First a word about, as of this writing, the clown in the White House. Since this is a touchy subject, don’t take it from me; take it from the conservative periodical Old Guard (“Devoted to the Principles of 1776 and 1787”), whose editor wrote, “Shall we speak of . . . an ignoramus as a scholar? Of an obscene joker and clown as a well-bred man of refinement and taste? . . . To say that we shall not speak of Lincoln coarsely is to forbid us to mention his name.”
I should point out the article was written in 1864.1
The number of references to Abraham Lincoln as a clown was exceeded only by the number of references, when he sought the presidency in 1860, to his being a candidate with fringe views who, through a combination of electoral circumstances, managed to squeeze through to the White House. Nor was this view confined to the South. When Lincoln sought reelection, an Ohio newspaper repeated its view of him as fringe with even more fervor. “We have tried him four years,” it declared. “He has destroyed the Union, violated the Constitution, trampled upon the laws, made the name of America a hissing and a byword through the earth, made our rivers to flow with blood, covered the land with green graves and devoured the substance of the people.”2
But come on, when we speak of the clown in the White House, we know who we mean. Here again, however, don’t take it from me but from the conservative author Thomas R. Meinders, who wrote, “Thanking Obama for killing bin Laden is like going into McDonald’s and thanking Ronald McDonald for the hamburger. It’s the guy cooking the burger that should get the credit, not the clown.”3
Theodore Roosevelt too was called a clown in the White House.4 In this respect Donald Trump, so often viewed and depicted as a clown candidate who managed, also through a combination of electoral circumstances, to win the White House, is not the first president to be viewed as such. What is significant about Trump’s victory in terms of fringe candidates is that he was not a fringe candidate. He was the nominee of a major political party.
But how Trump came to be the nominee of a major political party can be found in fissures deep within the nation’s political landscape that were amplified by fringe candidates.
Dating back as far as 1848, the candidacy of John Donkey reveals that voters were already recognizing and resenting meaningless campaign double-talk. The attention paid to the wealthy entrepreneur George Francis Train in 1872 reveals the curiosity of many for a successful businessman rather than a professional politician running the country—but also reveals that the political landscape was as yet sealed tightly against entertaining braggadocio. Fringe candidates in 1968 contributed to widening fissures, and those who gained attention through post-1968 changes in primary election rules were further enabled to reveal more fissures. Not long after, fringe candidates benefited from entertainment increasingly sharing the stage with journalism as competition intensified among the traditional news media, cable TV, and the internet. In 2016 enough of these fissures intersected to erupt into a mainstream path to the presidency for Donald Trump.
To be clear, fringe candidates did not cause these changes, though many played a role in exposing and enlarging them. Those whose candidacies received widespread attention attracted that spotlight because their campaigns resonated with and amplified lesser-heard voices for change—voices that represented political fissures.
With the election of Trump, many Americans may feel our revels now are ended. These fringe candidates, as I foretold when taking your political tickets, are clowns and Quixotes, but rather than fading into air, they have manifested themselves in later major party candidates—one of whom, widely viewed as a clown or modern-day Don Quixote, came to occupy the Oval Office.5
But are our revels ended?
Bear in mind, many Americans in earlier eras also felt the fun was over, that our democracy was done. And they were wrong. Nevertheless it’s a question worth asking, even if again and again.
In the course of this trip we have seen that the variety of odd banners with which fringe candidates have headed into the presidential fray have been as significant to this nation’s story as Don Quixote’s has been for all humanity. Indeed the crazy quilt of quests one could assemble with the banners of fringe candidates was part of what made this nation’s bed at its inception, when Thomas Jefferson described our collective quixotic quest in that paradoxical phrase “to form a more perfect union.” With those slightly wacky words, and the Constitution of which they are a part, the United States became the first nation in history in which laughter and political lunacy officially became patriotic acts.
Whether or not our revels are ended will be determined by the kind of presidents we elect in the future. Fringe candidates for president will provide the hints.