This year, as the United States marks 250 years of independence, it is natural to look back and measure the America of 1776 against the country today. So much has changed: morals and politics, economics and demography, fashion and cuisine, literature and the arts. The presidency itself has run through forty-six occupants; forty-five white men and a Barack Obama. Which raises a question: have presidents changed as much as everything else over two and a half centuries? How does the current occupant of the office compare to the very first one?
Few pairings could be more different than George Washington and Donald Trump. Washington was discreet, reserved, and courteous. He avoided show, ostentation, and self-promotion of every kind; the Father of the Country was, in a sense, uncomplaining, in a way the current officeholder is not. Trump, by contrast, traffics in nonstop bragging and self-advertisement, a style that would have struck Washington as alien and directly opposed to how a public servant ought to behave. It is worth revisiting the life of the man who refused to be king now that the country has a leader who fancies himself one. Signing a memorandum recently, Trump remarked that “we rule by common sense, to a large extent.” The word is ‘govern’, not ‘rule’, a small slip that says a great deal. Washington was beloved for giving away power he could have kept. Trump is criticised by many for reaching for power he was never granted. Washington was methodical and judicious, often consulting the Senate more than it wanted to be consulted. Trump is driven by impulse, absorbing legislative authority over tariffs and matters of war. Washington deliberately stayed out of congressional elections; Trump involves himself in primaries to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. Washington’s tastes were modest, visible in the refined but unflashy furnishings of Mount Vernon. Trump’s instincts run the opposite way, reflected in gilded additions to the West Wing and a planned ballroom that would overshadow a White House originally designed to contrast with the palaces of Europe. One man was famous for never telling a lie. The other is known for rarely stopping. Washington’s presidency was free of even the faintest scandal. He was reluctant to accept gifts, fearing they might be read as bribery. Trump, by comparison, has made a habit of transactional dealing, accepting the use of a foreign government’s luxury aircraft, complete with a private library and massage chairs, which he intends to keep. Asked how he could justify taking such a gift given constitutional concerns about foreign emoluments, he replied breezily that only “a stupid person” would turn down a free plane. He has also profited from cryptocurrency ventures with little to restrain him beyond his own sense of shame, a restraint that has not proven especially strong.
Americans entrusted Washington with enormous power precisely because he never appeared to be grasping for it. He acted out of duty, and if anything felt burdened by the authority he held; over eight years of revolutionary war, he returned home to Mount Vernon only three times. The deeper worry now is that Americans might forget who they are as a people, because democracy depends not just on institutions, but on customs that must be practised and renewed. Those customs trace back to Washington, who set the standard that a president should be gracious, dignified, courteous, humble, and sincere, carrying a natural gravitas that seems essential to the office. On March 4, 1797, Washington did something that placed him above Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and every conqueror or crowned head of Europe: he gave up power voluntarily. Most Americans hoped he would stay president for life. Instead, he went home to his farm, choosing to establish precedent over personal advantage. No man, he believed, is bigger than the country; the office outranks whoever occupies it. When Trump visited Mount Vernon with French President Emmanuel Macron, he reportedly suggested that Washington, “if he was smart,” would have put his own name on the estate, because, in his words, “you have got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.” There is real irony in the builder of Trump Tower offering marketing advice to the father of the country. The greater irony is that 220 years after his death, Washington’s name endures everywhere precisely because he resisted the urge to brand everything he touched. Washington was neither modest in ego nor short on wealth; combining inheritance, his wife’s fortune, and shrewd land purchases, he was likely the richest American of his era, proportionally wealthier than the current president. Yet almost no one remembers him for that; he is remembered for judgment and propriety, for placing the national interest above his own. Washington understood that institutions outlive individuals, a notion far from obvious in his time, and that power and esteem could be gained by not seeking them. After leading the army to victory, his first move was retirement to Mount Vernon, even as many urged him to become the new nation’s monarch. The tradition that even the most revered former officials must step back and stand behind their successors, mere guests in the house of power, is largely his creation, as is the broader habit of sharing authority with Congress and the courts. These norms now feel inevitable, like natural law, pillars of the American system that even a presidency as boundary-testing as Trump’s has not fully knocked down. King George III grasped the power of the precedent Washington was setting. Told that Washington planned simply to return to his farm, the king is said to have remarked that if he did, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”
More than two centuries later, America is shaped by forces Washington never imagined: mass media, social platforms, an ethos that conflates fame with success and money with virtue, producing a leader who built his brand by stamping his name on every building and product he could manage. It is hard to picture a sensibility further from the young man who, inheriting a family plantation in 1761, kept the name his half-brother had given it, Mount Vernon, honouring a former commanding officer rather than attaching his own. And there, finally, is the whole of the distance between them, distilled into a single choice made at the start of one life and echoed, in its inversion, across the length of the other. One man let a name fade into the land so that a country might endure. The other stakes his endurance on making sure his name never fades from anything at all. History does not run on flattery or gold leaf; it runs on precedent, and Washington set the only one that has ever mattered: that power, once handed back, is what makes a nation immortal, while power merely hoarded only makes a man forgettable. Two hundred and fifty years on, that is the test every president is still quietly measured against. Not one has failed it as visibly as the one measuring himself against it now.
The writer is a seasoned professional and a columnist. She can be reached at syedasalmatahir [email protected]