For a generation, Americans have had a historically large number of ex-presidents around, a possible source of counsel from one of only 45 people who have exercised the broad powers conferred by Article II of the Constitution.
You might expect former presidents to supply elements of personal comity and institutional norms to current politics, and sometimes they do. Certainly, the few periods with no living former presidents have been times of stress when incumbents might have called on seasoned predecessors for advice.
Presidents in those periods faced threatened war with France (1799-1801), violent resistance to Reconstruction (1875-77), the Great Depression (1933), and Watergate (1973-74). During the only quiet ex-president-less period (1908-09), Theodore Roosevelt witnessed the return of the White Fleet’s voyage around the world.
But having a lot of ex-presidents around hasn’t always helped. The only period before the 1990s with five living former presidents was between March 1861 and January 1862, when Abraham Lincoln faced secession of the Confederate states. None were Lincoln voters, and none gave him much support.
One, John Tyler, was elected to the Confederate Congress. Footnote: Tyler was born in 1790. His grandson Harrison Tyler died in May. These two Tylers spanned almost all the 250 years.
Americans did not have five living ex-presidents again until Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, and we’ve had at least four except for 25 months in 2006-09. I remember suggesting to the White House social secretary that he sponsor a six-president event, but that never happened. However, the young incumbent and Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush attended Richard Nixon’s funeral in April 1994.
Clinton, presumably aware of voters’ continued respect for the men he succeeded, seemed to carefully refrain from blaming them for his woes. George W. Bush, aware of his father’s respect for Clinton, behaved similarly. This was a stark contrast of the hostility and noncommunication between the onetime confreres but then rivals — Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.
On the surface, that comity has continued. Five presidents, including the incoming and outgoing incumbents, attended the Trump inaugurations in 2017 and 2025.
But none had endorsed him, not entirely surprisingly given his vitriolic attacks, going back to the 1980s, on the immigration and trade policies of both parties. Those attacks continued, but it’s worth noting that the Clinton-Bush comity was past history even before the dramatic escalator descent in June 2015.
Barack Obama, taking office after the financial crisis of 2008 and the successful execution of the still unopposed Iraq conflict he had long opposed, did not leave off his criticism of his immediate predecessor after his victory speech. Nor did he deal with his party’s defeat in the 2010 midterm elections by engaging successfully, as Clinton had with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republicans after 1994 and Bush with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats after 2006.
Instead, his administration responded, as conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell recalls, with Internal Revenue Service persecution of Tea Party activists. And Obama himself, nettled by repeated charges by Trump and others that he was born in Kenya, after finally releasing his long-form Hawaii birth certificate, days later launched a lengthy attack on Trump, seated in the audience, at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Some reporters believe that attack prompted Trump’s candidacy.
Then there is the fact, underlined by documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last week, that in December 2016, after Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, “the [intelligence community] is prepared to produce an assessment per the president’s request [italics added], that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”
Within days, newspapers printed leaked accounts of the bogus Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign — critical fuel for the Russia collusion hoax. Whether and how much the outgoing president was involved in the project of delegitimizing the incoming president, based on fake documentation, is a question that the press has shown little or no interest in addressing, just as it has shown little interest in why he is the first president since the invalided Woodrow Wilson to stay in Washington, in a house bought for $8 million, after his time in office.
Blaming your party’s election loss on foreign interference or collusion was once known as “red baiting” and “McCarthyism.” The norm in the past, observed by Bill Clinton in 2000, was for a president to accept the result, however disputed, and not to cast a pall of illegitimacy over his successor. Obama, at the least, failed to fulfill what was arguably his duty to prevent that from happening.
One might reply that Trump failed much more grievously to uphold that norm by challenging the result of the 2020 election and inspiring the pro-Trump crowd’s assault on the Capitol. I agreed at the time and agree today. “While Trump’s exact words to the crowd on the Ellipse didn’t constitute a criminal incitement,” I wrote then, “they were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility they’d provoke violence that any reasonable person could find impeachable.”
Reversing this spiral may turn out to be a task for the next generation. This has happened before. The five ex-presidents in 1993 were among the seven from the GI Generation (born 1908-24) who served over the preceding 32 years. The five presidents elected to serve the 36 years up to 2029 include three leading-edge baby boomers (all born in 1946), one late boomer (1961), and one pre-boomer (1942).
After electing 78-year-old candidates in 2020 and 2024, Americans are surely ready to choose someone from a later generation in 2028. Will that president, with several ex-presidents in their 80s plus one over 65, reverse the negative spiral?