Free How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country by Daniel O'Brien

absolutely nothing interesting or usable while a deadline looms over your head, then you’ll never truly understand frustration. That’s me. I did that. I read more about Millard Fillmore than any man should, and the only conclusion I’ve arrived at is that Millard “Not Even Cool Enough to Get a Nickname” Fillmore sucks and is boring and sucks.
    Plus, “Millard”? Come on; get a real name, you jerk.
    Few men can start with nothing, pick themselves up by their bootstraps, and proclaim proudly, “Someday, I’m going to be president on the off chance that the
real
president dies suddenly and I happen to be vice president at that time.”

    Millard Fillmore is such a man.
    It’s crazy, because his life story so closely mirrors Lincoln’s (both were born poor in log cabins, both were mostly self-taught, both were members of the Whig Party early on, both studied law, both eventually became president), except Fillmore didn’t do
any
of the cool or noble things that Lincoln did. He even publicly opposed Lincoln on slavery, because that’s high up on the list of things that assholes are supposed to do.
    No one wanted him to be president. He was only named vice president in the first place because he lived in New York, and the Whig Party wanted a Northeastern fancy boy to balance out Taylor, a rough Southern cowboy who was considered off-putting by Northern Whigs. That’s it. The Whigs needed someone to balance their ticket who was the opposite of a cowboy war hero, and boy did they find him.
    As soon as Taylor died and Fillmore took office,
the entire cabinet resigned
and his own party didn’t support him for reelection. He was mostly responsible for getting the Compromise of 1850 passed, which eased tensions between the northern free states and southern slave states. (Temporarily, obviously. We still Civil Warred about it.) The Compromise, while good for America, was incredibly divisive for Fillmore’s Whig Party. Some, like Lincoln, fled the party for the newly formed Republican Party, and some tried to form their own party while the Whig presence in the South just vanished completely. Whatever Whigs remained agreed on one thing: they did not want to endorse Fillmore as their nominee in the next election. Like Tyler before him, Fillmore was dropped by his party, but Fillmore’s Compromise did more damage than the Whigs could handle. The weakened and scattered party ran one more candidate, Winfield Scott, in the next election, and when he lost in a landslide to Democrat Franklin Pierce, the Whig Party died.
    No other president can say that they were singularly responsible for destroying a political party, so that’s something. It’s not interesting enough that I can write an entire chapter about it, so
go to hell, President Fillmore, you’re no help at all
.
    He helped open up trade with the Japanese, ending Japan’s isolationism. Is that badass? No? Okay. During the Civil War he formed a militia out of men over forty-five, but the only “action” they saw involved marching in parades. Never mind.
    Oh! There is one
kind
of cool story about Fillmore. After his presidency, he was offered an honorary Doctor of Civil Law by the University of Oxford, but he declined on the grounds that he had no formal or classical education, and therefore didn’t deserve the honor.The diploma was in Latin, and Fillmore maintained that “no man should accept a degree he cannot read.” That’s sort of respectable. But, before you go ahead and consider Fillmore a class act, please know that after his presidency he also formed the Know Nothing Party, a political party that was sort of okay but mostly racist, and that during his presidency he casually protected slavery. Because Fillmore wasn’t just a boring and bad president, he was a dick, but also not an INTERESTING enough dick to make this or any other essay about Millard Fillmore halfway readable because
goddammit Millard Fillmore, you are the worst
.
    His party believed him