For a generation, Americans have had a historically large number of ex-presidents around, a possible source of counsel from one of only 45 people who have exercised the broad powers conferred by Article II of the Constitution.

You might expect former presidents to supply elements of personal comity and institutional norms to current politics, and sometimes they do. Certainly, the few periods with no living former presidents have been times of stress when incumbents might have called on seasoned predecessors for advice.

But having a lot of ex-presidents around hasn’t always helped. The only period before the 1990s with five living former presidents was between March 1861 and January 1862, when Abraham Lincoln faced secession of the Confederate states. None were Lincoln voters, and none gave him much support.

Americans did not have five living ex-presidents again until Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, and we’ve had at least four except for 25 months in 2006-09.

Clinton, presumably aware of voters’ continued respect for the men he succeeded, seemed to carefully refrain from blaming them for his woes. George W. Bush, aware of his father’s respect for Clinton, behaved similarly. This was a stark contrast of the hostility and noncommunication between the onetime confreres but then rivals – Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

On the surface, that comity has continued. Five presidents, including the incoming and outgoing incumbents, attended the Trump inaugurations in 2017 and 2025. But none had endorsed him – not entirely surprising given his vitriolic attacks, going back to the 1980s, on the immigration and trade policies of both parties.

Barack Obama, taking office after the financial crisis of 2008 and the successful execution of the still-unopposed Iraq conflict he had long opposed, did not leave off his criticism of his immediate predecessor after his victory speech. Obama himself, nettled by repeated charges by Trump and others that he was born in Kenya, after finally releasing his long-form Hawaii birth certificate, days later launched a lengthy attack on Trump, seated in the audience, at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Some reporters believe that attack prompted Trump’s candidacy.

Then there is the fact, underlined by documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last week, that in December 2016, after Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, the intelligence community “prepared to produce an assessment per the President’s request” – italics added -“that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”

The norm in the past, observed by Bill Clinton in 2000, was for a president to accept the result, however disputed, and not to cast a pall of illegitimacy over his successor. Obama, at the least, failed to fulfill what was arguably his duty to prevent that from happening.

One might reply that Trump failed much more grievously to uphold that norm by challenging the result of the 2020 election and inspiring the pro-Trump crowd’s assault on the Capitol. I agreed at the time and agree today. “While Trump’s exact words to the crowd on the Ellipse didn’t constitute a criminal incitement,” I wrote then, “they were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility they’d provoke violence that any reasonable person could find impeachable.”

Reversing this spiral may turn out to be a task for the next generation. This has happened before. The five ex-presidents in 1993 were among the seven from the GI Generation (born 1908-24) who served over the preceding 32 years. The five presidents elected to serve the 36 years up to 2029 include three leading-edge baby boomers (all born in 1946), one late boomer (1961), and one pre-boomer (1942).

After electing 77- and 78-year-old candidates in 2020 and 2024, Americans are surely ready to choose someone from a later generation in 2028. Will that president, with several ex-presidents in their 80s plus one over 65, reverse the negative spiral?