Fareed take jan 6
Fareed's take: The world according to Trump
02:40 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Thomas Balcerski is author of “Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King,” forthcoming from the Oxford University Press. He tweets @tbalcerski. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN  — 

This Sunday marks two years since the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. Much has changed in American politics since that fateful day in January 2017, especially for the modern Republican Party. Yet to start 2019, President Trump and the Republican Party appear to be entering the political equivalent of the terrible twos.

Thomas Balcerski

In what may be considered a political tantrum on the part of the President and the Republican leadership in Congress, the federal government remains partially closed — the longest shutdown in American history.

Frustration is increasing as the Trump presidency evolves. And critics within the Republican Party continue to rankle the President. Earlier this month, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, sounded off in the most public of forums: an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he declared that the “president has not risen to the mantle of office.” In reply, Trump tweeted: “I won big and he didn’t,” while Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) recently dismissed Romney’s critique as a case of “sour grapes.”

The presidency of Donald Trump has been unprecedented in many ways. Yet in this respect, in the public disputes with members of his own party, he is not alone in American history. In the years before the Civil War, the Democratic Party, then in power, unraveled from within in ways that are eerily familiar to close observers of the current political moment. At issue was the key question of executive authority versus the power of the Congress and the will of the people.

In 1857, the new territory of Kansas clamored for admission to the Union. But there was a catch. A pro-slavery constitutional convention meeting at Lecompton had approved a governing document that permitted the peculiar institution. Although the Lecompton constitution seemed to represent the will of the people, in fact, it had been fraudulently obtained. In calling the convention, the pro-slavery territorial legislature had refused to offer a provision to exclude slavery from the territory; in turn, the anti-slavery opposition boycotted the convention.

Since the majority of citizens in Kansas actually opposed slavery, the popular will of the people had been ignored. What was to be done? Congress and the President would now decide the issue.

The President at the time, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, engaged in a bitter personal dispute with Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, then a leading contender for the presidency in 1860. In his 1857 annual message to Congress (delivered in writing before the era of live State of the Union addresses), President Buchanan insisted that the Lecompton Constitution represented the rightful will of the sovereign citizens of Kansas. The next day, Stephen Douglas announced his disagreement with the president on the floor of the Senate. The split had officially begun.

In the ensuing months, the struggle turned bitterly personal. Buchanan threatened to read Douglas out of the party, turning to the example of President Andrew Jackson decades earlier during the Nullification Crisis, in which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. Douglas acidly retorted: “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.”

The two men broke off social relations, with Buchanan going so far as to prevent Douglas from visiting the White House under any circumstance.

The feud between Buchanan and Douglas mirrored the dissolution of the Democratic Party and, by extension, the two-party system that had held together the country before the Civil War. In 1860, Douglas obtained the nomination as the Democratic candidate, but at a great cost. Southern Democrats refused to endorse him, turning instead to Buchanan’s vice president, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, whom Buchanan publicly supported.

The nation had taken one more step on the road to civil war. With the Democrats divided, the Republicans fielded the relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. In the election, Lincoln won the electoral vote by winning only votes in the northern states (he wasn’t even on the ballot in the South). In response, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union. Six other Deep South states soon followed.

During the winter months of 1860 to 1861, President Buchanan refused to prevent the Southern states from seceding, declaring that the Constitution did not permit him to do so. Americans were outraged. When Buchanan left office in March 1861, he was widely derided by members of his own party as a traitor. History has been even less kind. Today historians judge him among the very worst of US presidents, a position that some now say that President Trump is doomed to occupy.

Although the events of the 1850s happened long ago, they offer a crucial insight for the remaining years of the Trump presidency. To avoid the pitfalls of ineffective leadership and the disgrace of falling to last place in presidential rankings, the president should listen to critics within his own party. Had President Buchanan not stubbornly held his grudge against Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party might have remain unified. If President Trump and his allies read Mitt Romney and other critics out of the Republican Party, they do so at their own peril.

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    The present government shutdown threatens to doom the Trump presidency to historical ignominy, but it need not do so. Had President Buchanan taken more forceful action to stop southern secession, history would remember him more kindly. If President Trump refuses to reopen the government, history may well judge him among the worst ever to serve. The choice is his.

    The unpopularity of the Trump presidency at midterm serves as a potent reminder of the failures of past presidents. To avoid the worst effects of the terrible twos, the president would be well advised to heed the lessons of the past.