“The President”

I have questions about “The President.”

This sounds like maybe I’m going to talk specifically about our present situation and current events (noteworthy as they are), but instead, I’m talking about this odd tendency we Americans have of calling our current and former living presidents The President.

Think about how odd this is. You don’t have a CEO step down from a prominent position and have them called “the CEO”, right?

There is one area I can think of where you can have two figureheads: the mother of a monarch is typically called The Queen, so you might have two The Queens at once, as was the case during the reign of Elizabeth II.

Okay, technically you’re supposed to refer only to the current president as The President, but listen to any news report and you’ll hear this same term applied to them all. The same thing is true for the Queen, by the way—technically, Elizabeth’s mother was called Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, but I’d swear I heard them calling her The Queen when I watched The Crown. I rest my case.

Back across the pond: even if it’s not “The President,” it’s still going to be President Biden, President Obama, President Bush, and so on. I get calling King Charles that title for the rest of his life—there is no end to his term, so he will remain “The King” all the way until the end.

Presidents, though?

Here, I have to turn my attention to Unforgiven, my favorite western. You actually need to watch this short clip to get the reference unless you’re like me and can already quote passages like this one:

Okay, it’s not just presidents. Judges, too, retain their title after their term has ended. So do Governors and Senators, though not Housefolken. We Americans sure love holding onto the majesty of a title, don’t we?

You can take the country out of an aristocracy, but apparently you can’t entirely take the aristocracy out of a country.