Calvin Coolidge Is The Model

In a home in Vermont, a father and Justice of the Peace swore in the 30th President after the death of Warren G. Harding

One of the things that’s missing in America today is the humility that this once backwater republic held as its defining ethos. Most who are alive today don’t remember an America that was defined by its agrarian foundations and its anti-European trappings of monarchs and showy power. There is obviously a bit of scuttlebutt about moving the inauguration of President Trump indoors tomorrow. Frankly, after everything that has happened to him and others around him in the last year, he could be sworn in in the master closet at Mar-a-Lago, and I would be just fine with it. The pomp and fancypants of these events aren’t exactly a selling point to me in the most broke country in the history of mankind. I get that it’s a good celebration of a lot of hard work - and in all honesty, I am headed there tomorrow to cover it for Besides The Revolution and to meet the good people I had the chance to interact with in the MAHA coalition. I would be lying if I said I’m not looking forward to it. Politics is hard work on the mind, and celebrating victories is a worthwhile pursuit. However, there’s a foreboding sense in my head that if by 10 am on Tuesday, things haven’t started to be torn apart and the offices filled with boxes of the departing, Trump and his team are going to be in trouble - and quickly. The empire isn’t going to die a quiet death.

I heard my favorite commentator, Mark Steyn, suggest a few months ago that President Trump should hold his swearing-in at the border of Texas and Mexico and have the local border patrol do the oath. Then, immediately after his speech, be the one to arrest the first person who tries to cross illegally. It makes for a funny line, but it also has a ring of truth about the moment. There is a lot of work to do, and we have failed to be a serious opposition to the government for too long. The perma-class of Washington has a plan to prevent any elements of the Trump agenda…I hope President Trump has a plan, too. In the sentiment that Mr. Styen suggests, I would prefer to treat the inauguration as the starting gun for getting this dismantling going. I might prefer that his speech is something like this:

“America used to be functional. It’s not any longer. The citizens are abused, the money is ruined, and the people in the buildings that surround this place should be packing up their belongings and hitting the road faster than an angry John Adams. God bless you, and God bless America - now let’s go to work.”

If President Trump wants a model of success, he should look no further in history than Calvin Coolidge. He’s the model of president we need at this moment. Coolidge was the functioning follow-up to Woodrow Wilson. He had been selected as Vice President for Warren G. Harding. Harding was a very inconsequential politician. He was as close a predecessor to Joe Biden in persona as anyone in the 20th Century. A Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, called Harding’s speeches “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”

Sound familiar?

Harding had selected Coolidge to secure the “Yankee” vote. Coolidge was from Vermont, the most Republican state in the Union in the 1920s. When Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco, Coolidge took the reins of the presidency and did everything in his power to unwind what had been done during the Wilson presidency and the First World War. Coolidge was a humble man who believed that the role of government was to put itself out of business. He had a wilderness sensibility about him - and thought that the government that had been conceived of in the progressive era was an unsustainable and punitive version of the one that was described in the Constitution.

There were things that Wilson had done, like the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax, that couldn’t be undone, but Coolidge and his “hands-off the people” approach was a welcome change to the ever-pressing push by the federal government to involve itself in the daily lives of its citizenry and remake the American nation into an empire. Ultimately, Wilson’s vision is the one we live in, but Coolidge is a model president for the moment we find ourselves in.

From the moment Coolidge became president, he made an effort to make sure that the Presidency and its position were diminished. He had his own father swear him in while he was visiting them after he found out that Harding had died. He didn’t make it into a 4-day long event that the modern empire celebrations look like. He realized there was work to be done, and he was the one for the moment to do it. The Washington class made a big deal about it not being the Chief Justice doing the swearing-in, but Coolidge demonstrated his lack of concern for the apparatus and their hyperventilating by doing it anyway. His father was a notary public and a Justice of the Peace, and the job could be done by the most qualified man available, who happened to be his dad. No need to make it into something more dramatic. No need to create an Empire moment of pomp - just administer the oath and then get started. It was the perfect imagery and said what Coolidge thought of the Federal Government.

I like that Trump has moved this all inside and will have the whole thing wrapped up by 1 pm. The job needs to start immediately. A hundred years of government abuse doesn’t need a party; it needs a chainsaw.