Winner of the elections, Donald Trump is both the 45th and 47th president of the United States. He achieved the greatest comeback in the country’s recent history. Elected in 2017, defeated in 2021, he achieved a rare performance of returning to power. Rare, but not unique. Before him, Grover Cleveland was the first to achieve such a return to the highest office in the United States. It was 1892, a completely different era.
Being elected after having meanwhile lost an electoral battle is undoubtedly almost the only link that unites the two men. Cleveland was a Democrat (the first since the Civil War) and a strong supporter of anti-corruption. Which was far from being the primary concern of his predecessors during the “Gilded Age”, an era marked by the rise in economic power of the United States. With its industrial fortunes and its political scandals.
Between Cleveland and Trump, no point in common, or almost nothing
Elected for the first time in 1885, this great opponent of state interventionism was defeated by Benjamin Harrison before taking his revenge in 1893 when the latter was accused of having excessively mismanaged the state coffers…
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His re-election almost coincided with the country’s first major economic crisis. Historians present him as a man of integrity but austere. Not really the adjectives that regularly come up to describe Donald Trump.