8 US Presidents Who Don't Drink Alcohol [Fact Sheet]

US presidents who never touched a drop

When you picture the White House, formal receptions and champagne toasts probably come to mind. Historically, that’s fair — plenty of presidents were enthusiastic drinkers. Grant’s fondness for whiskey was famous enough that Lincoln reportedly defended him: “Find out what he drinks and send a case to my other generals.” Nixon had a staff rule about not calling him after 6pm. LBJ drank Scotch on Air Force One with some regularity.

But a surprising number of the men who held the office didn’t drink at all — or gave it up permanently along the way. Some had personal tragedies that shaped the choice; others just didn’t like the taste; one essentially delegated the decision to his wife. Here are eight of them.

Donald Trump

45th and 47th president of the United States (2017–2021, 2025–present) Estimated net worth over $5 billion

Trump’s sobriety comes from one place: his older brother Fred Trump Jr., who died of alcoholism-related causes in 1981 at age 42. Fred was a pilot — charming, well-liked, by most accounts more naturally personable than Donald — and his alcohol problem cost him his career and then his life.

Before he died, Fred warned Donald not to drink. “He’d tell me, ‘Don’t drink. Don’t drink,’” Trump said at a 2018 press conference. “He was substantially older, and I listened to him.” CNN reported in 2019 that Trump visited Fred during his final illness and watched him cycle through recovery and relapse — “five or six times,” Trump said, they thought they might lose him before they did.

He’s also said he worries he might be predisposed. “Let’s say I started drinking,” Trump told The Washington Post, “it’s very possible I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.” He has kept that pledge since at least 1976.

Joe Biden

46th president of the United States (2021–2025) 36-year career in the US Senate

Biden has never had a drink in his life. Not one. His reason, like Trump’s, comes down to family.

On the 2008 campaign trail he put it plainly: “There are enough alcoholics in my family.” He grew up watching his uncle Edward struggle with drinking, and later his brother Frankie. His son Hunter has been through rehab multiple times. Biden has long believed alcoholism runs in families and has apparently never wanted to find out which way he’d go. Marie Claire reported that his nightly commute home to Delaware — a habit he kept throughout his Senate career — also kept him out of Washington’s social circuit, which tends to run on drinks.

He’s joked about it. “I’m the only Irishman you ever met, though, that’s never had a drink, so I’m okay — I’m really not Irish,” he said during a visit to Ireland. Newsweek covered the question of whether he’d finally have a Guinness there. He didn’t.

Worth noting: Trump and Biden are the first consecutive presidents in American history to both be teetotalers, as WTSP reported when Biden took office in 2021.

George W. Bush

43rd president of the United States (2001–2009)

Bush’s sobriety has a specific date attached to it: July 28, 1986, the morning after his 40th birthday.

He and Laura had celebrated the weekend in Colorado Springs with friends, including a dinner at the Broadmoor Hotel where the group worked through several bottles of wine. The next morning, Bush went out for his usual three-mile run, badly hungover. He came back and told Laura he was done. “George just woke up and he knew he wanted to quit,” she told ABC News. “And he stopped… He just stopped cold turkey.”

He hasn’t had a drink since. In a later ABC Nightline interview, he said: “I doubt I’d be standing here if I hadn’t quit drinking whiskey, and beer and wine and all that.” He also credited Reverend Billy Graham. A meeting with Graham at the Bush family home in Maine in 1985 left an impression on him, and as The Hill reported, Bush later wrote: “I could not have quit drinking without faith. I also don’t think my faith would be as strong if I hadn’t quit drinking.” The Washington Post described 1986 as the year Bush himself identified as the turning point — personally and, it turned out, politically.

Abraham Lincoln

16th president of the United States (1861–1865)

Lincoln was not quite a teetotaler — he’d sip champagne at a White House toast rather than cause a scene. But in private he almost never drank, and his reason was probably the least moralistic of anyone in 19th-century American public life.

He told his law partner William Herndon that he was “entitled to little credit for not drinking because I hate the stuff. It is unpleasant and always leaves me flabby and undone.” His assistant John Hay noted in his letters that Lincoln drank almost exclusively water in the White House — sometimes coffee at breakfast, milk at lunch, but essentially no alcohol.

This put him in an odd political spot. He gave a speech to a Springfield temperance society in 1842, but most historians read it as more satirical than sincere — Lincoln was skeptical of the movement’s moralizing streak, even as he personally didn’t drink. He worked alongside Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant, two fairly heavy drinkers, without recorded judgment. Food Republic notes he simply didn’t like the taste and was transparent about it — which is an unusual stance for a politician in an era when temperance was treated as a serious moral question.

Rutherford B. Hayes

19th president of the United States (1877–1881)

The Hayes White House was dry. From 1877 to 1881, state dinners had no wine, the bar was closed, and First Lady Lucy Webb Hayes earned the nickname “Lemonade Lucy.” The backstory behind the ban is more interesting than that nickname implies.

The White House Historical Association is clear that the ban was Rutherford’s decision, not Lucy’s. She had never drunk and believed in setting a good example, but she actually opposed prohibition as a formal policy and declined to officially join the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The ban came after the first state dinner in April 1877, where wine had been served and temperance advocates in the Republican base reacted badly. Rutherford looked at the political math and closed the White House bar.

Lucy became the public face of a decision that was her husband’s political calculation. Tasting Table notes that hundreds of cartoons and newspaper pieces mocked “Lemonade Lucy” while Rutherford’s role went mostly unremarked. The WCTU, grateful, commissioned a portrait of Lucy for the White House — honoring a woman who had told them she wouldn’t officially join their cause. She seems to have been gracious about the whole arrangement.

Benjamin Harrison

23rd president of the United States (1889–1893)

Harrison was a genuine teetotaler: deeply religious, apparently cold to almost everyone, and genuinely indifferent to alcohol. His White House staff called him “the human iceberg.” Events at his White House were, by most accounts, cheerless dry affairs where guests got hot soup instead of a drink.

He is also the grandson of William Henry Harrison, the 9th president, which makes this the only grandfather-grandson pair in presidential history. The grandfather had a fondness for hard cider, so the teetotaling wasn’t a family tradition exactly — Benjamin Harrison’s abstinence was rooted in his religious convictions. Daily prayer was standard in his White House. God featured heavily in his speeches.

Tasting Table notes a small story: Andrew Carnegie once sent Harrison an unsolicited cask of Dewar’s scotch. There’s no record of what Harrison made of the gift. One imagines he didn’t know what to do with it.

Millard Fillmore

13th president of the United States (1850–1853)

Fillmore made some kind of commitment to sobriety in his twenties and largely kept it. He came of age in Upstate New York, where the temperance movement had deep roots, and the influence stayed with him.

He had one recorded exception: a trip to London in 1855, after his presidency, when he toured several wine houses. He returned reporting he’d been “slightly fuddled by merely moistening his lips with such a variety of liquids,” according to his biographer Robert J. Rayback, as cited by the Booth Western Art Museum. He later told students in Buffalo: “I have seldom tasted wine and seldom offered it to a guest.” The London incident sounds like it barely counted.

Fillmore came to the presidency when Zachary Taylor died in office in 1850 and served out the remaining term. He’s remembered mainly for the Compromise of 1850, which he signed into law and which historians still debate. His sobriety is a footnote — but unlike many of the presidents here whose abstinence came from tragedy or a spouse’s preferences, Fillmore made an explicit personal commitment to it, and the historical record shows he kept it for essentially his entire life.

James K. Polk

11th president of the United States (1845–1849)

Polk is the unusual case on this list: by most historical accounts, he occasionally drank wine himself. What made his White House dry was his wife, and the result was four alcohol-free years in the executive mansion.

Sarah Childress Polk was a devout Presbyterian who banned alcohol and dancing from White House receptions. Polk didn’t argue. Tasting Table reports that Sarah was a politically shrewd first lady whose convictions had genuine influence over how the administration presented itself — she handled much of the administration’s correspondence and was a close political partner to the president. The Mashed report on presidents who barely drank notes that the White House under Polk was one of the most consistently dry in the 19th century.

Whether Polk minded the no-alcohol policy is largely lost to history. What’s clear is that he didn’t push back. The most effectively enforced alcohol ban in the pre-temperance White House came from a president who wasn’t necessarily opposed to wine — because the person he lived with was.

Two things stand out from this list. First, the two most recent presidents — Trump and Biden — cited the same source for their sobriety: watching a family member drink themselves into serious trouble. Different families, same lesson. The 19th-century entries are more varied: religion, a spouse with strong convictions, or in Lincoln’s case, straightforward personal distaste. Second, none of them seem to have suffered for it. The job got done.

If you’re cutting back or staying sober, you’d be in reasonable company at a reunion of former commanders-in-chief.

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