Presidential politics has a long history of insult, falsehood and electoral payoffs. But you'd think we'd be better than that now

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Slander, pander, weave and deceive. It sounds like a Hollywood law firm. But it’s how politics is conducted in the U.S. in 2024. Kamala Harris is slow, of low IQ, horrible, stupid, the worst vice-president ever (though how do you compare people whose main job is to go to faraway funerals?) and so on and so on, never-endingly, unquiet flows the bile.

U.S. politics has a history of being played rough. Lincoln was called a baboon — by his top general, no less, though in a letter to his wife. John Adams said George Washington — yes, George Washington — was “too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station,” though he wrote that in a letter to a colleague. (Note to younger readers: Letters were an early version of email, though harder for Russians to hack.) Presidents have written lots of not-nice things in letters. Adams referred to Alexander Hamilton, more than once, as “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson “a lily-livered skunk.”

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Not all insults have been private. In 1828, the Cincinnati Gazette ran a piece alleging Andrew Jackson’s mother was a “common prostitute” (I wonder: was “common” the worse insult........

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