(NewsNation) — Recent political shakeups may be shocking to some, but former U.S. President Gerald Ford may have seen at least part of it coming, a video going viral on X shows.
The video shows Ford, a Republican who served as commander in chief from 1974 to 1977, visiting students at an Oct. 18, 1989, conference held in Iowa about the role of former presidents in American society.
One of the students asked the former president what advice he’d “give a young lady wanting to become president of the United States.”
To that, Ford expressed his hope that there would be a female POTUS then detailed his prediction for how it would go.
“It won’t happen in the normal course of events,” Ford said. “Either the Republican or Democrat political party will nominate a man for president and a woman for vice president, and the woman and man will win. So you’ll end up with a president, a male, and a vice president, a female. And in that term of office of the president, the president will die, and the woman will become president under the law or constitution.”
People were quick to point out similarities with this and how the withdrawal of President Joe Biden from the Democratic nomination in the 2024 election played out. While Biden did not die, of course, his stepping down paved the way for another nominee: his running mate and current Vice President Kamala Harris.
While her nomination still has yet to become official, The Associated Press recently reported Harris secured enough delegates to earn the party’s nomination and raised more than $81 million, a record for the 2024 political cycle.
Should she win the general election against former President Donald Trump, Harris would become the first woman president in United States history.
And then from there, according to Ford?
“Once that barrier is broken, from then on, men better be careful because they’ll have a hard time ever even getting a nomination in the future,” he said during his remarks in Iowa.
As Snopes notes, Ford made these comments five years after Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be nominated for a major party ticket. Ferraro was a Democrat who was Walter Mondale’s running mate in his unsuccessful bid to replace then-incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan.
There wouldn’t be another woman nominated to be a major party ticket before Ford’s death in 2006, Snopes wrote, contrary to his 1989 forecast that there’d be one in the “next four or eight years.”
Two years after Ford died, though, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was the vice presidential candidate for Sen. John McCain. Then, in 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first female major party nominee to run in the presidential general election.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
