Politics - News Analysis

Trump to be Banished From ‘Former Presidents Club’ Because He Doesn’t Have the ‘Temperament’

There’s one club Donald Trump has never been interested in joining. He’s made no bones about this and it’s likely the club’s members aren’t too upset about this.

Members of the Presidents’ Club pose for photos, they smile at each other like old friends and shake hands at historic events or sit respectfully during funerals. They undoubtedly share memories and they work together on special projects, The Associated Press reports. They rarely criticize each other and in general, have few harsh words for their White House successors.

But Trump, ever the bull in the china shop, has shattered a number of presidential traditions, and it’s unlikely he’ll ever want to join this club.

“He kind of laughed at the very notion that he would be accepted in the presidents’ club,” Kate Andersen Brower, who interviewed Trump in 2019 for her book Team of Five: The Presidents’ Club in the Age of Trump, told the AP. “He was like, ‘I don’t think I’ll be accepted.'”

It’s also very clear that the club’s members don’t want much to do with him. For the time being, anyway.

And when former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama gathered together shortly after Biden’s inauguration, they recorded a short video at Arlington National Cemetery and praised the peaceful transition of presidential power as a tenet of American Democracy. Trump’s name was never mentioned and the video served as a sharp rebuke of his behavior after losing the election.

“I think the fact that the three of us are standing here, talking about a peaceful transfer of power, speaks to the institutional integrity of our country,” Bush said in the video. Obama described inaugurations as “a reminder that we can have fierce disagreements and yet recognize each other’s common humanity, and that, as Americans, we have more in common than what separates us.”

It’s been more than two years since Trump left the White House and he is still making baseless claims that the election was stolen from him via fraud and his insistence on this was vehement enough to spark a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. We can be glad that failed, but Trump acted like such a spoiled child that he refused to attend Biden’s swearing-in, making him the first president to skip his successor’s inauguration in 152 years.

And as noted by Jeffrey Engel, the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Trump isn’t a particularly good fit for The Presidents’ Club “because he’s temperamentally different.”

“People within the club historically have been respected by ensuing presidents,” Engel said. “Even Richard Nixon was respected by Bill Clinton and by Ronald Reagan and so on, for his foreign policy. I’m not sure I see a whole lot of people calling up Trump for his strategic advice.”

That could very well be the understatement of the year.

Some of the former presidents also get together for the common good, as was the case when Southeast Asia was hit by a devastating tsunami in 2005. At the time, George H.W. Bush teamed up with Bill Clinton to launch a campaign urging Americans to donate. And Obama tapped Clinton and the younger President Bush to step up the fundraising efforts for Haiti in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in 2010.

Can you really imagine Trump doing something like this? I can’t either.

Well, maybe there is one instance; after all, he did throw rolls of paper towels into the crowd in Puerto Rico after the island was hit by Hurricane Maria, a stunt that then-mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described as “terrible and abominable.”

But not according to Trump, of course.

This is what Trump typically does. He’s really not interested in much of anything unless it involves him, or unless it’s something he can use as a PR stunt.

Because that’s the kind of man he is.

meet the author

Megan has lived in California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida and she currently lives in Central America. Living in these places has informed her writing on politics, science, and history. She is currently owned by 15 cats and 3 dogs and regularly owns Trump supporters when she has the opportunity. She can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GaiaLibra and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/politicalsaurus

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