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The Warren G. Harding of the 21st Century – Daily Montanan [1]

['More From Author', 'August', 'Darrell Ehrlick']

Date: 2023-08-10  

The world doesn’t need another column on Donald Trump. In fact, the antidote to the chaos and ugliness that he’s encouraged would probably best be solved by simply not allowing the 45th President of the United States’ voice to ever be amplified again.

But, in the brain fever that has spread through the GOP lately, including comparisons to great but persecuted former leaders, Trump’s voice isn’t going quietly, if at all. Yes, we all know that Trump is, according to himself, more popular than George Washington, and no leader has ever suffered more, not even Abraham Lincoln (or the other three assassinated presidents whose reward for public service was a lethal bullet).

Because Trump is an outlier, an outsider, anathema and sui generis, Republicans have struggled mightily to connect him with other historical figures in the GOP in an effort to normalize his otherwise horrible behavior and views.

Sure, there’s the sainted Ronald Reagan, hallowed because he represented the first of the Republicans to harness the idea of government standing in the way of business, rather than offering a counterbalance to unchecked greed. Reagan, too, embraced a zealous evangelicalism in a co-dependent relationship that has led us to a virulent strain of nationalism cloaked by a cross. But Reagan was a capable actor, so his smooth delivery literally candy coated a bitter economic reality with the folksiness of a kindly grandfather, complete with jellybeans.

Some have tried to link Trump to Barry Goldwater, whose love of unfettered capitalism and conspiracies about communism and liberals has never really died out as conservatives continue to see secret agendas hiding somewhere in elementary school libraries, which are apparently also chocked full of gay porn to hear some of them tell it. Goldwater is a close cousin to the brand of Trumpism of today, but there was something sincere, if not goofy about Goldwater. Trump’s sincerity, meanwhile, lies entirely in his insincerity, as if he shares anything in common but rage with his average follower.

And we won’t even toy with the idea that Trump and Lincoln somehow share the same political DNA, because no one was better than Lincoln at spotting a fool, or realizing the necessity and value of holding a fragile alliance of states together.

Instead, Trump’s true political grandfather is indeed a Republican, one that predates him almost precisely by a century, Warren G. Harding.

Harding is often regarding among the worst presidents by presidential historians. But Trump is like Harding not just because they often appear nearby each other on those lists. Instead, it’s because of the other parallels which are unmistakable.

Harding was nothing if not a populist. He was a newspaper publisher, but contemporaries noted that his true talent was avoiding work. He campaigned on a platform of a return to peace and prosperity – a veritable precursor to making America great again, after the turbulent years pocked with war, disease and massive global upheaval.

Like Trump, Harding emerged as a long-shot candidate from a crowded a Republican field to win the GOP nomination for president, although most people didn’t take the Senator from Ohio very seriously. And Harding instantly surrounded himself with a mix of politically connected allies and other trusted friends who were scarcely qualified. Sound familiar?

Harding’s cabinet was notable for the different scoundrels that were in his orbit, including Albert Fall and Attorney General Harry Daugherty, both of whom were embroiled in scandals, including the Teapot Dome oil debacle. Charles Forbes, fled to Europe to avoid prosecution for, ahem, ripping off veterans, and served prison time. Montana Sen. Burton K. Wheeler led investigations against Daugherty.

After Harding’s presidency concluded when he died of a heart attack in San Francisco, rumors swirled about his extramarital affairs, including the paternity of a child he fathered. He, like Trump, was a philanderer and apparently voracious womanizer.

Finally – and likely most compellingly – Harding’s appeal was rallying crowds by using words, phrases and ideas that were either half-baked or completely impenetrable. They were, by most accounts, void of meaning, but seemed to evoke warm feelings in crowds who seemed to latch on to his sentimentality, without asking a simple question: What the hell did that mean?

And more than anything, Trump’s own hollow rhetoric and weird musings – from an exegesis on the proper number of toilet flushes to his own dubious tales of the never-ending stream of grateful people who approach him with tears rolling down their faces because his leadership – seem a perfect match for the flabby pablum of prose proffered by Harding, which legendary columnist H.L. Mencken characterized as “Gamilielese” taken from the 29th president’s middle name, Gamaliel.

First, let’s begin with Harding’s word choice and topics, which like Trump, is a rambling mess of thoughts, with the only common denominator being their equally erratic speaker.

Mencken describes Harding, but might as well be talking about Trump:

“(H)e takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, 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. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

Then, Mencken, in his 1921 essay, examines the content of Harding’s speech:

“Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense? If you had first read the inaugural address and then heard it intoned, as I did (at least in part), then you will perhaps arrive at an answer. That answer is very simple. When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech.”

Finally, Mencken tackles Harding’s appeal. The newspaper man’s remarks seem as prescient today as it was 102 years ago:

“Let us turn to a specific example. I exhume a sentence from the latter half of the eminent orator’s discourse: ‘I would like government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.’ I assume that you have read it. I also assume that you set it down as idiotic—a series of words without sense. You are quite right; it is. But now imagine it intoned as it were designed to be intoned. Imagine the slow tempo of a public speech. Imagine the stately unrolling of the first clause, the delicate pause upon the word then—and then the loud discharge of the phrase in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, each with its attendant glare and roll of the eyes, each with a sublime heave, each with its gesture of a blacksmith bringing down his sledge upon an egg—imagine all this, and then ask yourself where you have got. You have got, in brief, to a point where you don’t know what it is all about. You hear and applaud the phrases, but their connection has already escaped you. And so, when in violation of all sequence and logic, the final phrase, ‘our tasks will be solved,’ assaults you, you do not notice its disharmony—all you notice is that, if this or that, already forgotten, is done, ‘our tasks will be solved.’ Whereupon, glad of the assurance and thrilled by the vast gestures that drive it home, you give a cheer.

Mark Twain famously said that while history does not repeat itself, it often rhymes. And to my ears, Trump and Harding have a certain unmistakable and similar ring.

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