Washington During his first term, Donald Trump was discussing possible movies to screen in the building’s movie theater with Steve Bannon, a top White House adviser.
Bannon thought it would be educational to watch how Abraham Lincoln, a previous president, had trouble finding competent generals, so he recommended Ken Burns’ great documentary on the Civil War.
In an interview, Bannon recalled how Trump once flipped through the channels at his Bedminster, New Jersey, residence, noticed the nine-part series was playing, and watched the entire thing.
Forget Barack Obama and Joe Biden; the 16th president appears to be obsessed with Trump.
He reflects on Abe Lincoln’s presidential demeanor, his stovepipe hat, and even the inconsequential aspects of his everyday life. How the 6-foot-4-inch Lincoln fits into his 19th-century White House bed is one of Trump’s oddities.
Lincoln’s illustrious position in history comes next. Perhaps too ambitious for Trump’s preferences.
During the last weeks of the 2024 campaign, Trump stated on Fox News that Lincoln was most likely a wonderful president. Quickly, the side-eye appeared: However, I’ve always asked why that wasn’t resolved. It doesn’t make sense, in my opinion, that we had a civil war.
One Trump advisor remembers a 15-minute phone conversation with Trump over whether Lincoln could have negotiated a peaceful resolution to the North-South struggle. “That’s the longest conversation I ever had with him,” the adviser added, referring to the length of time Trump spent discussing the subject.
Lincoln is frequently invoked by elected leaders, who come up with new methods to honor him. Two of Lincoln’s quotes were included in Biden’s 2021 inaugural address: “My whole soul is in it” and “The last full measure of devotion.”
A painting of an elderly Lincoln that hung in Obama’s office served as the inspiration for an essay he wrote while serving as a freshman senator from Illinois, Lincoln’s home state.
What is it about this man that has such a profound effect on us? The future president pondered.
Trump seemed enthralled with Honest Abe as well. It’s difficult to understand why exactly. One was an up-from-nothing frontier lawyer who gave some of the most poetic presidential speeches in history, eliminated slavery, and prevented the country from fracturing.
The other is a TV star-turned-politician whose self-branded contribution to presidential discourse is the weave, and the other is the scion of a wealthy real estate developer in New York.
We do know that outliers are of special interest to Trump. The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is his transition sidekick. He prefers victors, and Lincoln is the most revered member of what he refers to as the “very exclusive club” of American presidents.
In a research published earlier this year, academics ranked the nation’s presidents by greatness, and Lincoln came in first. Trump has more work to do to catch up after coming in last.
Despite this, Trump might have some similarities to Lincoln because he was assassinated during his second presidential campaign and, like Lincoln, managed to pull off an upset during his first.
According to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston and co-director of the project that assesses the presidents, Trump “gives everything to the office in his estimation, and that’s what Lincoln did.” Thus, while probably not flawless, the parallels are intriguing. Both men oversaw a sharply divided country and made an effort to use their own experiences to address the issues.
Trump has a tendency to view Lincoln as a political modern as well as a titan of history. And a defective one, too. Could Lincoln be defeated? Trump claims that if the two men whose faces are engraved on Mount Rushmore had returned from the dead and challenged him in 2020, he could have defeated a ticket that included George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
In an interview, John McLaughlin, one of the pollsters Trump named-checked, suggested that Trump might have been the first to suggest that he could have defeated the Washington-Lincoln ticket.
“I might have agreed with him if he had brought it up,” McLaughlin remarked, laughing. Without a doubt, Trump is the greatest person I have ever met. I could have answered, “Yeah,” when he brought it up.
Would Trump have been able to strike the agreement that Lincoln failed to, preventing the Civil War entirely?
Trump loves these kinds of counterfactuals, but none of this is knowable. He loves to claim that if he had been president, neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor the Hamas attack on Israel would have occurred.
Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the author of The Art of the Deal may think he possesses unique abilities that will enable him to accomplish what the politicians of the antebellum era were unable to.
According to Bannon, President Trump is fully confident that he can impose his will and achieve a favorable result in any circumstance. He is adamant that he could have handled the North-South conflict and reached a settlement that would have prevented the Civil War and abolished chattel slavery.
According to Bannon, historians will refer to this period as the Age of Trump. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk will all be forgotten. The MAGA movement and Trump will be remembered.
The country was already in disarray by the time Lincoln assumed office. Between his election and inauguration, seven southern states broke away from the union. The month following his inauguration, Confederate troops opened fire on the American garrison at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
Trump hasn’t explained how a peaceful resolution could have been achieved, but according to at least one historian, doing so would have meant preserving slavery.
According to historian Ted Widmer, author of the book Lincoln on the Verge, many people wanted Lincoln to settle in 1861, and they were all Confederates or conflicted Americans with commercial ties to the South.
Unless you were willing to live in lifelong slavery in the United States or give in to radicals who didn’t even care about the country, there was no way to settle.
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