Skip to main content

Mr. Outgoing Not at the Inauguration

 




One can hardly act surprised that Mr. Outgoing is not going to be at the inauguration of his successor this year.

There have been surprisingly few comments about the LAST time that happened. So it is worth being explicit. The last such snub took place in March 1869, when Andrew Johnson left town ahead of the festivities for incoming President Ulysses S. Grant. 

Andrew Johnson (pictured here) and Donald Trump share a lot else for the history books, too. Each was impeached by the House during his first-and-only term in office. Each defeated the prosecutors of that impeachment in the Senate and completed his term. And now, we see that each has declined to stick around for the ceremony that would formally end that term. 

This means that Bill Clinton is the only impeached and tried President who did show up for his successor's inauguration, that of George W. Bush, in January 2001. And that situation was different. Clinton was impeached in his second term in office. So he served out the full permitted eight years. Perhaps that renders one less cranky. 

[Were I to make an observation here to the effect that Monica might be a better tension-reliever than Melania, it would perhaps not be taken well, so I will refrain from it. I'm trying to Be Best.] 

There are only three data points, three President's who have been impeached and tried. Nixon, of course, resigned before these processes could work themselves out, so he isn't part of our sample. With such sparse data, one can hardly make generalizations, But I think it unremarkable that Trump won't be at this event.

Nor do I think he will be missed.

There has been a good deal of sentimentality of late about the wonderful tradition of the peaceful transition of powerful, and how horrible a breach Trump is making of it. Really? Yes, it is good that our chief executives succeed one another without the need for tanks rolling down city streets. But in this case, no one is dragging the Outgoing out of the mansion kicking and screaming. We can count that as a blessing. What we don't get is the hypocritical spectacle of incoming and outgoing shaking hands and pretending to be all buddy-buddy. I don't think we lose anything by not having that spectacle before us. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more