It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have a strong opinion about Donald Trump. But it’s worth lowering the emotional temperature for a moment, taking a step back, and looking at him through the eyes of history. Has there ever been a presidential candidate like Trump? Here I’ll confine myself just to the last twenty-five elections (1916-2012), during which time the Democrats ran eighteen different candidates for president, and the Republicans seventeen. So apart from the soundbites is there anything really different about the Donald?
First, Trump has never run for office. The last time a major party ran a candidate who had never entered an election was in 1952 when the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower. A war hero, commander of the D-Day forces in 1944, Eisenhower was so widely admired that both parties wanted him as their candidate. Far from being an outsider, he had been in government service for decades.
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