Oct. 23, 2024, 6:54 p.m.
Most presidential campaigns play out a certain way. Most have a familiar look in which both nominees generally play by the rules and adhere to the norms established in the two centuries since the 1824 election, the first in which the popular vote mattered.
Not so in 2024, a campaign that has tossed out the rulebook, shattered the norms, and kept historians busy tabulating the many firsts. In this campaign, it is unusual to go even a week without something unprecedented, unusual, or just really, really strange. And it’s mostly because one candidate is unprecedented, unusual and, at times, really, really strange.
“Donald Trump is sui generis,” said Matt Dallek, professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, using a Latin phrase for "in a class by itself." A better translation may be one of the former president’s most often used terms: “Nobody has ever seen this before.”
When he won the presidency in 2016, Trump immediately was unique in American history—the first president with no experience either in government or the military in the 227 years since George Washington first assumed the office in 1789. But in the eight years since, he has recorded so many more firsts it is hard to list them all.
Some—like being the first president impeached twice, or the first former president to be indicted, or the president with the most Cabinet turnover ever—Trump never talks about. But they have a place on every historian’s recounting of his political career. At the top of that list is the violence he provoked at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“No major-party nominee has ever inspired an insurrection and a mob attack on an institution of democracy or tried to overturn an election and then went on to win his party’s nomination four years later,” said Dallek, an expert on political transformation and the evolution of the modern conservative movement.
Dallek blames social media for the tendency to gloss over just how different Trump is in this campaign. “He just floods the media ecosystem and people are overloaded,” he told National Journal. “So they tune out a lot of his more bizarre and unstable and unhinged rhetoric and behaviors. Yet it also crystallizes just how unprecedented and norm-shattering his third presidential campaign is.”
He added that most of the “norms and rules that Trump has broken are what we’ve come to expect in the post-Watergate era.” That includes his refusal to release tax or medical information. But just as unexpected are policy positions that hearken back to an America of a century ago that was more insular and less willing to shoulder world leadership.
That includes his demonization of immigrants, aversion to alliances, and embrace of protective tariffs against imports. “This roots Trump in American history” as historians “find intellectual, political, racial, and nativist lineages from which he springs,” Dallek said.
Some of these traits were first signaled by Trump in his earlier two campaigns. But he was persuaded to moderate some of the positions by aides who told him they would cost him reelection. Those advisers had no sway in the years since his 2020 defeat. He also used those years to grow bolder in his embrace of tariffs and authoritarians, even spending time talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Trump running this year is free of any shackles that restrained him in the earlier runs.
Here is National Journal’s tabulation of 20 firsts and one-of-a-kinds from this year’s campaign:
1. First time ever that a major-party nominee is a convicted felon and faces other felony counts. In May, Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York. He also faces charges in Georgia, and prosecutors are trying to reinstate charges in Florida.
2. First time ever a president who was impeached got his party’s nomination for another term. Andrew Johnson sought the Democratic nomination in 1868, just months after he was impeached. He failed to get the nomination.
3. The Trump-Biden June 28 debate was the earliest-ever general-election debate and the first to kill a candidacy. Before this year, the earliest debate between the Democratic and Republican nominees was 1976, when President Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter squared off in Philadelphia on Sept. 23.
4. First time ever a major-party nominee has been replaced so late in the process. President Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, and Vice President Kamala Harris announced her candidacy the same day, only 108 days before the election. Before this year, the latest an incumbent president announced the end of his candidacy was in 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson quit the race on March 31, 219 days before the election.
5. First time ever a candidate is older than 77. The oldest nominees before the 78-year-old Trump were Biden, 77, in 2020; Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bob Dole in 1996, both 73; and John McCain, 72, in 2008.
6. First time a Black woman is a major-party nominee. Harris is the third African American woman to run for a nomination, after Democrat Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and little-known Republican Angel Joy Chavis Rocker in 2000, and the first to get a party bid.
7. First time in 200 years a nominee refuses to accept an election outcome. Both Samuel Tilden in 1876 and Al Gore in 2000 conceded despite allegations the election had been stolen from them. But Trump continues to insist he won in 2020 despite getting 8 million votes fewer than Biden. In pressing the case, he is copying his hero, Andrew Jackson. In 1824, Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes. But what was called “the corrupt bargain” gave the presidency to John Quincy Adams when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. No loser since has refused to concede his defeat.
8. The first-ever nominee to call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution as part of an effort to overturn an election.
9. First time a nominee has been so casual and frequent in his use of profanity. Barack Obama got in trouble in 2012 when he told Rolling Stone that Republican Mitt Romney was “a bullshitter.” But no previous nominee has decided “shit” was an appropriate word to use in a speech while seated next to a Cardinal or a good way to describe his opponent in a speech. It’s a word Trump also favored when he was president, famously describing Haiti and Africa as “shithole countries” in 2018.
10. There have been eccentric or “weird” nominees in the past. But never has a campaign featured so much downright strange and coarse behavior. It certainly is the first time that a nominee publicly spoke in awe over another man's penis, converted a town-hall event into a chance to sway to his musical playlist, and explained away his rhetorical detours as “the weave.”
11. First time in 132 years a defeated president is renominated. The last time was in 1892, when Grover Cleveland ran against the man who had defeated him in 1888, Benjamin Harrison. This is even more unusual because, Dallek said, “It’s not as if Trump was extremely popular. ... He never cracked 50 percent approval.”
12. First time a nominee tries to monetize his candidacy for personal gain, diverting money to his lawyers and selling merchandise with the revenue going to his own pockets rather than to the campaign. Among the items Trump is selling during the campaign are $60 Bibles, $100,000 watches, $600 gold necklaces, $499 gold sneakers, $299 assassination-themed sneakers, $199 "Fight, Fight, Fight" Trump cologne, $100 Trump coins, $90 Christmas ornaments, swatches of the suit he wore for his Georgia mug shot, and Trump cryptocoins. By one report, he has made more than $12 million alone just by selling books and NFTs.
13. First time a nominee promises specific policies in exchange for $1 billion in donations. In April, Trump made the request of oil executives, promising them favorable regulatory and tax policy in return.
14. The first candidate since World War II to challenge the security and economic architecture created—largely with U.S. guidance—after the war. Trump questions the importance of the U.S. network of alliances, including NATO and the U.S.-South Korea security arrangements. He has repeatedly denounced the United Nations and the European Union, lumping all such arrangements under the hated rubric of “globalism.”
15. First nominee in almost a century to campaign in favor of high tariffs with Trump’s embrace even stronger than Herbert Hoover’s in the 1928 and 1932 campaigns. “We’d have to go back a century to find a time when tariffs were popular,” Dallek said.
16. The first candidate to praise anti-American authoritarian foreign leaders—including, according to a new report, a yearning for the loyalty demanded by Adolf Hitler. The Atlantic quoted Trump saying, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had." Dallek said, "I’m hard-pressed to find an analogy for Trump’s open courting of authoritarians. I don’t think we’ve seen the celebration of anti-democratic tendencies that Trump has engaged in before.”
17. The first candidate to have supported a violent effort to halt the operations of government, as Trump did on Jan. 6, 2021.
18. The first post-Watergate nominee to refuse to release detailed medical records.
19. The first election in which, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision on July 1, both nominees know they have broad immunity from prosecution if they misbehave in office.
20. The first Asian-American nominee in Harris, whose mother was Indian.
