who have been granted magical superpowers by pundits and the media: presidential advisers Steve Bannon and, to a slightly lesser extent, Stephen Miller. Both men, raised in the notorious alt-right stomping grounds known as Goldman Sachs and the halls of Congress, respectively, have been characterized as having outsized control over the president, a sinister agenda and radical intentions.

This is a common phenomenon. Nearly every one of Trump’s immediate predecessors was alleged to have been manipulated by various mysterious operatives and advisers. Many on the right, for example, believed Obama to be controlled by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was supposedly a sort of shadow president. The allegedly dim-witted George W. Bush was famously said to have been managed by “Darth Vader” Dick Cheney and the evil “mastermind” Karl Rove. His father was “run” by political adviser Lee Atwater. Bill Clinton was either controlled by Hillary or Dick Morris, or both, while Ronald Reagan was portrayed as the robotic masterwork of either presidential adviser Mike Deaver or his wife, Nancy. In each case, of course, the president himself would beg to differ.

VERDICT: VERY NORMAL



This list could go on and on. Did you know, for example, that before they were presidents, John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford expressed support for the “America First Committee”? Or that before deportation became a dirty word, President Barack Obama was known as the “deporter-in-chief,” deporting more people than any other president in American history? Or that Harry Truman also had a “Southern White House” in Florida, spending a cumulative six months there during his time in office? Or that Warren G. Harding was denounced for his grammar and spelling, with H. L. Mencken once noting, “He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.” Even Trump’s accusation that Obama wiretapped him has presidential precedents. As the Washington Post reported, Richard Nixon was convinced that his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had bugged his campaign plane in the final days of the 1968 race. Nixon, the newspaper reported, “also was convinced that if he could get hard evidence of that, he could blunt and perhaps undermine the Senate Watergate hearings before they got started in the spring of 1973.” And don’t forget that Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama all replaced U.S. attorneys appointed by their predecessors, though less abruptly than did Trump.

The point is there’s very little Donald Trump has done that hasn’t been done, in some form or another, by others before him. Perhaps no other president has done all these things at the same time. But still, let’s not be too quick to the panic button. The hysteria over everything Trump does have the potential to obscure what may be genuine causes for concern.