SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Four score and seven years from now, the mystic chords of memory may recall the way Donald Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, lauded him one day and lambasted him the next. It is altogether fitting and proper that our descendants would examine why the 45th president, who hopes to be the 47th, keeps mentioning the 16th.
“This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” Trump said in a video introducing “Trump digital trading cards” in December 2022, shortly after announcing his third run for the presidency.
The Republican has often raised the Great Emancipator’s name and compared himself or others to him — he’s been treated worse than Lincoln, he’s done more for Blacks than anyone since Lincoln, and so on. It has become a recurring refrain in Trump’s unique brand of oratory, the meandering stream of random cultural references, dire warnings about the dangers of electing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, personal grievances and self-promoting stories that he’s come to describe as “the weave.”
In California on Oct. 13, Trump invoked Lincoln in castigating Harris.
“What the hell is wrong with our country? Look, we used to have the greatest — Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “Now look at this stuff. Can you believe what we’re doing? She’s so bad.”
Later that same week, a Tennessee 10-year-old called into “Fox and Friends” to ask who Trump’s favorite president was when he was little. Trump mentioned GOP exemplar Ronald Reagan, even though he was in his 30s when Reagan was first inaugurated in 1981. He then pivoted to Lincoln, but tempered his praise with some belated second-guessing about the war that broke out six week’s after Lincoln’s first inauguration.
“Lincoln was probably a great president, although I’ve always said why wasn’t that settled?” said Trump, who has repeatedly claimed that had he remained at the helm, the wars in Ukraine and Israel would never have happened. “You know, I’m a guy that — it doesn’t make sense. We had a Civil War.”
Harold Holzer, a renowned Lincoln biographer and chairman of the Lincoln Forum, marveled at the progression of Trump’s peculiar version of history.
“The trouble with Trump’s use of Lincoln is that it’s kind of malice toward some, and then malice toward many and ultimately, even malice toward Lincoln,” Holzer said.
Countless political hopefuls have tried to grab onto Lincoln’s lengthy coattails. The difference, Holzer said, is that most associate themselves with the humble Illinois railsplitter without making comparisons.
Barack Obama sent a stunning message on Lincoln’s birthday weekend in 2007 when he stood on the grounds of Springfield’s Old State Capitol, where Lincoln served in the House of Representatives for eight years, to announce his campaign for president. And at this year’s Democratic National Convention, Obama called upon “the better angels of our nature,” which Lincoln had summoned in his first inaugural address, to urge the nation to come together.
Gerald Ford, who reluctantly stepped in to serve as vice president during the Watergate scandal, tried to temper expectations by declaring after his swearing in, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.” When asked how he felt after losing the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, another Illinoisan, Adlai Stevenson, recalled Lincoln’s response from a similar circumstance: He was reminded of the little boy who stubbed his toe — he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.
“It’s not a new phenomenon. There’s a whole history of presidents referencing other presidents in these kinds of ways,” said presidential scholar Justin Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University. “Trump’s approach to doing so is unique, as is everything with Trump. It’s often less nuanced or delicate.”
Trump himself is not singularly fixated. While President Joe Biden was still in the race, Trump suggested that Jimmy Carter, whose presidency history has not treated gently, was relieved that Biden fared worse.
Trump’s seeming love-hate fascination with Lincoln is a function of his desire to preserve and build upon his legacy, Vaughn said. (The Presidential Greatness Project, a survey of political scholars co-authored by Vaughn and last updated in December, lists Lincoln as the greatest president in U.S. history with Trump dead last, a rating over which Trump and Biden sparred during their June debate).
As for the Civil War, Vaughn said it’s the dealmaker in Trump who suggests the broken Union could have been mended short of war. But the entire history of slavery in the United States was built upon compromise.
Holzer said the War Between the States was likely inevitable to purge slavery and finally create a united nation.
“Better negotiators than Donald Trump, including Henry Clay, tried to solve the sectional crisis without success,” he said.
Trump has consistently maintained that he’s done more for Black Americans than any president since Lincoln, citing his work as president on criminal justice reform and the creation of so-called opportunity zones designed to draw investors’ dollars to underserved communities.
By comparison, Lincoln penned the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in rebellious states, a bold if political document that shocked the Union-loving North as well as the secessionist South. And his relentless and masterful lobbying played a critical role in Congress’ approval of the 13th Amendment, forever abolishing involuntary servitude in the U.S., just weeks before his assassination.
Based on the Emancipation Proclamation alone, “there is no comparison to make between former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Trump,” said Daina Ramey Berry, dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of California-Santa Barbara and an expert on the history of slavery. Although the proclamation had no immediate effect, once slavery was exterminated, Berry said “people saw Lincoln as the Great Emancipator and an advocate for unity and freedom.”
How the self-effacing Lincoln might react to the dust-up is anyone’s guess, but it calls to mind an incident while he was a circuit-riding attorney.
Once, in Bloomington, Illinois, fellow attorney Ward Hill Lamon, who would accompany Lincoln to Washington and become his self-appointed bodyguard, ripped his pants just before court convened for the afternoon. The other lawyers snidely took up a collection to replace Lamon’s trousers.
When the hat was passed to him, instead of a coin, Lincoln dropped in a scrap of paper on which he had scrawled, “I can contribute nothing to the end in view.”
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Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed.
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