Editor’s Note: John Avlon is a senior political analyst at CNN. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
President Donald Trump is famously unencumbered by a sense of history – except when he’s trying to use American history as a wedge in the culture wars.
But even the most cynical and shallow national politician would not usually preoccupy himself with ways to defend the Confederate flag in 2020 – when even Mississippi, home state of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, decided it would be better to ditch its symbolism. That should be doubly true when that politician can’t stop comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln.
But here we are, in a land beyond logic, also known as Donald Trump’s traipse through American history.
Trump’s Lincoln fixation ramped up as he was preparing to run for president, repeatedly tweeting Lincoln quotes, some accurate if ironic (“A house divided against itself cannot stand”) and some inaccurate but revealing (“A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.”)
During the 2016 campaign, Trump often seemed to be discovering history in real time, telling a crowd in Detroit, “a lot of people don’t realize that … the great Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.”
But since reaching the presidency, Trump’s comparisons to Lincoln have alternated between complaint – “They always said … nobody got treated worse than Lincoln – I believe I am treated worse” – and self-congratulation: “My Admin has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln.”
As the President positions himself in the Lincoln Memorial for interviews (looking appropriately small by comparison), his supporters on social media likewise spew an array of ahistorical Trump-Lincoln memes, with others waving the Confederate flag. Dinesh D’Souza (yet another sycophantic supporter who was pardoned by the President) put forward an entire documentary nonsensically comparing Trump to Lincoln.
These comparisons don’t only fall apart because of the obvious contradictions, with Trump and his supporters defending the Confederate flag, the symbol of secession and slavery that Lincoln died trying to end. Or that the Republican Party in Lincoln’s time was a moderate progressive party while Democrats were the conservative populist party of their time – like Trump’s party today. (Confederates also often described themselves as fighting for liberty by defending slavery – get your head around that).
It’s not even that Trump is straining to punch well above his weight – with Lincoln routinely ranked as the greatest US president by historians and Trump already judged as our worst even before his fatally incompetent Covid-19 response.
It’s because in matters of character and temperament and political beliefs, Trump is the anti-Lincoln – and vice versa. Let’s count just some of the ways.
Lincoln was a poor man’s son, a self-made man known for his personal modesty, political moderation and moral courage.
Trump is a rich man’s son, bankrolled and bailed out by his father.
Not even defenders would describe Trump as modest – he’s always been obsessed with self-promotion at the expense of substance.
In politics, Trump is the opposite of moderate. He is a demagogue who demonizes his opponents and tries to divide the country for political gain, increasingly along racial lines.
Lincoln asked Americans to rise “far above personal and partisan politics … in this time of national peril.” Trump couldn’t even stop himself from making a pandemic response hyper-partisan.
When it comes to moral courage, Trump is MIA. He filters all decisions through the prism of self-interest. Trump is full of bluster, but he’s quick to fold in the face of someone he fears is stronger than he is (looking at you, Vladimir Putin). In contrast, Lincoln spoke out against injustice, ended slavery and signed an act to encourage new immigrants. Trump is quick to attack the weak and slams the door on new immigrants – including refugees – seeing them as a source of weakness rather than a source of strength.
Even Lincoln’s enemies admitted he was honest. It was a core quality that could not be credibly denied: “He was wise and he was honest,” Jefferson Davis said toward the end of his life. Trump, on the contrary, has set a land-speed record for lies, with The Washington Post’s running total of 19,127 lies or falsehoods in just over 1,200 days in office, as of June 1.
Trump reflexively attacks anyone he perceives as critical (direct family members and people named Putin notwithstanding.) But Lincoln did not demonize people he disagreed with – instead, he tried to empathize with his enemies as a means of reasoning with them. In the midst of a civil war, Lincoln instructed his ambassadors to “indulge in no expressions of harshness or disrespect or even impatience concerning the seceding states.” Even in private, he did not attack Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee in personal terms, preferring to call them “Jeffey D” and “Bobby Lee.” And these were people who were literally trying to kill him.
Most of all, even in the midst of a civil war, Lincoln believed that there was more that united his fellow citizens than divided them as Americans and he was guided by the Golden Rule – treat others as you would like to be treated. That simple wisdom flowed through all his decisions. Lincoln’s core asset was character.
“Of all the men I ever met,” Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman said, “he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.” While Trump’s hard-core supporters may laud their man’s will-to-power impulses as evidence of greatness, it’s hard to imagine anyone genuinely describing him as a good man. That’s never been part of his sales pitch.
Trump’s rise to the presidency has been a test of the ancient adage “character is destiny.” But if Lincoln is the anti-Trump, which president does Trump actually resemble? Nixon is an obvious point of comparison, but even Nixon didn’t pardon his henchmen and he had a sharp strategic vision, especially in foreign policy, rooted in his understanding of history.
The past president Trump most resembles in terms of temperament, the combination of self-pitying bile and bigotry, is actually Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, who was described by the Atlantic as “insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered,” and “egotistic to the point of mental disease.” Trump and Johnson are also members of the small but select club of impeached presidents.
Our country survived the Civil War, the assassination of Lincoln and the disastrous presidency of Johnson. We will survive the divisive, dishonest and corrupt presidency of Trump.
But Trump will not survive the withering assessment of history, especially when compared to past presidents. As Lincoln once said, and Trump approvingly retweeted, “once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and their esteem.”