George Washington was the last US president to face an all-out foreign policy uprising

Turns out there’s a close precedent for the spectacle of a poisonously contrary opposing party urging Americans and foreigners alike to ignore the sitting US president. But we must reach back all the way to George Washington and the 1790s, says a leading scholar.

In his day, Washington was branded senile by his opponents—the precursors to today’s Democrats but back then called Republicans—one of whom wished for his early death, according to Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US revolutionary-era scholar. Calling Washington a traitor, the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, tried to defund a treaty he had negotiated with the British.

“To the degree that the current right-wing Republicans don’t think that Obama represents the best interests of the country, they felt the same way about Washington,” Ellis tells Quartz. “The lunacies that we see are not unprecedented. They were there at the creation.”...

The issue back then was a diplomatic accord with Britain that came to be called the Jay Treaty. Negotiated just a few years after the cessation of the Revolutionary War, a time when emotions remained brittle between Britain and its former American colonies, the treaty, Washington argued, was nonetheless necessary if the US was to get onto its feet and not disintegrate.

But Jefferson and his political allies wanted the young country to enter a commercially hostile posture with Britain, and instead maintain its cozy relationship with the French.

Washington proceeded, peacefully settling outstanding issues from the Revolutionary War, including extricating residual British troops from present-day Ohio and neighboring states, and ushering in a decade and a half of normal trade between the former combatants.

So began the open warfare among the founding fathers. James Monroe, a Jefferson acolyte (and future president) who was then US ambassador to France, openly told Parisians they could ignore Washington—arguing that he was not the United States’ legitimate leader. Washington summarily fired Monroe. Another Jeffersonian aide behaved similarly, and Washington sacked him, too.