Former presidents don’t criticize their successors in public.
Or do they?
Former Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have all criticized President Donald Trump in latest months.
In April 2025, Obama, for instance, spoke concerning the significance of preserving the worldwide order, that means the system of guidelines, norms and establishments that have been active since World War II. He stated: “And this is a vital second, as a result of within the final two months, now we have seen a U.S. authorities actively attempt to destroy that order and discredit it. And the pondering, I collect, is that by some means, since we’re the strongest, we’re going to be higher off if we are able to simply bully individuals into doing no matter we would like.”
Biden additionally provided his personal adverse feedback on April 15: “In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has accomplished a lot injury,” he said in his first public remarks since leaving workplace.
Some commentators have known as these former presidents’ remarks “unprecedented.”
Many Individuals are accustomed to former presidents not talking about – not to mention criticizing – the present president.
As a scholar of the presidency, I do know that almost all presidents keep quiet about their successors, no matter what the present president does or says. They do that to keep away from undermining each their very own reputations in addition to the soundness of the presidency itself.
However I’m additionally struck by the truth that this custom is just not as entrenched as former presidents may declare or as many Individuals consider.
Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images
Presidents who bucked the norm
President George Washington established the precedent that presidents retire after two phrases and keep away from public assertion. John Quincy Adams, the sixth U.S. president, established a unique mannequin.
After Adams misplaced his bid for reelection in 1828 to Andrew Jackson, he served in the House of Representatives from 1831 through 1848. Congress is an uncommon perch for a former president, nevertheless it’s a spot the place criticizing sitting presidents and their insurance policies is a part of the job. Adams had loads of criticism there for his successors, together with Jackson and James Okay. Polk.
Almost half a century later, President Teddy Roosevelt was disenchanted that his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, did not stay as much as Roosevelt’s imaginative and prescient of reform. Roosevelt went from criticizing Taft privately in political circles to campaigning against him publicly in 1912, aiming to win a nonconsecutive second time period. Democrat Woodrow Wilson ultimately won that election, beating out Taft and Roosevelt.
Richard Nixon, who, in 1974, turned the one president to resign from office, wrote a series of books in the 1980s and 1990s that sought to redeem his personal sullied picture by casting himself as a visionary statesman. Nixon’s books additionally included loads of unsolicited recommendation – and implicit criticism – for Democratic and Republican presidents alike.
Earlier than turning into the beloved elder statesman of the previous presidents membership in 1980, Jimmy Carter earned the ire of his successors for his outspokenness. He said that President Ronald Reagan’s administration was an “aberration on the political scene” and stated that one in all Clinton’s political pardons was “disgraceful.”
Excluding Roosevelt, these former presidents who criticized their successors all felt that they had one thing to show. Anxious to redeem their legacies, they didn’t retire quietly.
A wholesome foray into retirement
So why don’t everyone knows these tales, and as an alternative consider that previous presidents merely preserve their mouths shut?
Individuals have lengthy handled presidential retirement as an emblem of a wholesome democracy. And that story of retirement emphasizes how former presidents typically go away politics behind them.
The trajectory of presidents discovering peace and contentment in retirement, surrounded by family and friends, is an interesting manner for presidential biographers to finish a narrative. These tales have included narratives about Harry Truman taking a cross-country road trip solely months after leaving the White Home in 1953, and George W. Bush taking up painting.
In actuality, former presidents have led complex lives of happiness and loss, withdrawal and engagement. The vitality and ambition that introduced them to the White Home typically make retirement tough. And, over the lengthy historical past of the presidency, former presidents have develop into more and more public figures.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A shifting position
One other essential issue within the rising prominence of former presidents is how their roles have not too long ago modified.
Starting within the Nineties, former presidents and first girls tried to publicly present friendship and settlement with their counterparts.
George H.W. Bush and Clinton, for instance, teamed as much as increase cash for catastrophe reduction after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in South and Southeast Asia. In 2017, Bush’s son George W. Bush, himself a former president by that point, called Clinton his “brother with a different mother.”
Former first girl Michelle Obama and Barack Obama have publicly thanked George W. Bush and Laura Bush for helping their family alter to life within the White Home. Michelle Obama has additionally develop into recognized for her private friendship with George W. Bush.
And as medical advances enabled former presidents to stay longer than ever, the relationships inside a rising former presidents club turned the topic of books, films and tv segments.
All of these stories had the same message – that each one presidents are dedicated to their nation. Likewise, the amiable relationship between former and sitting presidents reveals that if occasion leaders may overcome partisanship within the identify of unity and friendship, so too may different Individuals.
In a outstanding second, for instance, three presidents from two totally different events – Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama – got here collectively for a video before Biden’s 2021 inauguration to name for unity in a second of disaster.
Following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, they used their connection as presidents to inform a nationwide story. As Bush stated, “Effectively, I believe the truth that the three of us are standing right here speaking a couple of peaceable switch of energy speaks to the institutional integrity of our nation.”
“America’s a beneficiant nation, individuals of nice hearts. All three of us had been fortunate to be the president of this nation,” Bush continued.
The Republican former president regarded on the Democrats on both facet of him and smiled.
A brand new type of presidential relations
Whereas friendships between presidents turned extra widespread within the Nineties and 2000s, Clinton and particularly Trump had been doing one thing totally different by the 2016 election.
In 2016, Clinton turned an energetic partisan in help of his spouse, Hillary Clinton, throughout her unsuccessful bid for president.
Each Clintons remained public critics of Trump lengthy after he assumed workplace in 2017.
For his half, Trump as a politician after which president instantly dismissed the notion of friendship along with his predecessors and former opponents. He was fast to condemn Hillary Clinton – and especially Obama – within the early years of his first presidency.
No sooner did Trump lose the 2020 election than he was heaping public scorn on Biden with an energy that only increased after Trump entered the 2024 race.
Trump’s criticism of Biden did not stop after his 2024 victory, with the White Home issuing statements like a pledge “to turn back the economic plague unleashed by the Biden Administration.”
Trump has escalated assaults on different presidents. However he was not the primary to criticize his successors or predecessors.
