It seems like everyone is waiting in anticipation of the presidential election results after three days of refreshing Twitter and Google for the latest information. As of Friday morning, the Decision Desk HQ projected that Joe Biden had won enough electoral college votes to be named the president-elect. As for the rest, we are still waiting for The Final Countdown.
Biden’s win will be historic for a lot of reasons: He will be the oldest elected president in U.S. history at 78-years-old on inauguration day; his running mate Kamala Harris will be the first woman, as well as the first Black and South Asian American, vice president; and Biden will be the 10th person to unseat a sitting president after just one term. That’s right, President Donald Trump will be joining just 9 other presidents who lost their reelection campaigns — and he’s not happy about it.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
It would seem there’s also something monumental about Trump’s losing campaign, like the fact that he is the only president ever to lose the popular vote twice, or that he is the first president ever to lose a reelection after being impeached. But luckily for Trump, he can now use one of his favorite insults to describe himself: Loser. Sad!
So who else is Trump joining as a one-term president after a reelection loss? Well, John Adams was the first one-term president, as well as the second ever president of the United States. He lost reelection to Thomas Jefferson in 1801. Later, John Quincy Adams would lose his reelection as the 6th U.S. president in 1829 to Andrew Jackson. Quincy Adams lost due to accusations of “corruption and public plunder” from his opponents. Trump will also be joining Martin Van Buren, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover, who lost as a result of the stock market crash in 1933.
In more recent history, Trump will join the ghosts of presidents past, which include Gerald Ford, who lost his reelection in 1977 to President Jimmy Carter after he pardoned President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Ford also faced blame for failing to revive the economy. Unfortunately, Carter would later lose his own reelection bid to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1981. The Iran hostage crisis — when 52 Americans were held for 444 days — did not bode well for his presidency. Iran released all 52 hostages the day Carter left office.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
And that leaves us with George H.W. Bush — the most recent one-term president (until now) — who lost his reelection campaign in 1993 to Bill Clinton. Bush lost support for his domestic policies, “from a faltering economy, rising violence in inner cities, and continued high deficit spending,” his White House biography states.
But Trump isn’t going down without a very misguided fight. The president is still claiming there are missing ballots and illegal votes being counted. In a Twitter tantrum on Friday, Trump pointed again to the so-called “Radical Left Dems” as the real threat to democracy, and is even blaming the social media giant, Twitter for censoring his lies.
Unfortunately for Trump, the United States democracy doesn't function like a game show, and just as he touts that all lives matter, so do all votes.