When History Rhymes

A once-defeated president is headed back to the White House.He’s a populist New Yorker who won a popular-vote plurality and scored an Electoral College landslide.

He flipped states he lost four years earlier and gave his party full control of Washington.The race scrambled political allegiances, with some voters splitting their tickets.

Tariffs were a key issue.That paragraph describes the 2024 election.It also describes 1892, the only other time that an American president has won a second, nonconsecutive term.

That year, Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, defeated President Benjamin Harrison, the Republican who had beaten him.Today’s newsletter looks at The Times’s coverage of that particular moment 132 years ago — and its surprising echoes in Donald Trump’s return today.Déjà vu“President Once Again,” said The Times’s front-page headline about Cleveland’s inauguration.“The people made a mistake in not electing Mr.

Cleveland in 1888, and they have been confronted with evidence of this mistake for the last four years,” one reader wrote in a letter to the editor.Before Cleveland’s inauguration, stories speculating about who might fill his second administration filled the paper.As with Trump, some appointees were loyalists.

The Times described Cleveland’s postmaster general and secretary of war as “unwaveringly faithful to the aims that Mr.Cleveland himself has pursued.” His choice for interior secretary had stuck with Cleveland even as other Democrats opposed his third presidential bid.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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