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    Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump both received two terms, but not consecutively
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    Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump both received two terms, but not consecutively

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    4 minutes, 39 seconds Read

    With his victory in this week's presidential race over Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump finds himself in rare company, joining Grover Cleveland as the second chief executive of the United States to be elected to non-consecutive terms.

    Trump – the country's 45th president from 2017 to 2021 – will now serve a second term, this time as the 47th president.

    The first was Grover Cleveland, who served as the 22nd President from 1885 to 1889, followed by a second term in the White House as the 24th from 1893 to 1897.

    And in addition to being separated by more than a century between their eras, the two men also had different views on tariffs.

    Who was Grover Cleveland?

    Cleveland was born in New Jersey in 1837 and grew up in New York State. He practiced law in Buffalo before beginning a rapid rise through the political ranks. In 1881, Cleveland, an anti-corruption reformer, was elected mayor of Buffalo. A year later he was elected governor of New York and was nominated as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 1884.

    Cleveland, again running on an anti-corruption platform, defeated James Blaine, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state, to become the first Democratic president since the Civil War. Cleveland overcame a scandal in which he admitted in 1874 that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman named Maria Halpin.

    Cleveland won his first term as president with the support of reform Republicans known as Mugwumps, and his term saw both the labor unrest at Chicago's Haymarket in 1886 and the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, the first Federal attempt to regulate the railroad industry.

    In 1886, at age 49, Cleveland became the only president during his term to marry 21-year-old Frances Folsom. His first presidency was marked by other innovations: he was the first president to have a child in the White House and, according to historian Louis Picone, the first to have the White House Christmas tree strung with electric lights.

    His administration also sparked controversy when it blocked several bills that would provide pensions for civil war veterans and seed grain distribution funds to drought-stricken farmers. He said of the latter that federal aid “weakens the strength of our national character.”

    Ryan McMahon, an assistant professor of political science at San Antonio College in Texas, said the goals of Cleveland's re-election campaign in 1888 included lowering high tariffs imposed by Republicans and supported by the wealthy, despite opposition from his party.

    “Grover Cleveland was a great reformer as a Democrat and wanted to lower tariffs because the middle class was paying that cost in the form of an increased tax,” McMahon said.

    Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888 but ultimately lost the Electoral College to Republican challenger Benjamin Harrison, whose campaign was supported by wealthy elites who later became known as robber barons, McMahon said.

    Four years later, Cleveland, who remained a prominent figure within the Democratic Party, was nominated again for the presidency and defeated Harrison on his campaign promise to reduce high tariffs.

    During his second term, this time as the country's 24th president, Cleveland was embattled almost from the start. His first year in office was marked by the economic depression known as the “Panic of 1893,” and the following year thousands of railroad workers began the so-called Pullman strikes, which crippled large parts of the railroad industry and forced Cleveland to deploy federal military troops to the resolve work interruptions.

    “The economy was a disaster when he came in,” McMahon said. “He had again advocated for lowering tariffs, but the U.S. Treasury was in dire need of money and therefore could not accomplish what he set out to do.”

    In 1896, Cleveland enjoyed little support even within his party and preferred to retire rather than seek re-election.

    While Trump will be the second president to serve non-consecutive terms, there are others who have been unsuccessful in their attempts to return to the White House after their time as former presidents.

    Martin Van Buren, the country's 8th president from 1837 to 1841, ran an unsuccessful election campaign in 1848 as a member of the Free Soil Party. Millard Fillmore, president from 1850 to 1853, accepted the nomination of the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, in 1856, but was not elected. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, who served until 1909, sought a third term as president, but was unsuccessful as a third-party candidate.

    Can Trump run again in 2028?

    Not under the 22nd Amendment.

    A 2009 Congressional Research Service paper by national government specialist Thomas H. Neale states that the four-year term for presidents and vice presidents is established in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

    By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to a third term in 1940, U.S. presidents had honored a long tradition of self-imposed two-term limits, Neale wrote in his article “Presidential Terms and Tenures: Perspectives and Suggestions for Change.” Since 1789, he said, only seven of 31 presidents had served consecutive terms until Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944 and served that term before dying in 1945.

    Roosevelt's longevity prompted the passage of the 22ndnd Amendment of 1951 providing that no president can be elected more than twice.

    “To change that would require a constitutional amendment, and that is a long, painful and difficult process,” McMahon said. “It’s extremely unrealistic to imagine.”

    Presidential historian Edward Frantz, chairman of the history department at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana, made a final comment.

    Given the historic nature of Trump's victory, Frantz said, “The biggest winner from last night other than Donald Trump is Grover Cleveland and everyone who asks about him.”

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