Of all the Presidents who preceded Donald Trump in office, the one he most often measures himself against is Abraham Lincoln. Time and again, Trump has compared himself favorably to the sixteenth President, boasting, for example, that his poll numbers are higher—although, of course, there were no polls in the nineteenth century. He has belittled Lincoln, explaining that he nearly lost the Civil War to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general whom Trump speaks of with reverence. He pins positive clichés about Lincoln on himself, pointing out, as if no one else knew it, that Lincoln was a Republican, just like Trump, and honest, just like Trump.
Last week, on the evening of the day that his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, held a press conference in which he blunderingly acknowledged a quid pro quo in Trump’s phone call with the President of Ukraine (“Get over it!”), Trump travelled to Texas for a campaign rally in Dallas. After the advance team led the crowd at the American Airlines Center in singing “Y.M.C.A.,” Trump emerged and said, “I am thrilled to be here deep in the heart of Texas, where we just opened a beautiful new Louis Vuitton plant.” Then he began attacking his opponents in the Democratic Party: “crazy” Nancy Pelosi, “shifty” Adam Schiff, “corrupt” Joe Biden, and “very dumb” Beto O’Rourke. “We’re fighting a campaign against leftists, socialists, and globalists,” Trump said. “The radical Democrats want to destroy America as we know it.” If these opponents are allowed to have their way, he said, there will be “no guns, no religion, no oil, no natural gas.” Then Trump delivered his biggest blow: “Abraham Lincoln could not win Texas under those circumstances.”
“Couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, Ted,” Trump said to Senator Ted Cruz, who had introduced him. “Couldn’t do it, Louie,” Trump said to Representative Louie Gohmert, who represents a district in East Texas. “Abraham Lincoln, Honest Abe, couldn’t do it, Louie, right?” The Lincoln that Trump conjured for this scenario—a bizarre one even by the President’s standards—was transmuted into a leftist-socialist-globalist-radical-Democrat. That was the Lincoln who would have lost. Trump is apparently ignorant of history and gleefully contemptuous of facts, but this time he was partially right. Not only did the real Lincoln fail to win Texas, he didn’t get a single vote there—not because he was a radical but for the simple reason that, in 1860, his name was not allowed on the Texas ballot. Nor was anyone from the Republican Party, commonly called the “Black Republican Party” throughout the South in that era. In fact, in an act of pure voter suppression, Lincoln and the Party were not on the ballot in ten Southern states.
The overwhelming winner in the Presidential election that year in Texas, with seventy-five per cent of the vote, was the Southern Democratic candidate, John C. Breckinridge, who was the Vice-President in the Buchanan Administration. Breckinridge, who was from Kentucky, ran on a platform favoring the expansion of slavery in the territories and the strict enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Texas greeted Lincoln’s election with an Ordinance of Secession, which stated that “the recent developments in Federal affairs, make it evident that the power of the Federal Government is sought to be made a weapon with which to strike down the interests and prosperity of the people of Texas and her Sister slaveholding States.” The secessionist U.S. senator from Texas, Louis Wigfall—one of the group of extreme pro-slavery politicians known as the Fire-Eaters—was expelled from the Senate, rowed alone to Fort Sumter to demand its surrender, commanded the Texas Brigade (he was often visibly drunk on the field), was elected to the Confederate Congress, and exiled himself to Britain after the war. In the Texas of that era, Wigfall could be elected; Lincoln could not.
Great leaders, to Trump, aren’t measured by what they believe: they are great because they win and are adored. His portrayal of Lincoln’s greatness is unmoored from anything that Lincoln thought of as politics or political leadership, chiefly, the self-discipline, patience, and probity required to bring about the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Union victory—events that remade the nation. By contrast, in Dallas, Trump told his supporters, “I’ve always said I can be more Presidential than any President in history except for Honest Abe Lincoln, when he’s wearing the hat. That’s tough, that’s tough. That’s a tough one to beat. Being Presidential is easy. All you have to do is act like a stiff—look.” At that point, he moved robotically around the stage, mocking both Lincoln wearing his hat and the dignity of the office that he now holds. Getting away with bad behavior, without regard for the consequences for the nation, seems to prove to Trump that he is superior—and that he is invulnerable, whether coercing the President of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden or abandoning Kurdish allies in Syria. As if, by doing whatever he wants, Trump would raise himself to Lincoln’s monumental level.
A few minutes after Trump mocked Lincoln’s sincerity, he changed direction again. “Honest Abe. I liked Honest Abe,” he said. A voice shouted out, “Honest Donald!” Trump smiled. “We’ve confirmed,” he said, pocketing the comparison. “He says, ‘Honest Donald.’ Thank you.”
