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Presidents are not normally ironic, except in some details sometimes. They have their good and bad, their strong and weak, but irony isn't that common.
For example, JFK promised progress and vigor, and that's pretty much what he did. His most famous book, "Profiles in Courage" had his critics saying 'we need less profile, more courage', but it wasn't to the point of being ironic really.
Pick a president - FDR's name for his policies was 'the New Deal', and that is a fair description; it wasn't ironic. Obama's was 'hope and change', and while many felt those were disappointingly small, the words weren't ironic.
But trump is the most ironic in history. His core message was (the stolen) "Make America Great Again" - when he did the opposite, and the thing to do to ACTUALLY make America great again, was to keep him out of office.
As his time in office ends, the name for his efforts to overturn the election is "Stop the Steal" - completely ironic since stopping the steal means stopping his attempt to steal the election. The guy is walking irony. The guy portrayed himself as a top businessman, when he was losing more money than anyone else in the US.
The previous holder of the title, now a distant second, was Nixon, with his "Law and Order" theme for his mob-funded, criminal administration. A candidate for third would be Reagan, between his 'never negotiate with terrorists' as he did Iran-Contra, his calling the Contra terrorists 'freedom fighters' and 'the moral equivalent of our founding fathers', and his saying he was so anti-debt as he put the country on the road to massive debt ever since.
That's really it for presidents even close I can think of. Woodrow Wilson might get a nod for his running on a promise to keep the US out of the 'Great War'.
If we expanded it internationally, we could find more examples, such as Neville Chamberlein famous for "Peace in our time", or Hitler's 'Thousand year Reich'.
For example, JFK promised progress and vigor, and that's pretty much what he did. His most famous book, "Profiles in Courage" had his critics saying 'we need less profile, more courage', but it wasn't to the point of being ironic really.
Pick a president - FDR's name for his policies was 'the New Deal', and that is a fair description; it wasn't ironic. Obama's was 'hope and change', and while many felt those were disappointingly small, the words weren't ironic.
But trump is the most ironic in history. His core message was (the stolen) "Make America Great Again" - when he did the opposite, and the thing to do to ACTUALLY make America great again, was to keep him out of office.
As his time in office ends, the name for his efforts to overturn the election is "Stop the Steal" - completely ironic since stopping the steal means stopping his attempt to steal the election. The guy is walking irony. The guy portrayed himself as a top businessman, when he was losing more money than anyone else in the US.
The previous holder of the title, now a distant second, was Nixon, with his "Law and Order" theme for his mob-funded, criminal administration. A candidate for third would be Reagan, between his 'never negotiate with terrorists' as he did Iran-Contra, his calling the Contra terrorists 'freedom fighters' and 'the moral equivalent of our founding fathers', and his saying he was so anti-debt as he put the country on the road to massive debt ever since.
That's really it for presidents even close I can think of. Woodrow Wilson might get a nod for his running on a promise to keep the US out of the 'Great War'.
If we expanded it internationally, we could find more examples, such as Neville Chamberlein famous for "Peace in our time", or Hitler's 'Thousand year Reich'.