Two Peas in a Pod

Trump and Jefferson

I never cared much for Thomas Jefferson. The Founding Father credited with penning soaring rhetoric about equality for all, who termed slavery “a moral depravity,” nevertheless enslaved 600 persons during his life, using them to fund his debt and physically support his lavish lifestyle.

Possessed of a remarkably flexible morality, he was apparently unbothered by having an affair with a married woman in Paris or making Sally Hemmings, the enslaved half-sister of his dead wife, his concubine for 38 years thus fulfilling his promise to a dying Martha that he would never remarry.
Not exactly my beau idéal.

Jefferson was a somewhat reluctant revolutionary, having to be coaxed from his mountain retreat to return to Philadelphia where he was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. While professing his reluctance to enter government, he was a political mover and shaker who engaged in skullduggery, partisan rancor, personal insults and who used a politicized media in his quest for the presidency during the nastiest campaign the nation had seen prior to 2016.

As George Washington’s Secretary of State, he was unscrupulous, lying to his boss and placing a political operative on his State Department payroll whose primary function was to write anti-administration editorials. And, in his political campaign against John Adams, he mounted what was tantamount to a modern social media assault on the sitting president, using political newspapers to make scurrilous charges against his opponent and using demeaning nicknames. Adams was labeled a “repulsive pendant” and mocked for his monarchical leanings by labeling him “His Rotundity.”

The fraught election of 1800 even saw the earliest use of the electoral college to manipulate the outcome. In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson outlines plans for manipulating the selection of presidential electors in the key states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania while Charles Carroll accuses Jefferson’s supporters of “arts and lies” in trying to obtain Maryland’s electoral votes by legislative manipulations even though a majority of the residents favored the Federalist Party.

Jefferson, for all his personal failings, obviously was not in the same league as our once and would-be future president, Donald Trump. Jefferson was an intellectual, an 18th-century farmer-scientist, an inventor, an architect and a political philosopher. Widely read, he loved good wine, good books and art—none of which are attributes shared with the 45th president.

But unhappily Jefferson and Trump share commonalities. Both men, firmly ensconced among the nation’s elite, espouse populism while embracing the idea that violence is an inevitable outcome of the tension between the haves and have-nots. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Jefferson wrote in the wake of Shay’s Rebellion, the 1787 revolt by Massachusetts farmers against the debt crisis and taxes.

Less articulate and more self-concerned, Trump expresses solidarity with the January 6th rioters, saying they have been treated “very, very unfairly” and promising pardons for those who attacked the Capitol.

Both use words to incite but do not join the fray. Jefferson fled first to Monticello and then to his other plantation, Poplar Forest, as British troops approached while he was Governor of Virginia, leaving the state without a governing body for eight days in the midst of a war. Trump didn’t have to run—he simply pled bone spurs to avoid serving his country.

Isolationists, they both see the United States as a world onto itself, with Jefferson envisioning a self-sufficient agrarian society divorced from Europe, and Trump fixated on literally walling us off from the rest of the world through immigration policies, his disregard for NATO and adherence to economic protectionism.

Both are racists: hard for Jefferson to be anything but considering his role as slave owner while Trump cozies up to white supremacists.

And strangely, both men pledged to preserve, protect and defend a Constitution they did not respect. Thomas Jefferson, who was overseas when the Constitution was crafted, wrote, “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”

Jefferson’s “solution”—which left the Constitution’s main architect, James Madison, aghast—was to tear it up once every 19 or 20 years and start again. Imagine our Congress, so mired in dispute that it can’t pass ordinary legislation, agreeing on a new constitution every 20 years!

Now, Trump has chimed in, declaring that portions of the Constitution should be abandoned so he can resume his presidency, so rudely interrupted by a general election.

Jefferson, a major figure of the Revolutionary generation, can perhaps be forgiven for retaining the irreverence of patriots seeking to overturn a monarchy and their distrust of the future. Most of the Founding Fathers had no concrete idea of how their new government would function and, indeed, each early election added another piece to the puzzle.

George Washington decided to voluntarily step down after two terms, establishing a precedent. John Adams, bitterly disappointed by losing to Jefferson in 1800, nevertheless honored the peaceful transfer of power (although he anticipated Donald Trump by 220 years by refusing to attend Jefferson’s inauguration).

Jefferson, that maverick thinker and ethically slippery politician, himself endorsed the electoral process by praising a transfer of power, “not effected indeed by the sword … but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform,” saying it “was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of ’76.”

“The nation declared it's (sic) will by dismissing functionaries of one principle and electing those of another, (and the members) in the two branches, executive and legislative, submitted to their election...” he observed.

It would be refreshing if Donald Trump, who shares so many ideological similarities with Jefferson, would emulate him in this last regard.