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The president who never got elected.
What does the 38th President of the United States have in common with the 1990 Baltimore Orioles? In addition to the time when a drunken Cal Ripken Jr. dressed up like a female clown and hit wiffle balls into the harbor, the 1990 Orioles actually own another claim to fame. In a game against the Oakland A’s that season, they won 2-0 despite never recording a hit.
In his postgame interview, first baseman Randy Milligan thanked former president Gerald Ford for the inspiration.
You see, much like the 1990 Baltimore Orioles stumbled their way to victory without getting a hit, Gerald Ford was elevated to the Oval Office despite never receiving a single vote. He was the first person (besides Joe Biden, if you ask Uncle Jack) to become president without winning an election.
“That’s kind of an odd comparison,” you might think.
And you’d be right. But you’re still here, so buckle up. We’re about to walk the very fine line between a plan of succession and a constitutional crisis. This is the story of Gerald Ford.
Ford’s rise to national prominence began at the University of Michigan. While playing linebacker on the football team, he discovered a mysterious pulse of energy in a vacant locker. It unveiled a wormhole to the future, through which Jim Harbaugh passed his stolen play calls across the boundaries of space and time. It was the NCAA’s first-ever cheating scandal, and one that forced Fordy Football to decline NFL offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers. But it wouldn’t be his final controversy.
After college, during a five-year stint in the Navy, our boy G-Money developed a bit of a nipple fetish. So when he decided to run for United States Congress in 1948, he’d earn votes by visiting farms all over Grand Rapids and offering to milk the cows. This strategy caused both sore hands and soaring poll numbers, with Ford winning his seat in a landslide and going on to have a 25-year career in the House.
While in Congress, Ford Focus expanded his cow milking service to include a wider range of species including goats, ducks, and pigs — currying enough political favor to ascend to House Minority Leader. He also served on the Warren Commission and was tasked with compiling a thorough biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. Ol’ Gerald Softhands was your classic overachiever/underthinker. His profile of Oswald was quite detailed, meandering on and on about LHO’s love of rotisserie chicken, Yahtzee, and his beloved stuffed animal, Cuddle Bunny.
After reading Ford’s verbose and seemingly irrelevant assessment, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson commented that, “Jerry is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time”. As Johnson entered his second term, the two men became bitter rivals. They frequently engaged in verbal sparring and bare chested arm wrestling matches in the Rose Garden.
Eventually, Brother Geraldo gained the upper-hand. Johnson’s poll numbers tanked as the Vietnam War dragged into a debacle and the CIA botched an assassination attempt on Ringo Starr before the release of Revolver. The Democrats would lose enough seats in the House to make Minority Leader Ford powerful enough to completely stall the entire Johnson agenda. Isn’t the filibuster an efficient way to govern?
Anyway, LBJ became so unpopular that he actually had to withdraw from the 1968 Presidential Election, where Richard Nixon would end up carrying 32 states on his way to the White House.
With the Republicans now controlling the executive branch, Jolly Jerry raised his own profile by cheerleading Nixon’s agenda from Congress and cashing in a bunch of lactation-based favors in order to move legislation through the House on behalf of the new president.
Spiro Agnew, who was serving as veep under Nixon, resigned from his position in October 1973 after investigators found that, while serving as the Governor of Maryland, he had colluded with disgraced State Rep. Clay Davis to accept bribes and kickbacks from contractors in exchange for government contracts. Unable to distance himself from the disreputable Barksdale Organization, Agnew pleaded no contest to a felony charge of tax evasion and resigned from the vice presidency.
Agnew’s resignation and the charges against him were a significant political scandal, coming at a time when the Nixon administration was already under fire due to the Watergate "situation". But all of this hullabaloo sure was convenient for our boy Model G. As one of Nixon’s most loyal supporters in Congress, Ford became the obvious choice to replace Agnew as vice president, which he did on December 6, 1973.
Ford then spent his 246-day vice presidency bidding on Lee Harvey Oswald’s Yahtzee scorecards on eBay, carefully overseeing the addition of a massive lactation pen to the vice president’s residence, and dodging questions about the even massiver scandal plaguing his boss. Before the final bales of hay could even be delivered to VPHQ, Nixon had to resign. And so, on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford took the oath of office and became president without even so much as campaigning for the role.
“That’s how you fuckin’ do it,” said Cal Ripken Jr.
“Amen,” said Donald Trump’s 2024 debate coach.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” proclaimed Ford during a televised speech immediately following his swearing in. He then rested his head on the Resolute Desk and slept soundly for 28 minutes, while NBC continued to broadcast live.
When he woke up, he pardoned Nixon.
“It's like letting a cow come back into the barn after she went and trampled the cornfield. You can't un-spill the milk, so there’s no sense freezing out a perfectly good specimen.” Ford argued that the country needed to heal and move past the scandal, much like a farmhand who knows when it’s time to move on to the next nipple. This decision, while practical in Ford's eyes, left many Americans feeling sour.
During an ominous thunderstorm on Halloween of 1975, Freaky Fordy held a seance in the Lincoln Bedroom. While muttering a strange incantation, he mixed eye of newt, toe of frog, and pube of Nixon in a cauldron. That night became known as the Halloween Massacre — where Ford shitcanned most of Nixon’s staff and conjured supernatural demons such as George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney to replace them. Spooky stuff, indeed.
Anyway, karma and/or incompetence awaited our boy during his first presidential campaign and/or reelection campaign in 1976. Two separate women tried to assassinate him on the campaign trail (one was a follower of Charles Manson). Both nearly shot Ford, but he saved them the trouble and shot himself... in the foot. That's because he completely bungled a televised debate against Jimmy Carter, audibly farting several times, yelling loudly about zeroing out his Large Straight, and claiming that the Soviet Union was a myth perpetrated by the Chinese.
The performance was so poor that it effectively cost Flatulent Ford the election. A few weeks later, the American people would elect Carter, a virtually-unknown farmer from Georgia, as president. It stung Ford to find out that Jimmy wasn’t even a dairy farmer. He’d have no idea how to properly milk a cow, and peanuts weren’t nearly as milky as Cousin Almond.
Gerald Ford died in 2006.