We have just celebrated our 250th year of existence and we have a complete idiot as leader and things have changed in this country….that brings us to the question has Trump changed democracy forever?
This is what 11 historians have to say about the question…..
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/07/04/america-250-round-up-00981023
Do you agree with these findings by historians?
What do you think….has Donny changed the definition of democracy?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Recently 4 past presidents had their say about Donny and his governing style….on the nation’s 250th birthday these men looked at what awaits the country in the near future.
Four former presidents delivered similar warnings on 250th birthday of the US: American democracy doesn’t run on autopilot. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton each marked the milestone with calls for civic engagement and a renewed commitment to democratic norms, the Hill reports. Their messages:
- Biden cast the Declaration of Independence as an unfulfilled promise and stressed that democracy must be fought for and earned repeatedly, while maintaining that Americans are less divided than they appear.
- Obama described the country as a “work in progress” and said every generation must advance unfinished efforts to improve the nation.
- Bush, asked what the next 250 years require, emphasized voting and participation even when election outcomes disappoint, calling the ballot a “powerful freedom.”
- Clinton issued the sharpest critique, citing “deep division” and unnamed leaders who weaponize institutions and try to rewrite history, but he said the country’s strengths can still repair its flaws.
Okay these guys put lipstick on that floundering pig.
Biden needs to wake up and see that the nation is more divided than ever.
Obama was just plain optimistic maybe he should have given that advice to the Dems in Congress for the past decade.
Bush needs to tell this stuff to the party he represented in the past for they are doing all possible to end the ‘power of freedom’ that is the vote.
And then there is Clinton who need not preach to the nation after he and his minions have done what we are facing now to this country.
That is about all I have to say about the 4 past presidents and their attempt to look like they can make a difference….they cannot.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Now I could go on a diatribe about Donny referencing his many fuck ups but his last chapter has not been written yet.
And now time for the old professor to drop some history.
The worst president to many political historians was Buchanan the 15th president of the United States.
Historians often label James Buchanan as one of the worst presidents in United States history. His presidency was marked with conflict, a conflict that had been brewing for over thirty years. Yet, Buchanan’s actions, and at times his inactions, aggravated sectional tensions to the point where the Union dissolved.
James “Old Buck” Buchanan was born to wealthy Irish immigrants on April 23, 1791, in rural Cove Gap, Pennsylvania. He entered Dickinson College at the age of 16, two years later he graduated with honors. After his graduation in 1809, Buchanan studied law and as his legal career grew so did his political one. Buchanan served in a reserve unit during the War of 1812 and did not experience any combat, and shortly after the war, the Old Buck served in the Pennsylvania State Legislature before his election to serve in the United States House of Representatives from 1821 until 1831, where he sat on the House Judiciary Committee.
…Buchanan’s presidency was marred with conflict; however, one of the most significant events of his presidency began to unfold even before his inauguration. At the heart of the Dred Scott v. Stanford case was the status of slavery in the territories, an issue that had plagued American politics since the Missouri Compromise. Buchanan desperately hoped that the Supreme Court would unequivocally settle this massive issue before his inauguration in March of 1857. In violation of presidential ethics, on February 3, 1857, the president-elect began corresponding with Justice John Catron of Tennessee. Buchanan inquired as to when the country would learn about a decision and if the decision would be narrowly focused or broad. In his response, Catron did not answer as to when a decision would be handed down but did mention that the territorial question would be involved. On February 23, 1857, Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania responded to an earlier letter of Buchanan and tipped him off to the coming decision, writing “six if not seven will declare that the compromise law of 1820 to be non-effect.” With this prior knowledge in his inaugural address, Buchanan referred to Dred Scott as a decision that would “speedily and finally” resolve all questions about slavery in the territories, and he would “cheerfully submit to that decision.”
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/james-buchanan
There is more if you are interested…..
Read more about the worst presidential scandals.
Read more about the Worst Presidents methodology.
Donny may one day be known for nothing other than feeding his own ego but until then Buchanan is still the worst president.
I know most people could care less about our history and that should be a shame for we are where we are today because ignorance has prevailed.
Any opinions?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
During his first presidency Donny was all a tither over Andrew Jackson….I think because Jackson loved being a bully….and now in his second term Donny has a new idol, McKinley.
In his first term, President Trump’s favorite commander-in-chief, other than himself, was Andrew Jackson, the hatchet-faced, self-made populist who relished turning Washington upside down. Now he’s partial to the barrel-chested, unfailingly polite William McKinley, a champion of American expansionism as well as of tariffs, Trump’s favorite second-term policy. Trump’s shift, rather than merely swapping one infatuation for another, demonstrates how his mindset and priorities have evolved, the AP reports. The Republican president’s admiration for McKinley fits with his current politics, which are different from when Trump first took office in 2017. A key political target for Trump back then was the elites, which his administration predicted might crumble in the face of a Jackson-like working class uprising.
In his second inaugural address, Trump lauded McKinley as a “natural businessman” who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.” Trump used a Day 1 order to restore the name of North America’s tallest peak to Mount McKinley and he has repeatedly named-checked the 25th president more recently, while his weighty tariffs have left the world bracing for the kind of trade war not seen since the days of the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890. The White House says the shift isn’t a departure from Trump’s first-term goals, but simply his leaning harder into new tools—in this case, tariffs—to achieve them.
“President Trump has never wavered from his commitment to putting working-class Americans above special interests, and his channeling of President McKinley’s tariffs agenda is indicative of how he is using every lever of executive power to deliver for the American people,” said spokesman Kush Desai. The president’s Jacksonian impulses aren’t all dormant. He imposed some first-term tariffs and now is shaking up Washington with his efforts to slash the federal workforce and stock the bureaucracy with loyalists. He’s also prioritized antagonizing “elites” at Ivy League universities and top law firms.
(Click for more, including the other side of McKinley’s tariffs that Trump doesn’t mention.)
He adores McKinley because basically of tariffs…..but McKinley mismanaged so many things during his tenure as leader of the ‘free world’….
It is true that the self-styled “tariff man”—his political opponents preferred the more derisive “Napoleon of protection”—was the biggest public face of mercantilism during America’s high-tariff era of 1870–1912. As a congressman, he wrote what came to be known as the “McKinley tariff” of 1890, and as president he signed another increase in 1897.
But a funny thing happened after the U.S. came out of the Panic (and subsequent four-year depression) of 1893: Goosed by sharp increases in domestic iron and copper production, Americans had too many goods chasing too few consumers. And McKinley himself began agitating to tear down some of those trade barriers
“What we produce beyond our domestic consumption must have a vent abroad,” he said in September 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. “The excess must be relieved through a foreign outlet, and we should sell everywhere we can, and buy wherever the buying will enlarge our sales and productions, and thereby make a greater demand for home labor. The period of exclusiveness is past,” he continued. “The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable….If perchance some of our tariffs are no longer needed, for revenue or to encourage and protect our industries at home, why should they not be employed to extend and promote our markets abroad?”
McKinley’s presidency was ended by an assassin’s bullet the very next day.
Even before his late-life pivot to freer trade, McKinley had long been a champion of reciprocity, i.e., the bilateral, mutually beneficial reduction of targeted, asymmetrical tariffs. Or, as he put it in his first inaugural address, “the opening up of new markets for the products of our country, by granting concessions to the products of other lands that we need and cannot produce ourselves, and which do not involve any loss of labor to our own people, but tend to increase their employment.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/06/trump-is-wrong-about-mckinleys-tariff-legacy/
Who will get the nod next year?
He picks the worse to emulate….but that is always expected…..
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
The media and some pundits have been making a big deal out of the fact that Trump has had to endure two assassination attempts in mere weeks….unprecedented, right?
And that opens it up for me to drop some history on these people.
Think back to 1975….if you can possibly do that without hurting yourself……the President is Gerald Ford and he had to deal with two attempts in the month of September….
In September 1975, the nation was stunned when President Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts within just 17 days, both occurring in California and both carried out by women.
While unsuccessful, the shootings highlighted the social and political tensions in a country still reeling from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The year before, Ford had unexpectedly become president when Richard Nixon resigned. Before that he had been appointed to the vice presidency when Spiro Agnew had resigned.
“Ford had come into office under a great wave of popularity, which he enjoyed for the first month—until September 8, 1974, when he pardoned Richard Nixon,” says Mirelle Luecke, supervisor curator for the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Ford “[He] struggled with his popularity ratings after that. The country was also facing the end of the Vietnam War and massive inflation, so it was a time of a lot of change and a lot of difficulty.”
At first, the two assassination attempts against Ford seemed as if they might turn the clock back to the dark days of the 1960s, when the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy convulsed American politics, according to Ken Hughes, a historian with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“But Ford survived both attempts on his life without so much a scratch, so the assassination attempts did no lasting damage,” he says. “The buzzword was ‘decompression.’ After years of tumult and controversy, the pressure was finally off.”
https://www.history.com/news/gerald-ford-assassination-attempts-1975-lessons
You see poor little Trump is not the only presidential candidate to suffer with assassination attempts.
I love some history!
So get over it and move on to the real important stuff in this election.
Class Dismissed!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
We have a VP that is seeking the highest office in the land….nothing unusual there but if she is elected she will break a curse from our past.
Yep, more history from the junkie in the room.
Did you know if Harris wins the election she will be the first in many years?
As Vice President Kamala Harris begins her fall campaign for the White House, she can look to history and hope for better luck than others in her position who have tried the same.
Since 1836, only one sitting vice president, George H.W. Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Among those who tried and failed were Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. All three lost in narrow elections shaped by issues ranging from war and scandal to crime and the subtleties of televised debates. But two other factors proved crucial for each vice president: whether the incumbent president was well-liked and whether the president and vice president enjoyed a productive relationship.
“You really do want those elements to come together,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “If the person the vice president is working for is popular, that means people like what he’s doing and you can gain from that. And you need to have the two principals working together.”
In 1988, Bush easily defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor whom Republicans labeled as ineffectual and out of touch. Bush was otherwise helped by a solid economy, the easing of Cold War tensions and some rare luck for a vice president. President Ronald Reagan’s approval ratings rose through much of the year after falling sharply in the wake of the 1986-87 Iran-Contra scandal, and Reagan and Bush worked well together during the campaign. Reagan openly backed his vice president, who had run against him in the 1980 primaries. He praised Bush at the Republican convention as an engaged and invaluable partner, appeared with him at a California rally and spoke at gatherings in Michigan, New Jersey and Missouri.
The question is….will she succeed where so many others have failed?
Her popularity is growing but it is early in the campaigns and so much can happen and quickly.
Will she buck history?
Any amazing thoughts to share?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
As you are probably well aware the Democratic Convention is going strong in Chicago and by all accounts it is a huge success (the words of political analyst for the MSM not mine)….
But let us walk back 60 years to 1964 when there was a bit of an ugly incident. (That’s right yet another chance for me to inject some history into your dreary lives)
1964 I was entering into my junior year of high school and my Leftist leanings were becoming more pronounced.
These were the dark days of segregation in Mississippi and blacks were fighting for the rights….especially the right of voting.
Ever hear of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party?
The place is Atlantic City, New Jersey….
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded on April 26, 1964 as part of a voter registration project for African Americans in the state. For over half a century Mississippi blacks had attempted to attend regular Democratic Party meetings and conventions but were continually denied entry. They formed the MFDP, which welcomed both whites and blacks, to run several candidates for the Senate and Congressional elections on June 2, 1964.
Attempting to get members to join the MFDP angered most white Mississippians who often responded with violence. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, three men, Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, who were associated with the MFDP, disappeared and were later found dead with fatal gunshot wounds. The one African American man was beaten so badly for attempting to register to vote that his bones had been crushed. This defiance by Mississippi’s white majority propelled the MFDP to get its delegates into the upcoming national convention to replace the “regular” Democrats.
The regular Democrats wanted to seat an all-white delegation at the 1964 National Democratic Convention which met in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The MFDP protested. Supporters of the MFDP came from all over the United States to support their protest. Eventually a compromise proposal orchestrated by Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey offered the MFDP two non-voting seats next to the regular Mississippi delegates. However, the MFDP refused the offer because it denied them any chance of voting on the floor of the convention. MFDP leader Fannie Lou Hamer spoke before the convention rules committee explaining the position of the party and why the compromise offered was unacceptable.
While the MFDP ultimately failed in its goal of gaining seats at the Democratic National Convention, it was ultimately successful as its story in Atlantic City reminded the country of the ongoing battle Southern blacks faced in gaining full citizenship rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed two months before the Convention, did not address the right to vote. African Americans in Mississippi and across the nation vowed to continue to press for full voting rights. The MFDP’s role in that struggle helped pave the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
(blackpast.org)
As per usual for the day racism and bias won out and the delegates were not seated and were treated with suspicion and hatred.
Members of the MFDP went to Atlantic City believing that their planned contest of the seats assigned to the state party had a reasonable chance of success. In reality, the MFDP leadership received an education on how politics at the national level operated. While a number of MFDP delegates sincerely believed that moral persuasion would lead the DNC to refuse the regular state party the state’s allotment of seats, President Johnson had his own agenda. Johnson, running without opposition for the nomination for president, wanted a smooth convention. He feared a southern walkout if the DNC seated the MFDP. Johnson ordered the FBI to wiretap the MFDP office, as well as the hotel rooms of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin. Johnson knew the positions of civil rights groups and key leaders throughout the convention. He also threatened the patronage of those who might have been inclined to support the MFDP. In addition, he coerced Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers union, to threaten to cut off financial support to SNCC and the MFDP in Mississippi if the challenge was not withdrawn.
This threat did not alter the determination of the protestors. Before a televised hearing of the Credentials Committee, the deeply affecting testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer led Johnson to stage a news conference in an effort to stop public opinion from mounting to the point that he had to give seats to the MFDP. Johnson forced Hubert Humphrey to try to convince the challengers not to go forward. This was a test of Humphrey’s personal loyalty, and Johnson told him the vice presidential position on the ticket depended on how he handled the controversy. Humphrey offered the MFDP two seats representing the state of Mississippi, and the rest of the MFDP delegation were to be “honored guests” at the convention. The MFDP refused this offer, demanding at least the seats proportionate to the state’s blacks of voting age. Unwilling to compromise, the challengers got no seats, but they did manage to obtain the credentials of sympathetic delegates from states that disapproved of the regular Mississippi delegation. Several members of the MFDP staged a sit-in demonstration on the convention floor, but security guards quickly removed the protestors.
MFDP members left the convention embittered by their experience. Feeling betrayed by the actions of northern liberals and civil rights moderates such as King and Rustin who had supported the compromise option proposed by Humphrey, the MFDP and SNCC became more militant after the convention. The DNC did unseat the regular Mississippi Democrats in 1968 (as promised at the 1964 convention) when the state party persisted in denying access to blacks. As a consequence of this action, the Mississippi Democratic Party ended the discriminatory practices and customs it had used to exclude blacks from meaningful participation in party affairs.
(encyclopedia.com)
This was a valiant attempt to gain recognition but sadly the forces of racism won the day but that was short-lived….then came the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
There you have my little slice of history from my state of Mississippi.
Now as the Right attempts to limit and even stop some citizens from voting the valor of those people should be a beacon to not roll over and never play dead.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Last Saturday a gunman attempted to shoot and kill an ex-president of the United States….but I have given that all the ink it will get for now.
Trump is something special….an ex-president running for the lost office once again, right?
Come on guys! You knew I could not let this incident go by without a little history lesson involved, right?
Not hardly!
Trump is not the only or the first ex-president to be targeted by an assassin’s bullet…..as much as he would love to be unique.
The year is 1912 in Milwaukee (sound familiar?) and the ex-president is Teddy Roosevelt….
Theodore Roosevelt’s opening line was hardly remarkable for a presidential campaign speech: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible.” His second line, however, was a bombshell.
“I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.”
Clearly, Roosevelt had buried the lede. The horrified audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” the wounded candidate assured them. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bullet-riddled, 50-page speech.
Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
Only two days before, the editor-in-chief of The Outlook characterized Roosevelt as “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy,” and for the next 90 minutes, the 53-year-old former president proved it. “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap,” he claimed.
Few could doubt him. Although his voice weakened and his breath shortened, Roosevelt glared at his nervous aides whenever they begged him to stop speaking or positioned themselves around the podium to catch him if he collapsed. Only with the speech completed did he agree to visit the hospital.
The shooting had occurred just after 8 p.m. as Roosevelt entered his car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel. As he stood up in the open-air automobile and waved his hat with his right hand to the crowd, a flash from a Colt revolver 5 feet away lit up the night. The candidate’s stenographer quickly put the would-be assassin in a half-nelson and grabbed the assailant’s right wrist to prevent him from firing a second shot.
https://www.history.com/news/shot-in-the-chest-100-years-ago-teddy-roosevelt-kept-on-talking
You see Trump is not the first ex-president running for office again to have been shot while campaigning to regain the White House.
Personally I liked the message that Teddy had with his Bull Moose Party we could use some of those progressive ideas today.
Know your history.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
It is a Sunday and as usual I want to enrich your knowledge as best I can…..yes another FYI post from the Old Professor.
These days there is a massive back and forth about who is eligible to run for office and the defense of whichever side one falls on this debate is always the 14th Amendment….Section 3 to be exact.
For those that do not know the language of this section of the Constitution….I can help….
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
There you have it…..very simple and straightforward.
Since it is an amendment to the US Constitution where did it all begin and why?
As with so many things in this country this amendment had its beginning after the great American Civil War.
On December 4, 1865, the 39th Congress convened in Washington, D.C., marking its first meeting since the Union victory in the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The burning questions facing Congress and President Andrew Johnson—Lincoln’s White House successor—were how to reincorporate the former Confederate states into the Union and how to prevent another violent insurrection.
Among the Senators who tried to take their seats in the coming months was Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederate States of America. Stephens had been arrested for treason in May 1865, imprisoned for five months in Boston, then paroled by President Johnson. Upon returning to his home state of Georgia, the state legislature elected Stephens to the Senate.
He wasn’t alone. Southern legislatures elected to Congress two former Confederate senators, four other former Confederate congressmen and a host of former Confederate military officers. Members of the Radical Republicans, the political group that had led the fight to end slavery and now pushed for the rights of newly freed Black Americans, were outraged. Their plan for post-Civil War governance was Reconstruction, an ambitious legislative program to end slavery, extend the vote to Black men and guarantee equal protection under the laws for all “freedmen,” formerly enslaved people.
But enforcement of Reconstruction would be impossible if state and local governments in the South were run by former Confederates, and if Congress, in the words of Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens, was “filled with yelling secessionists and hissing copperheads.”
The simplest way to legally enshrine loyalty to the U.S. government as a post-war qualification for federal and state political offices was by amending the Constitution. This marked the start of a many-years debate over who should be allowed to serve in government—and who got to decide.
The end result was Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualified anyone from holding federal or state political office who had violated their oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” by engaging “in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
https://www.history.com/news/14th-amendment-section-three-disqualification-clause-confederates
Now you have enough information (if you actually read the article) to make a formed debated on this subject the next time Uncle Fred brings it up. And probably know more about the subject than the idiot that brings it up on the boob tube.
You may breathe now and resume your day’s activities.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
I hope you have a wonderful Sunday and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Old farts like me know who Eisenhower was….the general that lead the Allies into victory over the Nazis in Europe and then president of the United States.
Eisenhower was a champion in the fight against authoritarianism plus was a champion of the common man….as a young boy I helped my grandfather with distribution of leaflets for Ike in 1956….a look at the GOP platform of 1956 (this shows just how far the GOP has sank in the passing years.)
President Eisenhower has given us a statement of principles that is neither partisan nor prejudiced, but warmly American:
The individual is of supreme importance.
The spirit of our people is the strength of our nation.
America does not prosper unless all Americans prosper.
Government must have a heart as well as a head.
Courage in principle, cooperation in practice make freedom positive.
To stay free, we must stay strong.
All that historic stuff aside….what is this about Besmirching?
Kansas’ own Dwight D. Eisenhower served as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II and defeated a rising tide of fascism and authoritarianism. As a popular two-term president, he governed as a pragmatic conservative — sustaining prosperity, supporting integration and supporting international alliances.
In every way, he lived and governed as the opposite to former President Donald Trump, a man who has made no secret of his love for chaos, racist impulses and dislike of global allies. Trump tore a page from authoritarian regimes’ playbook on Jan. 6, 2021, as he egged on an armed insurrection of his own government.
So why is Eisenhower’s foundation in Abilene making common cause with a traitor?
In case you missed it, the foundations and institutions representing nearly every U.S. president since Hoover united for the common good late last week. They issued a stirring statement calling for a renewed commitment to civic institutions, public civility and protecting this precious representative democracy.
https://www.alternet.org/eisenhower-foundation/
So sad the the Foundation has chosen to side with an authoritarian a/hole like Trump….his foundation is besmirching the name of Eisenhower and crapping on the man, an American hero.
It is also a shame that the GOP has taken an alternate path than it was traveling in 1956…this would be a much better nation if they had stayed on track.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”