Donald Trump is attempting a feat that only one other president in history has accomplished before: returning to the White House after losing the presidential election four years earlier.
The only president to date to leave office for a term and then return was more than 100 years ago, with the re-election of President Grover Cleveland.
But the similarities between Trump and Cleveland’s bids for a second term pretty much end there.
The circumstances surrounding Trump’s campaign to return to office have almost nothing in common with what happened the last and only time a president achieved this.
Donald Trump is attempting to return to the White House after losing the 2020 election. The only president to return to the presidency after a loss and four years out of office was President Grover Cleveland.
Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States.
First elected in 1884, he was the first Democrat to serve as president after the Civil War, but lost the 1888 election to Benjamin Harrison.
Then, four years later, in 1892, Cleveland won the Democratic nomination again and returned to the White House for a second term, from 1893 to 1897.
Since then, several former presidents have attempted to return to office, but none have been successful so far.
“Cleveland, when he left the White House, when he lost, was not eager to come back,” said biographer Troy Senik, author of “A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.”
“For the first two years, two and a half years, after he left, nobody really thought he would come back. He didn’t think he would come back,” Senik said.
In fact, Cleveland was quite pleased to have had a good mandate and the local government had delivered its verdict, according to Senik.
“He was an exceptionally unambitious president.”
When Cleveland lost the 1888 election, it was a very close race and Cleveland actually won the popular vote despite losing the Electoral College.
President Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms in the White House. He is the only president to do so. He was first elected in 1884 but lost his reelection bid in 1888. He then won the 1892 election to serve another four years.
When he lost the 1888 election, Cleveland did not challenge the results. Nor did he give any immediate indication that he would seek another term.
At the time, there were some claims from factional quarters of the party that the election was fraught with risk, claims that were false but perhaps more plausible at the time than they are today.
“There’s a real contrast in how these allegations were handled, because at one point the press asked Cleveland, ‘What do you think happened? Why do you think you lost?’ and he said, ‘Because the other side got the majority of the votes,’” Senik said. “He wasn’t willing to accept any of those theories.”
It’s unclear what Cleveland was really thinking, but the most important thing for him, according to his biographer, was “not to upset the country” with talk of a tense election.
What also contrasts Trump and Cleveland is that Cleveland was the end of the road for a certain kind of Democrat, while Trump is ushering in a new Republican party.
What ultimately brought Cleveland back into politics was his view that the Democratic Party was moving in a more populist direction and away from Cleveland’s vision of limited government.
Upon re-election, Cleveland was able to delay change for about four years.
“He’s a real contrast to Trump in that he’s a real counter-revolutionary. He’s trying to stop this populist surge in his party, whereas Trump is in charge of his own in the Republican Party.”
Cleveland was also concerned about the character of the people who might be the Democratic nominee if he was not in 1892.
President Cleveland ran for reelection in 1892 focusing almost entirely on the tariff issue.
The task of being nominated in 1892 was completely different from the 2024 nomination process, as it occurred well before the party primaries.
Cleveland’s return was largely welcomed by party leaders, who were making the decisions about who would be the nominee and did not want to see the party go in a populist direction, but not by the rank and file.
He had a reputation for honesty and integrity, so the party was able to reconcile its differences to nominate him.
If there had been a primary process like the current one, with voters having a say, Senik does not believe Cleveland would have been the candidate.
When Cleveland lost in 1888, it could be said that it happened because he got ahead of the electorate.
At the specific moment in the history of this election, his re-election was built around the single issue of tariff reduction, which divided his party.
When he ran again in 1892, after Republican President Benjamin Harrison was already in office and Congress was controlled by Republicans, tariffs had risen and people were feeling the economic impact, so his stance benefited him in a way it hadn’t in the previous election.
Several other presidents besides Cleveland, including Grant, Roosevelt, and Hoover, have run again after leaving office, but none of them were successful.
Where Trump’s bid for reelection and Cleveland’s may have most in common is that voters may be weary in 2024 of a Trump-Biden rematch in the same way they were in 1892, when the candidates were Cleveland and Harrison for a second time.
“Everyone was bored with that,” Senik said of 1892. “They thought it was very uninteresting to put the same two characters on stage again.”
In the end, it was a quiet election: Cleveland was ill for much of it, suffering from gout, and Harrison’s wife was dying.
Overall, they did not campaign much and the country largely ignored them.
Besides Cleveland, several former presidents have tried to return to the White House after leaving office, including Presidents Ulysses Grant, Herbert Hoover, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore and Teddy Roosevelt. None of them won.
If he wins in November, Trump will be the second president to serve non-consecutive terms.
