Jan. 7—During the months between his election and his inauguration as America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln avoided saying anything about the issues of the day.
Lincoln knew, with the nation teetering on the edge of the coming calamity known as the U.S. Civil War, that it wasn’t wise for him to weigh in on public questions until he was in office and had the authority to shape policy.
Similarly, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was all but mute in the days between his election and his inauguration as the 32nd president of the United States.
This was during the heart of the Great Depression. His predecessor, Herbert Hoover, tried to force FDR into endorsing Hoover policies for coping with the crisis.
Roosevelt smiled and kept quiet until he took the oath of office, when he could—and did, in the famous First Hundred Days—put his own policies in place.
When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he, too, stayed silent during the days between his victory and his inauguration, even as his predecessor, Donald Trump, tried to overturn the election results and deny the voters their voice and the greatest pandemic in a century killed Americans by the tens of thousands.
Like Lincoln and FDR, Biden understood that there was little upside to speaking on public questions until he was in a position to answer them with policies and solutions of his own.
More than that, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Biden were honoring a principle adhered to from Washington on down.
They believed, as every president did for the nation’s first 240 years, that America has only one president at a time.
There has been only one exception in our history.
Not surprisingly, that exception is Trump.
In the days since he won one of the narrowest victories in U.S. history, the former and future president already has worked to blow up a budget deal that, if he’d had his way, would have led to a federal government shut down and cost Americans billions of dollars. Along the way, he took the legs of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, out from under him—even though Johnson has been one of Trump’s most loyal defenders.
Johnson’s grasp on power in the House is shaky at best and the country may soon add another protracted and completely unnecessary battle to find a new speaker to its list of woes.
The last one—which Trump had a hand in, too—took three weeks before Johnson was selected. It paralyzed the government for almost a month. The people’s chamber almost tore itself apart.
And the one before that—again, with Trump trying to control things while out of office—took 15 votes and a week. To secure the speaker’s spot, former U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, had to trade away key powers of the position and sent both the House and the nation on a nine-month rollercoaster ride.
A smart man might have learned something from those experiences and decided to refrain from meddling in matters beyond his control before he was back in power.
But that’s not Donald Trump.
He’s now decided to reverse course on TikTok and has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay implementation of a federal law forcing the Chinese government to sell the platform to non-Chinese owners or have it shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19.
Trump’s about-face occurred after he had a meeting with an investor in the social media operation who also just happens to be a major donor to the Republican Party.
Trump has been uncharacteristically mute about what they discussed at that meeting.
The federal law, which the Biden administration is defending as a constitutional duty, had broad bipartisan support when it cleared Congress.
Back then, neither Republicans nor Democrats thought the Chinese government shouldn’t have easy access to Americans’ personal information.
Trump, for reasons his legal brief fails to make clear, now thinks letting the Chinese harvest our private data is okay.
The wisdom of this latest Trumpian course correction may be far from apparent, but one thing is clear.
Once again, Trump feels compelled to honor no law or principle that stands in the way of his half-thought-out impulses. He thinks self-discipline is for sissies.
Presidential historians disagree.
In their most recent rankings, they placed Lincoln in the top spot.
FDR came in second.
Biden was 14th.
And Trump?
Dead last.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.