The problem with Biden's 'legacy' and Trump's 'mandate'
Two fuzzy concepts that obscure more than they reveal
President Joe Biden and his predecessor/successor Donald Trump are being analyzed through the lens of two shopworn words: legacy and mandate.
They are terms that pundits are especially prone to use, perhaps because they are so ill-defined.
Biden blew up his legacy, the argument goes, with the pardon for his son Hunter Biden, after assuring the public before the election that he would let the justice system play out.
Colleen Long and Zeke Miller of the Associated Press put it this way: “By choosing to put his family first, the 82-year-old president — who had pledged to restore a fractured public’s trust in the nation’s institutions and respect for the rule of law — has raised new questions about his already teetering legacy.”
When Trump gave his victory speech, he claimed “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” from the voters. Trump is a “maniac with a mandate,” according to Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a writer for the New Yorker. “It is chilling to observe the landscape of possibilities before him—and us.”
But what exactly is a president’s legacy? And who gets to decide whether an incoming president has a “mandate”?
Legacy
According to the narrow dictionary definition of the word “legacy” — “an amount of money or property left to someone in a will,” according to Oxford Languages — Biden’s pardon will certainly be part of what he leaves behind, literally something he turns over to the next generation of his family as well as the nation, a dubious precedent future presidents could use to their families’ advantage.
But there’s a broader definition: legacy is “the long-lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc. that took place in the past, or of a person’s life.” And that’s where our efforts to define a president’s legacy instantly can lead us astray.
In 1948, Life magazine published a study by Arthur Schlesinger Sr. that surveyed historians and grouped America’s presidents into five categories: Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average and Failure.
Six presidents were listed as great: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Two were branded failures: Ulysses S. Grant and Warren Harding.
But as George R. Goethals noted in a February, 2023 article for The Conversation “some presidents’ rankings have changed as the nation — and historians themselves — reassessed the country’s values and priorities.”
Many historians now view Wilson and Jackson as far from great presidents. “Wilson’s rather startling efforts to segregate federal offices and the military are becoming more widely known as scholars explore that aspect of his presidency,” Goethals wrote.
A new biography of Wilson points out just how backward his views were. Reviewing the book by former Rep. Christopher Cox for Washington Monthly, Sara Bhatia noted that “Wilson had more connective tissue with the Confederate past than with the future…Cox assembles a convincing body of evidence that Wilson was committed to white supremacy as a matter of public policy manifest not just in his racial politics but also in his hostility toward women’s suffrage.”
Andrew Jackson’s “commitment to Indian removal from Southern and Midwestern states, not unique for the time, and the resulting Trail of Tears — the forced and violent relocation of Native Americans from their homelands — are important topics in today’s political discussions,” noted Goethals.
On the other hand, Grant has risen in historians’ estimation. C-SPAN’s 2021 survey gave him high marks for “pursued equal justice for all,” putting him in sixth place in that dimension. Overall, Grant was ranked 20th among all presidents in the 2021 survey (Lincoln was ranked first and James Buchanan was ranked last.)
“Pursued equal justice for all” is one of 10 criteria the network used in asking historians to assess presidents. The others were: Public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skill, relations with Congress, vision/setting an agenda and performance within context of times.
“Historians have quite simple ways of evaluating presidents,” Goethals concluded. “We have an image of the ideal leader. Just a few pieces of information relating to that ideal make a big difference in whether we view presidents as fitting or not fitting that image. This is particularly true of our perception of how good they were. Presidents’ moral commitments speak loudly to whether or not we view them as good.”
Ford’s pardon
In 1974, one month after President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal, his hand-picked successor granted him “a full, free and absolute pardon.” President Gerald Ford justified the pardon by saying that if Nixon had gone to trial, “the attention of the President, the Congress and the American people would have been diverted from the problems that we have to solve.”
Many reacted with fury to Ford’s decision. The president’s own press secretary resigned in protest. And polls showed a majority of Americans disapproved of the pardon.
But with the passage of time, critics, including the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, changed their minds and began to view the pardon as an act of principle. By 1986, a Gallup poll found 54% of Americans approving of the pardon. In 2001, Sen. Ted Kennedy, who had opposed it, joined with Caroline Kennedy in honoring former President Ford with the John F. Kennedy Foundation’s Profiles in Courage Award.
‘Equal justice’
Biden’s pardon of his son is of course a more self-interested act than the pardon of Nixon. It may well harm his scores from historians on “equal justice” and “moral authority.”
Trump has his own issues on both of those counts: he was ranked last among presidents on “moral authority” in the 2021 survey and 40th out of 44 on “pursued equal justice.” Overall, he came in 41st out of the 44 presidents.
But as the shifting sands of judgment on Gerald Ford illustrate, it’s really impossible to judge from the standpoint of December, 2024, how history will view Biden or Trump decades from now. The consequences of their decisions and policies will play out for a long time, for better or worse.
People may forgive Biden, as many already have, for doing what any father would do for his son and protecting him from an incoming president bent on “retribution.” They may have a harder time justifying his failing to act earlier to head off ethical quagmires. Hunter and the President’s brother James compiled “lengthy track records of making, or seeking deals that cash in on” Joe Biden’s name, according to Ben Schreckinger’s 2019 reporting for Politico.
Other factors that could weigh on Biden’s legacy include his switch from positioning himself as a one-term “transitional” president to seeking another four years in the White House, as well as his inability to effectively deal with mass immigration and high inflation.
Yet early in Biden’s term, there were hopes for a highly effective presidency. In April, 2021, Jonathan Alter wrote in the New York Times that, “With a few breaks and the skillful execution of what seems to be a smart legislative strategy, President Biden is poised to match F.D.R.’s stunning debut in office.” The Covid crisis had created an opportunity for a transformative presidency, akin to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-fighting first term.
Biden’s Covid relief package, vaccination program and the “Build Back Better” infrastructure bill provided a promising start. “He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson who can rightly be called F.D.R.’s heir. Soon we’ll know if he squanders that legacy — or builds on it,” Alter concluded.
Mandate
“Mandate” is an even more dangerous word than “legacy” since it can be used to justify future power grabs. Interestingly, two of the presidents who have claimed strong popular mandates happen to be the ones historians have demoted from the “great” category.
Political scientist Julia R. Azari wrote that Andrew Jackson’s “decision to destroy the Second Bank of the United States was justified through his insistence that the 1832 election was a mandate for his position on the issue. Jackson ordered his treasury secretary to remove deposits from the Bank, and dismissed him when he refused, rationalizing his actions by claiming the president enjoys a special popular endorsement – a mandate...”
“Woodrow Wilson articulated the idea that the president was specifically given power to act by virtue of his election and spoke for the ‘whole people.’ This formed the basis for the idea that the president should play a greater role in policy leadership than presidents had up to that point.”
Azari asked, “Does a mandate mean that the election carried a special message? How do we know what voters were thinking as they cast ballots?”
The fact that Trump won the popular vote along with the electoral college has been cited by some proponents of the idea that he has a mandate. But as Peter Enns, professor of government at Cornell, told the Guardian, “If this election can be explained by what voters thought of Biden and Harris and economic conditions, it really goes against the notion of a mandate for major change from Trump.”
According to the Guardian, Enns’s research suggests that “voters chose Trump not because they want to see his divisive policies implemented, but rather because they were frustrated with the state of the economy during Joe Biden’s presidency, an obstacle Kamala Harris was not popular enough to overcome.”
Although Trump won the Electoral College by 86 votes, the popular vote margin “is the second-closest since 1968, and it’s still tightening,” NPR reported. “With 96% of the vote in, Trump has 49.97% and Vice President Harris has 48.36%, according to the Associated Press. These results show that Trump doesn't exactly have the ‘unprecedented and powerful mandate’ he claimed on election night. The margin shows how closely divided the country is politically and that any shift to the right is marginal,” according to NPR’s Domenico Montanaro.
We live in a time when rhetoric is amped up to extreme levels in our feeds. By all means, let’s call out hypocrisy, wrongdoing and hubris. But it’s more important than ever to show humility in predicting history’s judgments and to stop reaching so quickly for the fuzzy concepts of “legacy” and “mandate.”
Much appreciated, but you're working too hard, Rich. The Pesident-elect would like you to visit Mar-a-lago for a round of golf and...chat.
Love how you handle the history behind current events, Rich. It adds important perspective to the day-to-day musings of the rest of us. Nice job on this one.