This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 20th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When people pick parallels for the Trump administration, Nixon often floats to the top of the list but his

historian Anthony Comegna argues as he did nearly four years ago on this very

podcast that the better parallel is that of President John Tyler. He explains why.

Yeah, so almost four years ago. I think it was just a month or two into Trump's

presidency. You and I had this discussion on the podcast about Trumpism and Tylerism and you know people

have been throwing around all sorts of comparisons between Trump and other presidents 2016

and other elections and I thought clearly he's John

Tyler he's most like John Tyler I mean a couple things by that we talked about

this in the old episode and I thought it would be a good idea to revisit this

thesis now that the Trump presidency seems to have come to a close and you know I think a couple of the key things are his accidency and delusion in the desire to set up a continuing

movement based on a cult of personality.

That sounds bizarre because we barely remember John Tyler,

but a couple things here.

Like you said, he took over for Harrison

after he died a month into office,

many libertarians favorite president for that very reason.

But Tyler takes over and the first time that it ever happened, people called him his

accidentcy because he didn't even seem to really belong in the

wig party but at the time it was this weird agglomeration of anti-Jacked

Democrats and small-arm Republicans and old federalists and all sorts of things.

...