Of the forty-three presidents who got an essay this year, Trump wasn’t one of them, though he’s arguably still the most discussed name in the whole project.
The series is called In Pursuit, launched last September by More Perfect, a bipartisan alliance of 37 presidential centers working alongside Substack. The idea was simple on paper: pair a historian, author or former official with a single president or first lady and let them distill one lesson from that life.
Its curator, Colleen Shogan, happens to be the person Trump fired from her job as Archivist of the United States without ever giving a reason. She set one rule for every contributor going in. “Everybody took those instructions and that guidance very seriously,” she told the Associated Press, describing her insistence on nonpartisanship. The aim, she said, was for readers of any political stripe to “feel welcome to be able to read these lessons and essays and learn something from them.”
Trump and Biden got left off the roster entirely, both judged too recent for real historical distance. That’s the official explanation. It hasn’t stopped Trump from showing up anyway, just never by name.
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George W. Bush opened the series on Presidents Day with an essay on Washington, and he’s given no interviews about it since, letting the piece stand on its own according to Shogan. Read next to five years of headlines about a president who contested his own election loss and has floated a third term, Bush’s praise for Washington’s restraint lands differently than it might have in 2015. “Our first president could have remained all-powerful,” Bush wrote, “but twice he chose not to. In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to.”
He called that restraint “among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics.”
Retired General Stanley McChrystal took on Ulysses S. Grant and found a version of the same theme in a general who resisted political pressure on the military. He praised Grant for refusing to let officers “align with political factions and be loyal to a person rather than the Constitution,” closing with a line that needs no footnote given how often Trump has demanded personal loyalty from his own staff: “Our future still depends on whether our leaders choose law over loyalty.”
The full contributor list runs well past the three former presidents.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote about William Howard Taft, the only president who later sat on the Supreme Court himself. Hillary Clinton wrote about Eleanor Roosevelt. Michelle Obama wrote about Jacqueline Kennedy. Karl Rove took on William McKinley, and Barack Obama wrote about Lincoln.
Bill Clinton’s entry, the most recent one published, covers Theodore Roosevelt’s fight against corporate power alongside his exclusionary record on Black and Indigenous Americans, an unflinching pairing that runs counter to Trump’s own push for federal institutions to favor more celebratory versions of American history.
Not every essay is about a household name. Former Congressman Steve Israel drew Millard Fillmore, whom he described as “a historic punchline — best remembered, ironically, for being so forgotten.” Yale historian David Blight took on Franklin Pierce, presenting him as both a pro-slavery president and what Blight calls a “permanent victim” of Washington’s drinking culture, recounting how Whigs mocked Pierce during the 1852 campaign as the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.”
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
