When crooks run for president
It’s been widely reported that Donald Trump could, in theory, continue to run for president even if he ends up in prison for any of the crimes he’s been charged with. The precedent generally mentioned, such as in this Politico article, is that of the famous union organizer, activist and perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate, Eugene Debs. When he ran for president in 1920, Debs was serving a 10-year prison sentence, having been convicted of sedition during Woodrow Wilson’s second term for merely delivering an anti-war speech (his sentence was commuted by Wilson’s successor, Warren Harding, after Debs had served more than 3 ½ years).
I’d say a more apt example is that of a presidential candidate who was an actual crook — an egomaniacal, fascistic, conspiracy-theory-spewing scoundrel with a cultish following: Lyndon LaRouche.
Calling himself a Democrat, LaRouche ran for president several times. Like Trump, LaRouche would rant like a dictator. His preferred mode of communication were 30-minute taped addresses on network television broadcasted to a mostly bewildered (I assume) audience — me included — who, flipping through the channels on lazy evenings during presidential election cycles, would occasionally happen upon this bizarre and vituperative charlatan performing one of his longwinded, conspiracy-laden monologues. I can still remember a line from one of those screeds:
“You want 50 nuclear startups every year? We can do it! Even if we have to melt down the neon signs on the whorehouses to do it!”
Whatever the hell that meant. That remark — that combination of wackiness and ugliness — to me epitomized the man, and I never forgot it. (Out of curiosity and to doublecheck my memory, I googled that scorching clause and, sure enough, a LaRouche website popped up.)
He was a millionaire madman, loopy to the tenth power, who thought he was a genius, and he somehow convinced his followers he was. His creepy organization had a network of amateur spies in the U.S. and abroad who gathered intelligence which he used to ingratiate himself with Reagan administration officials.
LaRouche ended up being sentenced in 1989 to a 15-year prison term for tax and mail fraud related to political fundraising scams.
Hm...fundraising scams? Does that remind you of a certain ex-president?
LaRouche died in 2019 — of old age, I presume (he was 96) — rather than by assassination, which he often preposterously claimed he was a target of.
Here's a vintage video of LaRouche being interviewed on “Good Morning, America” in 1986. I’ve transcribed just a little bit of the absurd dialogue below. Watch the segment if you want to see more nuttiness, including the assassination claim.
Hartman: Good morning, Mr. LaRouche.
LaRouche: Morning, David.
Hartman: Let’s start off with something Mr. LaRouche said recently on ABC’s Nightline. He told Ted Koppel, the host of the program, this about wanting to be president of the United States:
[video clip]
Koppel: You still want to be?
LaRouche: Well I don’t particularly want to be, I think I have to be, unless, unless somebody comes along who I say, OK, let him have it, he’s qualified.
…
Hartman: Why would you do a better job … than let’s say Gary Hart or Mario Cuomo or others in the Democratic Party who are mentioned as possible presidents.
LaRouche: I don’t know of anyone who’s indicated as a presidential candidate in the Democratic Party who has any competence whatsoever for dealing with any of these issues.
Hartman: Well, what are your credentials, if they don’t have credentials — on the surface of it they seem to have credentials and you don’t. What are yours?
LaRouche: Well, I’m an economist, I’m probably the best one living today, in terms of performance. I’ve dealt with foreign governments … when it comes to foreign agreements, I know how to get them. There are people in foreign governments who if I were president who would come to Washington and I guarantee you within a matter of 48 to 72 hours we’d have agreements that would change the world.
His boasts were laughable, but what’s no joke is that, as we’ve seen, the Republican Party would and did actually nominate a wacky, beyond-the-pale vile blowhard like this. And they would again.
Republican leaders and the GOP base have no problem with the notion of a presidential candidate running for their party’s nomination who incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, who is currently under indictment for a multitude of state and federal crimes and likely more to come, and who every day acts like a complete Looney Tune. As far as they’re concerned, he’s a serious candidate, he’s their frontrunner, and if he wins, he wins.
The DNC just says no
While the Constitution puts very few limits on who can legally serve as president, that doesn’t mean the parties can’t have their own standards for their standard bearer. There’s no law that says a party must entertain the candidacy of a person whose egregious views and behaviors are inimical to the party’s core beliefs and values.
Indeed, Democratic National Committee rules explicitly give the Chair authority to decide if a presidential candidate is a “bona fide” Democrat. And LaRouche provided a test case for this rule: in 1996, the DNC Chair notified state Democratic organizations that primary votes cast for LaRouche would not qualify for delegates to the Convention. The Chair wrote that LaRouche was not a bona fide Democrat because of his "beliefs which are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic, and otherwise utterly contrary to the fundamental beliefs...of the Democratic Party…." LaRouche sued; the DNC prevailed.
At the time of the DNC Chair’s decree, LaRouche was on parole and, since the year was divisible by four, he was once again running for president. In the ‘96 primaries, he captured enough votes to have sent a couple delegates to the Convention and to have had his name placed into nomination, had he been considered a bona fide Democrat. In the 2000 primaries, he won over 21% of the roughly 250,000 votes cast in Arkansas, which normally would have equated to several delegates.
Here’s Al Franken’s dead-on portrayal of Lyndon LaRouche, which aired in 1988. Again, as funny as this impersonation is, the humor here is tempered by the reality that nowadays a wackadoodle, violent, Lordy-there-are-tapes-and-more-tapes multiply-indicted presidential candidate can count on top-to-bottom support of one of this country’s major political parties.