FRIDAY FISTFIGHTS / FIVE OF THE MOST COMBATIVE PRESIDENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

By the Editors & Illustrators of PillartoPost.org--“Combative” is a matter of historical interpretation, not an officially measured presidential quality. Still, five presidents repeatedly stand out for treating politics as open warfare—with Congress, the press, powerful institutions or personal enemies. Presented chronologically, they are Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. 

ANDREW JACKSON, 1829–1837 Jackson entered the White House portraying himself as the defender of ordinary white Americans against bankers, political insiders and established privilege. His assault on the Second Bank of the United States became known as the “Bank War.” In 1834, the Senate censured him for assuming powers it considered unconstitutional. Jackson’s opponents formed the Whig Party partly in resistance to his expansion of presidential authority. A famous political cartoon depicted him trampling the Constitution beneath his feet under the title “King Andrew the First.” Jackson’s temper was not merely political theater. Before becoming president, he fought duels, carried bullets in his body and participated in numerous personal confrontations. 

ANDREW JOHNSON, 1865–1869--No president before the modern era conducted his feuds so publicly or self-destructively. Johnson considered congressional opposition a personal betrayal and attacked prominent lawmakers by name. During his disastrous 1866 speaking tour, known as the “Swing Around the Circle,” Johnson argued with hecklers and delivered angry speeches denouncing his opponents. His continual warfare with the Republican-controlled Congress over Reconstruction and protections for formerly enslaved Americans culminated in his impeachment. The House of Representatives impeached Johnson in 1868. The Senate acquitted him by one vote, allowing him to complete his term. He was the first American president to be impeached. 

HARRY S. TRUMAN, 1945–1953--Truman was combative without being consumed by conspiracy. His plainspoken 1948 campaign against what he called the Republican “do-nothing Congress” inspired supporters to shout, “Give ’em hell, Harry.” Truman fought publicly with Congress, labor leaders and the press. He fired General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War after the general publicly challenged the administration’s policy. Truman could also make disagreements intensely personal. After Washington Post critic Paul Hume criticized his daughter Margaret’s singing, Truman sent him a furious letter and warned that an encounter with the president could result in a black eye and a broken nose. 

RICHARD NIXON, 1969–1974--Nixon’s combativeness was generally less visible in public than Johnson’s or Truman’s. Behind closed doors, however, Nixon divided the political world into loyalists and enemies. His administration maintained an “enemies list,” considered using federal agencies against opponents and created the White House “plumbers” to stop damaging information from reaching the press. Secret White House recordings revealed a president deeply suspicious of journalists, demonstrators and political adversaries. The Watergate scandal ultimately forced Nixon to resign rather than face almost certain impeachment and removal. He remains the only American president to have resigned from office. 

DONALD TRUMP, 2017–2021 AND 2025–PRESENT--Trump made confrontation a central feature of presidential communication. He repeatedly attacked political opponents, judges, government officials and news organizations while using rallies and social media to maintain direct contact with supporters. Donald Trump was impeached twice by the House of Representatives but acquitted both times by the Senate. The first impeachment, in 2019, involved charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The second, in 2021, charged him with incitement of insurrection following the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In 2024, a New York jury convicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He became the first former American president to be convicted of a felony and subsequently the first person with a felony conviction to serve as president. He received an unconditional discharge, meaning no imprisonment, fine or probation, and has appealed the conviction. 

THE CLOSEST COMPARISON--Donald Trump has no exact presidential twin. Andrew Jackson supplies the populist rebellion against established institutions. Richard Nixon supplies the preoccupation with enemies and hostile news organizations. Harry Truman supplies the pugnacious language and willingness to strike back personally. But in relentless public combativeness, Trump’s closest predecessor may be Andrew Johnson. Both presidents treated opposition as something beyond ordinary political disagreement and carried their fights directly to the public. Johnson’s presidency demonstrated that continual combat can energize loyal supporters while hardening opposition and weakening a president’s ability to govern. 

THE FOODIST / MESA AGRICOLA’S TINY KITCHEN MAKES THE BIG TIME

 At Mesa Agricola, handmade tortillas carry a changing selection of slow-cooked guisados built from Baja memory and produce grown nearby. Photograph by Lauren di Matteo.

The New York Times has placed an unadorned six-table Escondido counter among the nation’s 50 best restaurants. The distinction belongs as much to a nearby farm as it does to the stove.  Welcome to Escondido and Mesa Agricola (agriculture able}.

 But first, what is a guisados?

Guisados (Spanish): dishes of meat, vegetables, beans, or other ingredients slowly cooked in a seasoned sauce—essentially stews or braises.

Pronounced: gee-SAH-dohs. Singular: guisado.

***

 The distance between a Valley Center field and a warm tortilla in Escondido is about 12 miles. At Mesa Agricola, that short journey carries enough flavor, memory and ambition to earn the little restaurant a place on The New York Times Restaurant List for 2026, published this yesterday. 

Mesa Agricola is one of six California restaurants chosen for the Times list of 50 and the only selection from San Diego County. That is heady company for a counter-service shop with six tables, inside and out, and a dining room whose decorative bravura begins and ends with a dangling cactus. 

There is no velvet rope, no battalion of servers and no tasting-menu theater. There are guisados, tortillas and the daily proposition that careful farming can be tasted. Behind the restaurant are chef Juan González and farmer Megan Strom, husband and wife, whose partnership begins in the soil. 

Strom grows much of what reaches the kitchen at the couple’s farm in Valley Center; other ingredients come from nearby Southern California growers. Even the corn milled for the tortillas is local. 

González turns the harvest into the slow-cooked stews of Mexico: food that appears humble until the first bite reveals how much time and judgment have gone into it. The menu’s foundation is the guisado, the simmered preparation that belongs to home kitchens, neighborhood fondas and the Mexican midday table. 

González may offer seven to 11 on a given day, folded into handmade corn tortillas or wrapped, northern-style, in flour tortillas as burritos. 

--Rajas arrive soft and smoky. 

--Calabacitas catch the sweetness of squash. 

--Chorizo with nopales carries richness and green acidity in the same mouthful. 

--Cochinita, steak ranchera, shrimp ranchero and turkey mole may join the rotation, depending upon the season and what the farm provides. 

 There is nothing accidental about the apparent simplicity. González grew up in Rosarito, Baja California, and his cooking draws on those flavors as well as pre-Hispanic techniques and traditions from across Mexico. 

The kitchen also looks outward. One mole traces the Filipino influence that reached Mexico through the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, when ships crossed the Pacific for 250 years carrying people, ingredients and ideas between Asia and New Spain. 

At Mesa Agricola, history is not presented as a lecture. It arrives as sauce. That may explain why the Times described the food as “surprisingly tectonic.” The phrase suits a restaurant where the visible architecture is modest but the plates rest upon deeper layers: 

Baja childhood, Mexican regional cooking, Pacific trade, San Diego County agriculture and the daily labor of making tortillas by hand. 

The flavors shift beneath one another, yet the food remains direct enough to eat standing at the counter if every chair is taken. The recognition completes a remarkably quick ascent. 

Mesa Agricola opened in August 2025 after González and Strom had built a following through a residency at Vino Carta in Solana Beach. The permanent Escondido shop brought the idea closer to the source, placing a farm-minded Mexican kitchen in a North County city whose surrounding valleys still grow food even as subdivisions press outward. 

 The restaurant’s location also matters. Escondido has long lived in the shadow of San Diego’s coastal dining rooms, where ocean views and polished design can command attention before a plate lands. 

Mesa Agricola reverses that equation. Its glamour is the deep red of a beet preparation, the char on a tortilla, the green tangle of herbs and seeds scattered at the last moment. 

The room asks almost nothing of the eye so the food can ask everything of the palate. National praise will make an already busy lunch line longer. It should also focus attention on a model that sounds obvious and remains difficult to execute: grow excellent produce nearby, cook it with cultural memory and technical confidence, charge prices that allow neighbors to return, and resist burying the result beneath decoration. 

Mesa Agricola means, roughly, an agricultural table. The name is not branding so much as a statement of method. The farm and restaurant are separate places, but they operate as one kitchen. Twelve miles of North County road connect them. The Times recognition merely confirms what diners at those six tables have already discovered: sometimes the most consequential meals begin long before the cook lights the fire. 

 MESA AGRICOLA • 707 S. Escondido Boulevard, Escondido • mesaagricola.com