Okay, a pretty large majority of us agrees that Abraham Lincoln was
a great president. And, yes, Donald Trump could be assumed to be the presumptive
nominee of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Quelle horreur!
Well, yes, and no. Lincoln, the famous man of “peculiar
ambition,” is definitely a founding father of the nation we know. But if this
great were us (and not primarily memorialized upon monuments, on sacred native
land, on our $5 bill) here’s what we may be talking about in the fuller context
of Honest Abe.
“[Lincoln] advanced
the country toward unlimited government … He
was willing to use foreigners and minority groups against his own people. He was
willing to have a selective ‘democratic’ conscience when it came to subjects
like deportations.”
– Sam Dixon,
Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1986
Then there is this from historian Richard J. Carwardine in “Lincoln:
Profiles in Power”
“Lincoln himself composed a few articles specifically for the
newspapers and gave careful thought to where his public letters should first
appear before they were copied Union-wide. He controlled the press’s access to
his private meetings, allocated lucrative government printing contracts to
selected Republican papers, and rewarded loyal editors and correspondents with
well-paid jobs at home and abroad. Unsurprisingly, loyal correspondents made up
the presidential trainload to Gettysburg in November 1863, their place on the
platform assured; hundreds of local papers subsequently printed and celebrated
Lincoln’s speech, in repudiation of Democratic ridicule of a ”silly, flat and
dish-watery utterance’. Probably most important of all, Lincoln, though not
dependably accessible to reporters, made sure his door was open when it needed
to be.”
None of this is to excuse the hard reporting that should go
into the suitability of Donald Trump’s bid for higher office. My two cents?
There just might be something to learn in just what are some of the common
traits (granted, hopefully a narrow sliver of a Venn diagram) of the current
Republican presidential front-runner and Lincoln himself, a man who reasonable
people have convinced us to use as a cudgel against Trump – rather than doing
the harder work of knocking him down on matters of policy, most damagingly, his
penchant for inciting hatred and violence, ie, a proposed ban on all Muslims
from visiting America and the advocated killing of terrorists’ families.
Next: Running for
Your Life: Running and the C-Word
