The report that President Trump is already alerting advisers that he’s thinking about running again in 2024 might, or might not, be, as Axios suggests, the “clearest indication yet that Trump understands he has lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.” It’s still a moment to reprise what history suggests are the long odds he would face in a quest for a non-consecutive presidential term.

Encore attempts by ousted White House incumbents, after all, have been rare. The first, by Jacksonian Democrat Martin Van Buren followed his loss, in 1840, to the Whig William Henry Harrison. Voters cashiered Van Buren for the depression after the Panic of 1837. They nicknamed him Martin Van Ruin. Unfair, perhaps, but probably no more so than blaming Mr. Trump for Covid.

Van Buren was initially the favorite for renomination in 1844. The Democrats, though, were annoyed by his opposition to annexing Texas and expanding westward. Van Buren was animated by his concerns over slavery. So the Democrats forsook the incumbent and nominated James Knox Polk, who had a fine term, won the Mexican war, and chose not to seek a second term.

So in 1848, Little Van, as Van Buren was also called, tried again for the nomination. Again the Democrats rebuffed him. So he ran as a spoiler on the ticket of Free Soil, where he garnered only 10% of the national vote but 26% in his home state of New York. That tipped the Empire State to the Whig Zachary Taylor, providing his margin of victory over Democrat Louis Cass.

Next came Republican Theodore Roosevelt. He wasn’t ousted from office. Rather, in 1904, while running for his first full term after the three and a half years following the 1901 assassination of William McKinley, TR impulsively pledged on the evening of his election that he would not seek re-election in 1908. So William Howard Taft ended up as president.

In 1912, though, the pledge no longer applied, and TR ran as a progressive under the flag of the Bull Moose. He managed to humiliate Taft, but placed second to the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Following Wilson’s narrow re-election over Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, Roosevelt was considered the favorite for the 1920 Republican nomination, when, on election day, he’d be 62.

Sadly, in January 1919, TR began to suffer breathing problems. His doctor saw him on the evening of the 5th. He then asked his servant, James Amos, to turn out the light. During the night, the conqueror of San Juan Hill and survivor of the Amazon, died in his sleep leaving the question of whether he could have won a non-consecutive term a matter of historical speculation.

It is the precedent of Grover Cleveland that is the most tantalizing chapter of the non-consecutives. Like President Trump, Cleveland narrowly won election and was narrowly defeated for reelection. In 1884, he launched his first campaign after being governor of New York. He defeated the “plumed knight,” Republican ex-Speaker of the House, James Blaine, with a campaign to drain the swamp.

Following twenty- four years of Republican administrations, Cleveland complained of “a vast army of officeholders” who were “long in power, rich in resources both in money and influence, but corrupt to the core.” Cleveland also promised tariff reduction and the gold standard. At the time, it was the Democrats who were seen by the northeastern establishment as the “deplorables.”

No sooner did Cleveland take office than he set out to, in the words of one scholar, “recast the role of president as party leader.” He focused on building a Democratic consensus on tariff reform, compelling 30 state party conventions to endorse reform legislation. He risked vetoing hundreds of bills, including for military pensions and Federal disaster relief.

Cleveland advocated limited government, viewing surplus tariff revenues as a slush fund for special interests. The Republican Senate blocked any reduction in import duties, though, and the tariff became the central issue in the 1888 campaign, leading to Cleveland’s defeat by Indiana’s Benjamin Harrison, who warned of economic mayhem should levies be reduced.

So how did Cleveland defy tradition and party leaders and win re-nomination in 1892? His personal popularity cemented his control of the Democratic party during the Harrison years. As one 1890 editorial noted “he constitutes party opinion, party caucuses, party conventions, party platforms, nay, even the party itself, all within the circumference of one capacious waistband!”

Hmmmm. A small government populist, Cleveland often defied the priorities of party leadership in favor of the common citizen. “If this,” he explained, “involves the surrender or postponement of private interests and the abandonment of local advantages, compensation will be found in the assurance that thus the common interest is subserved and the general welfare advanced.”

Such an attitude earned him the nickname of “the guardian president.” Plus, too, Harrison played into Cleveland’s hands, signing a major tariff increase authored by congressman and future president William McKinley. Harrison presided over increased Federal spending, earning the Republican-controlled legislature the moniker “The Billion Dollar Congress.”

So the Democrats re-captured the House in 1890 with a wide majority. McKinley lost his seat six years before he’d be elected president. Voters flocked to the platform Cleveland had consistently avowed since 1884. Yet not before the Republicans packed the Senate (in today’s parlance), forcing the admission of six new, low population Western states during Harrison’s term.

Hmmm. Their hope was to tilt the Senate and electoral college balance. Those states did provide a net total of 11 electoral votes in the 1892 election. In the event, though, they were not enough to overcome a Democratic restoration. With his Illinois running mate Adlai Stevenson (grandfather of Dwight Eisenhowers’s Democratic opponent) Cleveland won the only non-concurrent term.

“What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?” Cleveland asked. Those are words for Donald Trump to ponder as he contemplates his political future. While 76 million voters are happy to see him gone, his 71 million in 2020 are nothing at which to sneeze. If Mr. Trump targets 2024, can he maintain the consistency of messaging and policy that Cleveland displayed?

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Image: A Grover Cleveland $1,000 bill, redeemable in gold. From the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, via Wikipedia.

Mr. Atkinson, a contributing editor of the Sun, covers the 20th Century.