The President Trump Is Pushing Aside
Only one historic site bears the name of America’s 22nd and 24th president—and it’s no Monticello.
The Grover Cleveland Presidential Library and Museum occupies a one-story building in Caldwell, New Jersey, behind the house where its namesake spent the first few years of his life. The museum is the size of a small living room. A Dunkin’ sits across the street.
The site befits Cleveland’s legacy. He was a large man but not larger than life; his two terms in the White House were most remarkable for the four years that separated them.
Until November 5, Cleveland held the distinction of being the only U.S. president to regain the office after voters turned him out: He won the White House in 1884, lost his reelection bid in 1888, and then won again in 1892. Donald Trump matched Cleveland’s achievement by winning last year’s presidential election, robbing him of his exclusive claim to history but also renewing interest in a president whom time has largely forgotten. The two men share little else in common. Cleveland curtailed government corruption, adhered to a restrictive view of presidential authority, and opposed expansionism; Trump flouts ethical norms left and right, chafes at limits to his power, and wants to buy Greenland. Yet their new bond could reshape Cleveland’s legacy.
A grandson of the former president, George Cleveland, has been fielding calls from reporters and history buffs for months. “Anything that shines a light on a dimmer part of history is a good thing,” he told me. “It’s a Grover Cleveland renaissance!” joked Louis Picone, a historian who sits on the board of the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Memorial Association.
One rainy evening last month, the association gathered in Caldwell—a small town about 20 miles west of New York City—for its annual meeting. The event doubled as a ribbon-cutting for a newly renovated room in the museum that the group is trying to expand. At the moment, the exhibit isn’t much: some photographs, a desk, a chair Cleveland used in the White House.
The event drew a couple dozen people, who listened to Picone deliver a talk on “extraordinary” presidential elections. But he didn’t discuss any of the past three, which weren’t exactly ordinary. Picone mentioned Trump only glancingly and ignored his new connection to Cleveland.
[From the March 1897 issue: Mr. Cleveland as president]
Indeed, Trump is a touchy topic for the keepers of the Cleveland flame, not all of whom are happy to see their guy joined forever in history alongside the 45th and soon-to-be-47th president of the United States. Paul Maloney, the association’s president, politely declined to answer when I asked him how he felt about Cleveland losing his unique distinction. “We have a political figure that I’m trying to keep the politics out of. I know how odd that is,” Maloney told me. “I don’t want anyone to infer any point of view that our organization might have.”
The group’s vice president, Bunny Jenkins, wasn’t as diplomatic: “It had to be Trump?!”
Besides their comeback connection, Cleveland and Trump are about as different from each other as any two presidents. Trump was born into New York wealth; Cleveland was a minister’s son who helped provide for his family after his father’s early death. He was a hard worker and, at times, a hard drinker; Trump abstains from both long hours and alcohol.
Both Cleveland and Trump campaigned as anti-corruption populists, but Cleveland followed through on his commitment to clean government. (His dedication was literal at times: As mayor of Buffalo, New York, he helped construct a modern sewer system for the foul-smelling city.) A Democratic reformer, Cleveland fought Tammany Hall as governor of New York. After he won the presidency in 1884, he insisted on paying his own train fare to Washington, according to a 2022 biography by Troy Senik. He once refused to accept a dog that a supporter sent him as a gift, deeming it inappropriate.
As president, Cleveland developed such a reputation for public integrity that he earned the nickname “Grover the Good.” He curbed the spoils and patronage system that pervaded politics at the time—and that Trump has begun to re-create.
Whereas Trump has repeatedly stretched the bounds of presidential power, Cleveland respected them. He interpreted the president’s constitutional responsibilities narrowly and did not try to whip votes for his agenda in Congress. But within his authority, Cleveland acted aggressively: He vetoed 414 bills during his first term, more than all 21 of his predecessors combined.
Few of the political controversies that Cleveland confronted as president are relevant anymore; the pensions of Civil War veterans and the gold standard were major flashpoints in the late 19th century. But one major fiscal debate has lingered—tariffs—and he and Trump took opposite sides. Cleveland pushed for lower tariffs even though they were popular, a stance that likely cost him his first attempt at winning a second term.
Despite his reputation for good governance, President Cleveland had significant flaws, including ones that much of his 19th-century electorate would have overlooked. He opposed women’s suffrage, and he made virtually no effort to protect Black people in the South from the terror and disenfranchisement of Jim Crow.
Accusations of misconduct in his personal life nearly derailed his first bid for the presidency. A Buffalo newspaper reported that he had fathered a child out of wedlock years earlier with a widow named Maria Halpin. The story alleged that Cleveland hired detectives to abduct Halpin, take the baby, and force Halpin into a mental institution. A few months later, and just before Election Day, the allegations became far worse. According to Senik, Halpin signed an affidavit attesting that Cleveland had “accomplished my ruin by the use of force and violence and without my consent.” Days later, however, Halpin denied her own charges and said she had signed the document without reading it. Cleveland won the election, and his opponents did not bring up the allegations in subsequent campaigns.
Whether or not he assaulted Halpin remains unclear. “The only two people who know are dead,” Picone told me. But historians, including Senik, have generally “given Grover Cleveland the benefit of the doubt” because of his reputation for honesty, Picone said. “It was so out of character,” he said of the allegations. Cleveland did acknowledge, though, that he had been romantically involved with Halpin, and he never denied that he was the father of her child. In 2020, the historian Susan Wise Bauer wrote in The Atlantic that Cleveland had managed to present himself as “the upstanding, hapless victim” in the whole affair, creating a new playbook for politicians accused of sexual misconduct.
The Republican Benjamin Harrison beat Cleveland in 1888 thanks in part to Cleveland’s aggressive push to lower tariffs, a position that united the GOP in opposition and divided his own party. “What is the use of being elected or reelected unless you stand for something?” he asked a staffer, according to Senik’s book. Cleveland took his ouster much more gracefully than Trump would more than a century later when he tried to overturn an election. Asked why he lost, Cleveland replied simply, “It was mainly because the other party had the most votes.” Whereas Trump skipped his opponent’s inauguration, Cleveland held an umbrella over Harrison’s head to protect him from the rain as he took the oath of office.
Trump began considering a comeback bid almost as soon as he left the White House in 2021. Cleveland did not, but his wife, Frances Cleveland, had an inkling he might return. As the Clevelands were preparing to leave the White House in early 1889, she told a staffer, “I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.” The confused aide asked when she planned on visiting. “We are coming back just four years from today,” she replied with a smile.
Trump was the first former president in decades to try to return to the White House. But comeback attempts were more common in the 19th century. Cleveland was motivated to run again in part because Harrison had abandoned fiscal constraint, presiding alongside what became known as “the Billion Dollar Congress.” Cleveland won a campaign that drew relatively little interest from the public, but the mark he set—a second, nonconsecutive presidential term—would stand for 132 years.
The Grover Cleveland Birthplace Memorial Association has been trying to build a proper library and museum for decades. New Jersey, which owns the historic site, has agreed to foot most of the bill, but red tape has caused delays. The Cleveland home is still undergoing refurbishments, and the museum won’t fully open to the public for at least another few months. “We’re breaking our backs trying to get this place open,” Dave Cowell, the association’s 86-year-old secretary of the board and former president, told me.
Over the past three decades, visitors to the Cleveland birthplace have grown from about 300 annually to roughly 9,000 a couple years ago, he said. That still pales in comparison to the expansive presidential museums dedicated to Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, which draw hundreds of thousands of people every year. But Cleveland is gaining on second-tier presidential rivals such as Martin Van Buren, America’s eighth president, whose historic site in New York receives about 13,000 people a year, Cowell said.
The association is planning a grand opening for the museum later this year. Trump will be invited, Picone said. But the group won’t try to leverage the Trump connection for extra attention. No exhibitions examining their new link in history are in the works. It’s just too soon, Paul Maloney told me. “Now, 10 years down the road? Fifteen years down the road? We might think differently.”
As Cleveland’s fans are quick to note, his presidential comeback is just one part of his legacy. His story has receded from national memory largely because his presidency did not coincide with momentous events; the country was not at war, and he did not die in office. Maloney, a retired social-studies teacher, admitted that Cleveland didn’t even make it into his U.S. history curriculum. But, Picone argued, “he was an excellent president.”
That Cleveland’s most famous achievement has now been matched, his grandson George conceded, is a loss. “Nothing lasts forever,” he told me. But he took solace in the thought that Trump’s return to the White House won’t completely erase his grandfather’s record comeback. After all, George said, “he’s still the first.”