Your Weekend Message From The Master

(Editor’s note: Charles Pierce writes daily at The Esquire Politics Blog at Esquire.com. He is an award-winning writer and author, most recently Idiot America. Every weekend, he sends out a weekly newsletter to subscribers, of which, I am one. From now through the election, I will post his weekend musings on here)

July 7, 2024.

On July 1, 1893, a certain Commodore Elias Benedict prepared his yacht, the Oneida, for an unusual mission out on Chesapeake Bay. The yacht’s saloon was repurposed as a surgical suite. A team of six was recruited to perform the surgery, including a dentist named Ferdinand Hasbrouk, who would serve as the anesthesiologist. The patient, a rather obese man, 56 years of age, was suffering from a carcinoma of the mouth.

The patient was named Steven Grover Cleveland, and he was the 24th president of the United States, having already been the 22nd president of the United States, guaranteeing him a place in every trivia contest until the end of time. The operation was performed under maximum security. From the Health Sciences Library of the University of Arizona.

However, there were political considerations. A nationwide depression had just gotten underway and in the name of strengthening the economy, the president was leading a movement to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and uphold the gold standard. In August, the president had to address Congress and thus, he had to be able to recover from the surgery’s effects by that time. It was already late June. Furthermore, the president was concerned that reports of his condition could prove even more unsettling, so the surgery would have to be done in secret.

The economy was sinking into the bust cycle of the boom and bust financial system of the age. (Today, we know it as Project 2025, section 4.) The Panic of 1893 had struck in February, and it would last for the next four years. In addition, it was gradually coming to light that Chester Arthur, Cleveland’s predecessor the first time around, had been debilitated by Bright’s disease throughout his term of office. Arthur, in fact, was already dead. Cleveland’s political concerns were well-taken, but he never was the same after the surgery.

Twenty-six years later, in the middle of a barnstorming railroad trip aimed at raising support for the new world he wanted to build, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado, and then collapsed entirely six weeks later with a stroke…