The next President could be anyone
Two wild things happened at noon Friday. One was obvious and historic: Donald Trump became President. The other was completely unknowable and therefore almost completely unmentioned: There is a new next President of the United States.
And whoever and wherever he or she is, there’s a good chance we’ve never even heard of the person.
It’s probably unreasonable to dwell on who will be our 46th President when we’ve hardly seen a single action from our 45th. We’re all exhausted from the 2016 campaign. Who wants to think about 2020?
But I can’t help it. Wondering about who comes next while all the attention is on the new President is a habit I’ve had since high school during a trip to the Kennedy Library in Boston. I saw a photograph of John F. Kennedy in his backyard with his wife Jackie. He was 35 or 36 years old, in a t-shirt, messing with an amateur paint set, and in another fussing with a newspaper.
So domestic and ordinary. Yet they would be the next occupants of the White House.
The photo is deceiving. Kennedy was no suburban everyman, and his ascendency to the presidency wasn’t exactly a stretch. War hero. Rich. Harvard. And steadily gathering legislative years (if not accomplishments) for his resume. Kennedy, while younger and more glamorous than his peers, followed a similar path to most of our 20th century Presidents: Hold serious jobs, at top levels in government, for many years before serious consideration for the biggest job in the world.
But the resumes have gotten a lot thinner lately.
George W. Bush started his journey to become the next President of the United States on Jan. 20, 1993, when Bill Clinton was sworn in. Bush was at the inauguration; his father was leaving the presidency after one term. That day he was the part owner of the fourth-place Texas Rangers baseball team, and still almost two years away from winning his first political office.
Obama became President when he was just 47. One of the youngest ever, yet his career seemed stalled on Jan. 20, 2001, the day Bush became the President.
Still just a state senator, months earlier he had lost a congressional race and was so broke he couldn’t rent a car with his Amex. At the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, he was denied credentials to access the convention floor.
As Bush and Obama went from marginal players to the ultimate success in eight years, Trump’s ascendency, or at least serious speculation about his presidential prospects, started decades ago.
Trump was 34 in 1981 when celebrity journalist Rona Barrett quizzed him about presidential ambition in a nationally televised profile. In the serious exchange, a pensive Trump weighs his electability, concerned his ideas are good for the country but tough to sell politically.
Throughout the 80s, America’s top interviewers like Oprah Winfrey and Larry King put the “don’t you want to be President” question to The Donald. Murmurs of a “Draft Trump” campaign in New Hampshire were reported by Time magazine 30 years ago. For all those who said a President Trump is unthinkable, people have actually been thinking about it for a long time.
Still, eight years ago today, Trump was hardly a contender. In the opening sequence of the first season of “The Apprentice,” he admits that he had been mired in “serious trouble” financially in the 1990s. The perennial presidential talk still surfaced, but generated more by Trump himself than anyone else.
Where were you eight years ago today when Obama became President? Or in 2001 when George W. Bush raised his right hand? I’ve always found it easier to track these occasions than New Year’s, which all seem similar to me.
As many of us lose the urgency behind New Year’s resolutions, maybe we can take encouragement from Inauguration Day, regardless of whether our candidate won in November. Bush, Obama and Trump. They have virtually nothing in common, except each skirted personal ruin and achieved the highest honor our nation can bestow. If they can do that, perhaps you and I are a lot more capable than we’ve grown accustomed to thinking.