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Amazing.
Here are but two headlines from the last few days:
From Fox News:
Trump attacks DeSantis 4 times more than Biden, as 2024 race heats up
Trump has attacked Biden far less than DeSantis in recent days
Then there was this headlining editorial from the New York Post:
Trump can dish out — but his whole team whines when he’s slammed
There are more like these two, but they will suffice to ask the question.
Have any of the people writing this nonsense read American history? Are they up on the history of American presidential elections in both primaries and general elections? Apparently not.
Former President Trump is targeting his presumed primary opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And his detractors shriek as if they’d seen a mouse.
Memo to Trump critics: races for president have always — say again always — resulted in Candidate A and allies attacking Candidate B. And vice versa. But since this basic fact of American history is mystifyingly unknown or simply ignored by whining Never Trumpers, let’s hop in the time capsule and travel back through various presidential elections.
• 1800: This featured rivals President John Adams against one-time friend and now bitter rival Vice President Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson forces labeled Adams a “hermaphrodite” (someone who has both male and female reproductive organs). Adams’ side labeled Jefferson as an atheist and dangerous. Jefferson won. Two years into what would be his first term, Jefferson was accused in an opposition editorial of using one of his slaves, Sally Hemings by name, as his “concubine.” Six years earlier, the same paper, then allied with Jefferson, accused rival Alexander Hamilton of having an affair with a colleague’s wife.
• 1828: This was a showdown between the patrician President John Quincy Adams — son of the former president — and Gen. Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Over there at thought.com is this summary of that Adams-Jackson election showdown:
[B]y the time the votes were cast, both men would have wild stories circulated about their pasts, with lurid charges of murder, adultery, and procuring of women being plastered across the pages of partisan newspapers.
• 1844: This election featured Democrat James K. Polk versus the Whig Party’s Henry Clay. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz described this election between the two as follows:
In the South, Democrats played racist politics and smeared Clay as a dark-skin-loving abolitionist, while in the North, they defamed him as a debauched, dueling, gambling, womanizing, irreligious hypocrite whose reversal on the bank issue proved he had no principles. They also pitched their nominees to particular local followings, having Polk hint preposterously, in a letter to a Philadelphian, that he favored “reasonable” tariff protection for domestic manufactures, while they attacked the pious humanitarian Frelinghuysen as an anti-Catholic bigot and crypto-nativist enemy of the separation of church and state. To ensure the success of their southern strategy, the Democrats also muffled (incumbent president) John Tyler.
• 1884: This was a pitched battle between Republican former Secretary of State James Blaine and Democrat Gov.
