Trump presidency represents a lot of ‘firsts’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/01/2017 (2645 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We think of presidents as different from us. And, in many ways, they are, starting with the confidence to gaze in the bathroom mirror and think, “I should be leader of the free world.”

The presidency is among America’s most exclusive clubs. Its members’ every decision, speech, interview and now tweet are reported around the globe. Unlike mere mortals generally confined to the dustbin of history, presidents are memorialized with monuments, presidential libraries, biographies, highways, airports, public schools, coffee mugs and possibly legal tender.

In this club, which remains singularly male, there are distinctions.

Millard Fillmore remains the sole Millard, possibly for eternity. Andrew Johnson was the first president to be impeached, though certainly not the last.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only president to be elected four times. Also, to marry a woman who shared the same surname.

John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president; Ronald Reagan, the first actor and also the first to have divorced; Barack Obama, the first African-American.

Even among firsts, the man who became the 45th president is unprecedented. As he assumes office, Donald Trump can boast more firsts than the men who presided before him:

 

• The first president to have never performed public service, either by holding public office or serving in the military.
• The first to be born and raised in Queens.
• The first to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, specifically its Wharton School. And to attend Fordham before transferring to Penn in his junior year.
• At age 70, the oldest man to be inaugurated president. (Ronald Reagan was 69.)
• The first president to build and reside at the top of a 58-storey skyscraper. And to develop hotels. And casinos. And golf courses. (However, he becomes one of multiple presidents who share an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the sport.)
• The first president to be the subject of a Comedy Central Roast.
• Among the nation’s richest presidents, and the first who is a billionaire.
• The first president to have not disclosed his tax returns during the campaign since the tradition began in 1976.
• The first to own an airliner. His, a Boeing 757, features more gold-plated features than Air Force One — gold-plated seat belts and bathroom fixtures, plus a family crest — though it is not larger, as Trump has claimed.
• The first president to really love Twitter, unleashing more than 34,000 tweets — twice as many as his White House predecessor — with no signs of stopping.
• The first president to have hosted a reality show.
• And the first to still hold the title of executive producer of one.
• The first president to marry three times and divorce twice. (He will not be the first president with a foreign-born first lady; John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, was born in London. But Trump will be the first in almost two centuries. (He will not be the first to be married to a former model. Betty Ford also modelled. However, he will be the first to be married to a former model who posed topless.)
• The first president to author or co-author a veritable library of motivational books — more than a dozen — before taking the oath of office.
• Also, the first president to be a brand. The first to have bottled water bearing his name. And steaks. And a clothing line. And buildings.
• The first president to have hosted Saturday Night Live. (He did it twice.) Or to have made myriad television and film appearances, including on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Jeffersons, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, The Nanny, Sex and the City, WWE Raw and WrestleMania, virtually all of them in his favoured role, “Himself.”
• The first president to appear on Howard Stern’s radio program. Repeatedly. And brag about his sex life and discuss women’s appearances. (In all likelihood, he will not be the first president to use vulgar language while discussing women. He will be the first to be recorded using such language, have it widely reported, and still be elected.)
• The first president to have owned beauty pageants.
• The first to reside in a three-storey Fifth Avenue penthouse inspired by the style of Louis XIV, with ornate marble columns and flourishes of 24-karat gold.
• The first president to have been the focus of a Justice Department discrimination investigation and civil suit.
• The first to have an eponymous “university,” which was more of a real-estate-seminar program than an institution of higher education. (Jefferson founded the University of Virginia but did not name it for himself. George Washington allowed the use of his moniker to rename a college on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.)
• The first president to have so many items for sale named after himself, from shirts to fragrance to vodka. (Trump, like many presidents before him, does not drink alcohol.)
• The first to have his companies file for bankruptcy six times.
• The first Donald.

 

— The Washington Post