It’s easy to argue that Trump is merely ginning up interest for a Republican rerun by threatening to leave, along with the quarter of would-be Republican voters who a recent Bulwark poll found would follow him. But that same poll also found that a considerable majority of Republicans want new leadership. Trump, for all his bluster, knows it. Perhaps he’s decided that if he can’t be a Republican president, no one can. If enough defectors remain committed to him, he will surely cost the Republicans the next presidential election.

History offers a fairly direct parallel. A similar Republican split occurred in 1912, when former president Theodore Roosevelt — unhappy with what he perceived as the unduly pro-business policies of his handpicked successor William Howard Taft — returned to challenge him. After losing the nomination to Taft at the Republican convention, despite outperforming him in the then-minority of state primaries in which registered Republicans participated, Roosevelt launched his own Progressive Party. Despite Taft’s considerable incumbency advantage, Roosevelt outpolled him in the general election, launching a characteristically vigorous campaign that saw him not only survive an assassination attempt but finish the speech he was giving with the assassin’s bullet lodged in his chest. Roosevelt siphoned enough support from Taft that Democrat Woodrow Wilson triumphed in an electoral-vote landslide, while winning a mere 42% of the popular vote.

The United States is uniquely vulnerable to this sort of third-party disruption, due to the first-past-the-post voting system that awards all of a state’s electoral votes to the highest-polling candidate, regardless of how close the popular vote is in those states. In 1912, Roosevelt and Taft received a combined 51% of the popular vote — yet carried only eight states between them. Owing to this all-or-nothing system, America offers perhaps the finest representation of French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s formula of bipartite alternation: “The one-party totalitarian regime is an unstable form — it defuses the political scene, it no longer assures the feed-back of public opinion…[but] alternation is the end of the end of representation.” In any particular presidential election, a third party — even a well-supported one such as Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party — has little chance of achieving any kind of representation. However, in the longer term, a third party can be truly disruptive. 

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Here, then, is the crux of the threat presented by Trump, roughly akin to the “nuclear option” in America’s political duopoly: he could wreck the Republican Party in this election and perhaps even destroy it for good, while creating a new second party to take its place. It would be a fate that hadn’t befallen an American political party since the Republican Party emerged in 1854 out of the ashes of the Whig Party, the latter badly fractured by insoluble arguments over slavery. Before that, it hadn’t happened since the Federalist Party — America’s first true political party — had essentially imploded during the War of 1812. It lost its legislative majorities forever to the Democratic-Republican Party, the precursor of today’s Democratic Party.  

But for the most part, American third-party insurgencies have merely cost one or the other party the general election. American Independent Party candidate George Wallace wrestled five states in the Deep South from Democratic control in 1968. Reform Party nominee Ross Perot syphoned millions of economic-nationalist voters from the Republican Party in 1992 and 1996. These were damaging moments, occurring at times of acute national crisis — Wallace polled well with Southern voters seeking to preserve aspects of racial apartheid systems, while Perot appealed to anti-interventionist, anti-free trade Republicans.

Still, though these insurgent campaigns might have led to galling defeats, neither fundamentally reshaped American politics in the way the disappearance of the Federalists or Whigs had. In fact, Republicans, through the shrewd electoral strategising of Richard Nixon, found a way to claim those dispossessed Southern voters in 1972. And since the Nineties, ostensible isolationists and anti-interventionists in both parties — including, perhaps most successfully, Donald Trump in 2016 — have found ways to exploit what had briefly been Perot’s support base. Given their sprawling constituencies, it’s easier for both parties to integrate these aggrieved voters into their ranks — to “sheepdog” these wayward sons and daughters into the established parties using co-opted outsiders to bridge the gap. 

Nevertheless, though unlikely, the kind of “clean break” Trump could trigger does have the potential to fracture the Republican Party forever. And that is because, ever since Richard Nixon permanently enlarged the party by annexing the “Solid South” long critical to Democratic electoral success, the GOP has had a fundamental flaw. It originated in the 19th century as a Northern-centred, pro-business party opposed to both slavery and, eventually, labour unions; post-Nixon, the Republican Party has been permanently struggling with the challenge of uniting small businesspeople, evangelicals, foreign-policy hawks, isolationists, anti-tax libertarians, anti-government libertarians, localists, and economic nationalists. Various leaders, from Ronald Reagan to Trump himself, have fashioned uneasy alliances among these groups — but each settlement has seemed shakier than the previous. Trump, in particular, saw precisely how difficult this challenge could be: he entered Washington with a team of advisors that adhered more closely to the “America-First” principles of his campaign and left with a cabinet full of corporate Republicans, some of whom hurriedly denounced him shortly after he left office.

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Glenn Youngkin is the Republican future

By Oliver Bateman

At the end of Trump’s presidency, the Republicans were indeed a “house divided”. And if the examples of the Federalists and Whigs offer anything of value for political observers today, it’s that divided parties might cease to be divided simply by ceasing to be at all. In the case of the Whigs, the newly-formed Republican Party addressed the main issues that had split them — free labour and opposition to slavery in the American territories — so there was simply no reason to keep such a large, fractious coalition alive. A more streamlined alternative had presented itself.  Now, the “big-tent” Republican Party may be faced with a challenge analogous to the Whig Party’s in the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. Is the future of the Right to be an interventionist, low-tax party still able to work with Wall Street and Nato? Or do the voters on this side want “America-First”, “MAGA”, and all of Trump’s unifying slogans?

While it is certainly possible to do all of these things — as the Whigs managed to maintain a balance from 1833 to 1856 — it may not be sustainable to do so. Republican politicians and voters who favour free trade and free movement of cheap labour may find themselves, like the Southern “Cotton Whigs” of the American antebellum period, unable to coexist with a MAGA base insistent on tighter border controls, tariffs, and heavier investment in internal industry. If so, Trump — by virtue of being the right person in the right place at the right time — may be able to bring about a permanent separation, likely forcing many Republicans in favour of free trade and free movement into the Democratic fold, just as “Cotton Whigs” joined the ranks of the Democrats.

All of this, however, will depend on the creation of a party that can step out of the shadow of its charismatic founder. Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, which outpolled the Republican Party 27% to 23% in 1912, offers an instructive example here. Roosevelt’s party shared certain overall policy goals with those American reformers dubbed lower-case “progressives”, such as a desire to more efficiently regulate large corporations and establish certain social welfare programmes. But its electoral fortunes waned significantly following that strong 1912 showing, disappearing by 1920. Its nickname, the “Bull Moose Party” — so acquired because Theodore Roosevelt had left the 1912 Republican convention claiming he felt “strong as a bull moose” — was apt, because its electoral performance depended to a considerable extent on the personal magnetism of one of the 20th century’s first great “cult of personality” figures, a personality who died in 1919 at the age of 61. 

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A Trump-led party would be at risk of going the way of Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” party, simply because he, like Roosevelt, is a sort of electoral ne plus ultra. Who would want to follow either act? Trump has, perhaps, a number of possible successors waiting in the wings, ranging from duelling Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert to his own sons, but this is akin to comparing a votive candle to the bright orange sun around which so much media commentary has turned.

Not only that, but the Trump of 2024 is not the insurgent social media star of 2016. He is still quite dove-ish on foreign policy but has lost considerable far-Right goodwill through his association with the era of lockdowns, which he at times supported, and mRNA vaccines, the development of which he considers a major achievement of his regime. The majority of those who identify as Republicans are looking for post-Trump alternatives. Though the former president holds double-digit leads over chief rival Florida governor Ron DeSantis in most polls, that lead vanishes if the single-digit support for various other mainstream candidates, a large hypothetical field ranging from former vice president Mike Pence to former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, is aggregated and assigned to DeSantis. In other words, in the race of “Trump and every other Republican”, the contest is neck and neck and likely only to tighten as the name recognition of other candidates continues to grow.   

Given Trump’s status as an influencer himself, it would be instructive to watch which candidates the rising “based” or far-Right influencers choose to align themselves with. So far, rising stars such as “Libs of TikTok” account operator Chaya Raichik have managed to stay mum when it comes to choosing between Trump and Ron DeSantis. But it is these people whose considerable soft power could meme not just a movement but an entire party into existence. If Trump cannot win their support, his efforts to construct a party that will overthrow the Republicans and outlast him is likely to be no more successful than his effort to dethrone Twitter with a rival social media platform.

In reality, though, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical didn’t premiere until early in 2015, just four short months before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator and inaugurated the age of populism. This means that Hamilton enthusiasm was partially a lagging indicator, and partially just something for stunned liberals to desperately grasp onto, a thread running backward to the cosmopolitan American future they had lost.

I do not come to bury this kind of fandom: the Miranda musical is terrific no matter its ideological baggage. But it still might have been more intellectually productive if the Trump era had inspired its fans to turn from Miranda’s version of the Founding to the one found in Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel Burr.

Burr already had one cultural moment, dropping originally amid the squalor of Watergate, when its dose of cold-eyed iconoclasm was well-received by critics and bookbuyers alike. But today the novel can be read or re-read with new eyes, outside the long shadow cast by its late author’s famous media persona, and in a landscape where its vision has just as much to offer.

That vision is cynical on the surface. Vidal retells the story of the Founding era from the perspective of what one of Aaron Burr’s biographers called the “Fallen Founder” — the almost-president of 1800, the slayer of Alexander Hamilton in their 1804 duel, the man tried for treason for a supposed scheme to detach the western states from the Union.

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The treason trial ended in acquittal but also ended Burr’s public political career; he bounced around Europe unhappily in search of patronage and then ended up back in New York City, where he lived quietly as a lawyer until a late marriage to a wealthy widow in 1837. That’s the point at which the novel picks up, through the agency of its narrator, Charles Schuyler, a young journalist on the make who befriends the aged Burr but also agrees to betray him, by gathering evidence intended to prove that the disreputable killer of Hamilton and famous ladies’ man is also the secret father of Vice President Martin Van Buren, whose pending ascent to the presidency Schuyler’s patrons hope to block.

With this hope in mind, the journalist induces the aging Burr to share his own unfinished memoirs, granting us first-person flashbacks to the Revolutionary War and early republic, in which Burr describes his own rise and fall while settling accounts with all his former friends and rivals.

Compared to the pieties of conservative founder-worship or even of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, these portraits can seem savage. George Washington is an incompetent general who, as president, obsesses over his own quasi-royal dignity. Hamilton, of course, is everything that he accused Burr of being: A man of vaulting ambition, eager for aristocratic style and monarchical power, “capable of any illegality including a military coup”, who actually engaged in an attempt to steal the 1800 election. (Vidal’s Burr writes: “I suspect that when Hamilton looked at me he saw, in some magical way, himself reflected. And so if one is an embryo-Caesar, accuse the looking-glass of that high treason and divert thereby the wrath of the plebes.”)

Finally Jefferson, in Burr’s telling, is expedience and ambition personified — a man who had the gift “at one time or another to put with eloquence the ‘right’ answer to every moral question”, even as in practice “he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power”. A man whose principles committed him to an agrarian and decentralised confederacy, but whose presidency settled “with suspicious ease” on empire-building and executive power. A better Napoleon than Napoleon himself, since his empire-building in the vast Louisiana territory actually endured.

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As readers we need not accept that Burr-the-narrator is reliable in all these details, or buy all of his extensive self-justifications. We only have to accept his unique observer’s position, as a man interested in his own honour and prospects but not especially keen on any grand ideological project, at a time when one of history’s grandest ideological projects — the age of revolution — was getting underway.

From that perspective, Burr’s account is cynical and deflating relative to mythmakers and ideological historians — and one of the points of setting the novel’s framing narrative in the 1830s is to see how quickly American mythmaking took hold. But even through the eyes of the Fallen Founder there is no escaping the fact that what he describes is a political success story: a republic established and then expanded, various disasters and civil wars avoided, the Caesarist appetites of even the most powerful figures checked and limited, and at least some revolutionary ideals put into political practice.

Indeed, the novel’s Burr often circles back to acknowledge as much. All his barbed comments about Washington culminate in the observation that: “He was the supreme creator of his union … [whose] powerful will and serpentine cunning made of a loose confederation of sovereign states a strong federal government graven to this day in Washington’s sombre Roman imperial image.” His war with Hamilton doesn’t conceal his partial liking for his rival, and his sneers at the self-made immigrant double as an acknowledgment of the Horatio Alger qualities celebrated on Broadway.

Even Jefferson, Burr’s final enemy and the instigator of his treason trial, is presented as, well, what he was — a dreadful hypocrite, with a tangle of competing motivations and ideals slicked over by self-interest, but also a remarkably effective politician who adapted himself to the new republic’s presidency rather than being carried into disasters by his radical inclinations.

So what is the novel’s un-cynical message? Perhaps that politics is an always unfinished and ambiguous vocation, whose moments of moral clarity are inherently exceptional, and whose normal workings require a constant balancing-act between idealism and realism, private probity and public vision, the necessary and the possible.

This balance needs to be struck within the individual statesman, first. The reader will observe that Burr falters and falls, relative to the other Founders, not because he’s worse and they’re better, but because he has the wrong proportions: too much concern for his private honour, which makes him miss crucial opportunities and also carries him into the fateful duel, and not quite enough concern for public ideals and great causes, which makes him an insufficiently inspiring leader for any of the new country’s clashing factions.

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But then, in good Madisonian terms, the balance also needs to be struck between competing statesmen. The great good fortune of America in the Revolutionary era, in Vidal’s portrait, was not that all its leaders were uniquely public-spirited but rather that their talents and rivalries interacted in such a way as to mostly stabilise and strengthen the young country. Which is to say, while everyone was accusing everyone else of being a monarchist or Caesar in the making, the republic took form and proved stronger than any individual or faction.

This brings us to the book’s relevance for our own political era, in which accusations of incipient autocracy fly as freely as they did in the United States of 1800. There is a certain relief in recognising this similarity. It’s a reminder, among other things, that periods of stable consensus politics are almost as exceptional as moments of total moral clarity, and that the people who have constantly asserted this-is-not-normal about some feature of the age of populism are mistaken. It’s quite normal for small-r republican politics to be shadowed by the fear of tyranny, corrupted elections, misinformation, destabilising foreign influence, the fate of Rome. (Before there was the reductio ad Hitlerum there was the reductio ad Rubicon — and perhaps the exhausted response: “A Catiline-conspiracy analogy, again, really?”)

These similarities also hint that the politics of the late-18th and 19th centuries may be more relevant to our own fragmented era than the mass movements and ideological tyrannies of the early 20th century. The category to which Burr belongs, the political adventurer — the none-too-principled but also none-too-ideological figure seizing opportunities as they come to him — seems especially relevant to the rise of Trump or, for that matter, Boris Johnson. And of course Andrew Jackson, hovering in the wings of Burr, remains the crucial antecedent for all American populism, past, present and yet to come.

But to the extent that aspects of our own era can be glimpsed in Vidal’s vision of the American Founding, the recognition also brings with it a sense of the depressing difference. We have the adventurers, the fears of Caesarism, the conspiracy theories and fake news, but the qualities of leadership and vision that Burr grudgingly acknowledges in his rivals seem altogether absent. Instead of vaulting ambition counteracting vaulting ambition, our adventurers stand out, clownishly, amid a landscape of greying mediocrity. This is far less dangerous than the alternative, but it is a sign of decay rather than life.

These books are a sort of ultra-niche entry into the “own voices” category of fiction: written by an author (in this case, a President) who shares key identity characteristics with his characters (also Presidents.) In fact, the president in Clinton’s new book, Matthew Keating, becomes an ex-president himself just 60 pages in, after his power-hungry VP, Pamela Barnes, leverages the fallout from a botched kill operation in Afghanistan to defeat Keating in the Democratic primary.

Keating is understandably demoralised by this experience; on the eve of Barnes’ inauguration, we find him standing morosely on a snowy tarmac, lamenting his one-term presidency while his wife attempts to comfort him: “Matt, you could have done so much more if the entire system hadn’t been crippled long before you entered the Oval Office,” she says. “From Twitter mobs to focus groups, nothing can get done anymore.”

Ah, Twitter: a destructive force capable of crippling democracy itself! But when the narrative jumps ahead by two years, Keating remains at loose ends: procrastinating on his memoirs, and filling the hours by challenging his long-suffering security agent to canoe-racing competitions. (In what is perhaps a bit of wish-fulfilment on the part of the book’s author, Keating is the repeated winner of these races. He is also, he makes sure to tell us, not wearing a shirt.)

Needless to say, these books are not great works of literature. The President’s Daughter is in many cases profoundly silly. Barnes, in particular, is a Machiavellian caricature whose nightly routine involves sipping Scotch like a James Bond villain while her wormy husband massages lotion into her cracked and aching feet — “a constant irritant since she stood up for herself and others and entered politics years back.” It is representative of the overall writing quality that one cannot tell if this is simply a clunky accident of sentence construction, or if we are meant to believe that Barnes’ feet literally hurt from figuratively standing up.

But choppy writing and crappy character development aside, Bill Clinton’s little renaissance as a co-writer of pulpy political thrillers is fascinating for what it reveals about the unique conundrum faced by the men who used to be President — and, per American tradition, retain the title for life — but are now, alas, just men.

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There’s a certain expectation, or at least a desire, that American presidents step back from public life after they leave office. George Washington set this bar when he retired to his farm in Mount Vernon in 1797, expressing “a determination not to intermeddle in any public matter” for the rest of his life. It’s an example that has proved inspirational: when Barack Obama left office, he too referenced the “wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices.”

Obviously, this tradition is not being observed in our present moment. America’s most recent ex-president not only eschewed the graceful exit, but is reportedly expecting to be declared the real winner and reinstalled in office any day now.

But it’s also never really been a tradition, or at least not a universally popular one. For every George Washington, there’s a John Quincy Adams, who not only refused to retire from public life but ran for Congress and served nine terms in the House of Representatives (a politician to the end, he collapsed on the House floor during a heated debate over the Mexican-American War and died two days later.) William Taft advised his successor on foreign policy and eventually lobbied his way into a supreme court appointment. Herbert Hoover left office only to spend the rest of his life bitching furiously about Franklin Roosevelt to anyone who would listen.

Some of this behaviour may stem from a lack of examples to follow. Hoover, for instance, was the sole living ex-president for a full twenty years after he left office in 1933, and perhaps felt a special obligation (or at least no particular compunction) when it came to being a thorn in the side of his successors. But in recent decades, the field of former presidents has become much more crowded, with up to half a dozen of them milling around at any given time.

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And while it was once possible to imagine these men as toothless entities, politically neutered and doddering away at some pet humanitarian project or hobby for their remaining years, being a public figure is a different thing in 2021 than it was a few decades ago. In the age of the influencer, anyone who’s ever occupied the public stage of the American presidency is granted a degree of permanent cultural power that can’t be simply shrugged off. Social media makes it much easier for ordinary people to become famous; it also makes it much harder for a prominent person to step back, to disappear. Even Obama, who has more or less kept his promise to stay out of politics after his presidency, is still wielding influence in the form of a massive Netflix deal that has expanded to include podcasts.

It’s no surprise, then, given how difficult it is for presidents to fade away, that our political parties’ relationship with their one-time leadership has gotten complicated. The past ten years have seen the emergence of an especially strange alchemy, whereby former presidents lose their own party support while gaining it across the aisle.

George W. Bush, for instance, was reviled by the left when he was still in office: we called him the “worst president ever”, we were immensely relieved when his second term came to an end, and we were delighted when he kept a relatively low profile in the years that followed. But then, in 2016, Bush was suddenly back on our radar — when he reportedly walked away from Trump’s inauguration speech saying, “That was some weird shit.”

It was the start of a transformation: the so-called worst president ever suddenly seemed more like a benign uncle, one with a cute painting hobby and a bleeding heart for immigrants. The GOP rejected Bush as a traitor to the cause, but on the Left? Some hated to see it, but an undeniable rehabilitation was occurring in the form of internet memes, political nostalgia, and even praise from his Democratic successor.

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Meanwhile, a version of this same phenomenon can be seen playing out in the opposite direction with Barack Obama, who has lately riled the radical Left (and delighted the folks at Fox News) by coming out against the excesses of progressive orthodoxy. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” he said, addressing an audience of young people in 2019 — and then, just days ago, reiterated his concerns in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. But while these comments play well among Right-wingers, who commend Obama’s reasonableness, they irk many of his former supporters. In one representative article, a writer bemoaned the former president for “yet another needless prescription of acquiescence to a bloc of Americans on the wrong side of history.”

Which brings us to Bill Clinton and his complicated legacy. Even if he’d wanted to, this is one ex-president who couldn’t just disappear into the ether once his White House tenure was up. He’d had his turn, but now it was hers — and as a former president-turned-political spouse, Bill was obligated to stand dutifully by Hillary’s side while she climbed the ladder of power, up to and including a quest to hold the same office he’d vacated sixteen years previous.

It was hard to fully appreciate the cascading series of absurdities that surrounded Bill Clinton’s new role in public life: that the President who’d been impeached over a sex scandal was now expected to play, of all things, a devoted and supportive husband. That his presence was required on Hillary’s campaign trail because, despite everything, people still liked him better than her. That his wife somehow ended up running against the only guy in the world whose vulgar and boorish behaviour could make Bill — the alleged rapist, the intern defiler — look positively genteel by comparison. That a mere fifteen months before #MeToo became a decade-defining movement and media obsession, the biggest Bill Clinton story of the year was that he had frolicked with balloons at the 2016 Democratic National Convention like an adorable, demented child. (The second biggest was Trump’s press conference just before the October 9, 2016 presidential debate, featuring three women who’d accused Clinton of sexual assault.)

Could this have been a new way forward for a former American president? Might Bill Clinton have enjoyed a reputational renaissance as First Gentleman to Hillary’s Commander-in-Chief, at least until the #MeToo movement came along to make things awkward? It’s possible, but since Hillary lost that race, we’ll never know — and we’d also rather not talk about it.

In a party that aims to position itself as the safest space for women, to make no apologies for abuse or assault, the lingering presence of a confirmed-pervert-maybe-worse is a terrible liability. Sure, we were willing to pretend we’d forgotten about all that, back when Bill Clinton was the grimy ribbon wrapped around a package marked “important” and “historic,” a package that contained the first female U.S. President. But now, we’d rather he just went away.

And while co-writing pulpy thrillers with James Patterson isn’t quite retiring to a Mount Vernon farm, it does give the man a way to occupy himself, and to garner attention on a different, non-political stage. A Clinton who is ensconced in a fictional world full of kidnappings, terror plots, and shirtless canoe races is a Clinton who won’t get in the way of Democratic policy-making or interrupt the long march toward progress.

Unless, of course, “The President’s Daughter” turns out to be Chelsea’s 2024 campaign slogan.