Lessons for Donald Trump ... from Grover Cleveland

The 22nd — and 24th — president had a disastrous second term

Snow started falling in Washington, DC, early on March 4, 1893. There was a wind from the northwest and temperatures hovered in the mid-20s when Grover Cleveland took the oath of office as president before a small crowd on the Capitol’s East Portico.

For the first time in American history, a president was about to serve a non-consecutive second term. Aside from the weather, the portents were good.

When he took office for the second time, Cleveland’s party, the Democrats, held undivided control of government for the first time in 35 years, his biographer Troy Senik noted.

“Cleveland distinguished himself as one of the few truly honest and principled politicians of the Gilded Age,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Yet his second term would be a disaster. It even helped to foster the idea that re-elected presidents suffer from a “second-term curse.”

On Tuesday, voters made Donald Trump only the second president to return to the White House af…