President James Polk: Greater Than Trump
January 21, 2026
by William P. Meyers

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How do you measure greatness?

Our current President, Donald Trump, loves greatness, or bigness. He boasts he is the greatest, by many measures. But I will argue that James Polk was a far greater President of the United States. Most Americans know next to nothing about Polk, and he had his flaws, to be sure. But that is surprising if we consider how different (mainly smaller) America might be if Polk had lost the presidential election of 1844 (a very interesting year, numerologically).

James Knox Polk did not start off in one of America's richest or most powerful families, but neither did he start at the bottom. Slavery was still very real during his lifetime. Manufacturing was still secondary to agriculture. Strangely, some of the issues of the day are still issues in the Trump Era, like how high tariffs should be and how the U.S. money supply and Treasury should be handled. Real estate was very important to Polk, though it did not play the role it would for Donald.

The Polk family had immigrated in the late 1600s, so they were very well established when he was born in 1795 to the recently independent United States of America. He was born in North Carolina, where his father had land and a few slaves. The family moved to Tennessee, a frontier states, in 1803, where his father became a judge and mixed with the likes of Andrew Jackson, David Crockett, and Samuel Houston. But James was sickly, a problem that haunted his life, but which also made him a man very determined to succeed.

James went to college, which few young people did in that era. He then studied law under an attorney, became clerk to the Senate of Tennessee, and then was admitted to the bar in 1820. Politically he was a Jeffersonian, or anti-Federalist. Like many in that camp he would join the Democratic Party when it was formed by General Jackson. He was an astute legislator and slowly worked his way up the ranks, first winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1824. He supported Andrew Jackson and the new Democratic Party, though John Quincy Adams had won the Presidency. Eventually he worked his way up to become Speaker of the House in 1835.

Polk's politics were standard for a southerner and Democrat. He was in favor of slavery, low tariffs, and state banks, as opposed to the Bank of the United States.

In 1839 Polk ran for, and won, the office of Governor of Tennessee. But then he lost races for the office twice, in 1841 and 1843. That might have ended his political career, yet he sought nomination to be Vice President of the United States on the Democratic Party ticket. Due to the convoluted politics of the times, in one of the strangest political conventions in U.S. history, instead he became the nominees for President. That was in 1844. His opponent was the Whig Party candidate, Henry Clay. James Polk won the presidency with 49.5% of the electoral vote, but 170 of the 275 electoral college votes.

What made Polk arguably the greatest (pre-Trump) President of the United States was his expansion of U.S. territory. At the time of his election Florida was still a territory, Texas was an independent republic, and the states furthest to the west were Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. U.S. territory did run further to the west, but the Oregon territory was jointly administered with the British Empire, while Mexico had nominal control of what are now California, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Texas had been a bone of contention, not just with Mexico, but with the British Empire and potentially the French Empire. Since it would be a slave state, there was opposition to annexing it from abolitionists. Complex negotiations took place for over a year. In the last days of the Tyler presidency, Polk (and allies) maneuvered Congress to proceed with a treaty admitting Texas.

James Polk was an expansionist, not an unusual position in his era, but he was more forceful about it than other politicians. Mexico had almost no effective governance of its northern regions. Its leaders in what would become the modern Mexico were also fighting among themselves. Polk's main question was exactly how much of Mexico to take, and how much to use force and how much to use a bribe (payment to the indebted Mexican government for the land annexed).

The Mexican-American War began in April 1846. Though Mexico's military defeat came quickly, the war did not end until a treaty was signed on February 2, 2028.

Meanwhile Polk negotiated a treaty with the British Empire splitting up the northwest territories. The U.S. got what is now Washington State and Oregon. The British got Vancouver Island and British Columbia.

Adding it all up:

Texas: 268,597 square miles

New Mexico: 121,298 square miles

Arizona: 113,998 square miles

Nevada: 110,574 square miles

Oregon: 98,381 square miles

Washington: 66,636 square miles

Idaho: 85,569 square miles

Utah: 84,899 square miles

Total Polk additions: 949,952 square miles

Compare that to:

Louisiana Purchase: 828,000 square miles

Alaska: 665,384 square miles

Potential Greenland acquisition: 836,330 square miles

So even if President Donald Trump did grab Greenland, he would still be second to James Polk in square miles, and even further behind in acquired population.

There are many other issues brought up by the James Polk era, both before and during his Presidency. I will delve into some of them in future articles. As part of the agreement by which he achieved the nomination for the presidency, he had agreed not to run for a second term. The burden of the presidency worsened his poor health. He died at the age of 53 of cholera, in the year 1849.

Source for James Polk: James K. Polk by Charles Sellers, in 2 volumes, 1957, Princeton University Press