Why Trump is obsessed with Abe Lincoln

WASHINGTON During his first term, Donald Trump was discussing potential films to be shown in the building's movie theater with a senior White House official, Steve Bannon.

Bannon suggested Ken Burns' classic Civil War documentary, thinking it would be instructive to see how a former president, Abraham Lincoln, struggled to find competent generals.

To this, Trump mentioned that once he was flipping through the channels at his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, he saw that the nine-part series was airing and watched the whole thing, Bannon recounted in an interview .

Forget Joe Biden and Barack Obama; it's the 16th president who seems to be an obsession with Trump.

He reflects on Abe Lincoln's stovepipe hat, his presidential appearance, and even the mundane details of his daily existence. One of Trump's curiosities is how the 6-foot-4 Lincoln fits into her bed in the 19th-century White House.

Then there is Lincoln's elevated place in history. Perhaps too high for Trump's liking.

Yes, Lincoln was probably a great president, Trump said on Fox News in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign. Quickly came the sideways glance: Although, I always said, why didn't that has it not been fixed? I'm the type to say it doesn't make sense that we had a civil war.

A Trump adviser recalls a phone call with Trump in which they spent 15 minutes discussing whether Lincoln could peacefully end the conflict between the North and South. What stood out, the adviser said, was the amount of time Trump spent on the subject: It was the longest conversation I've ever had with him.

Elected officials love to invoke Lincoln and find new ways to honor him. Biden's 2021 inaugural address borrowed two of Lincoln's phrases: All my soul is in it and The last full measure of devotion.

As a freshman senator from Illinois, Lincoln's home state, Obama wrote an essay inspired by the portrait of an aging Lincoln that hung in his office.

What is it about this man that can move us so deeply? the future president wondered.

Trump also seems fascinated by Honest Abe. Why exactly is not easy to understand. One of them was a pioneering lawyer from nothing who ended slavery and kept the nation from splitting in two while delivering some of the most lyrical presidential speeches in the canon.

The other is the scion of a wealthy New York real estate developer and TV star-turned-politician whose contribution to the presidential speech is weaving.

What we do know is that Trump is particularly interested in outliers. His transitional sidekick is Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. He likes winners, and in what he calls the “very exclusive club” of American presidents, no one is more revered than Lincoln.

When scholars ranked nations' presidents by greatness in a report released earlier this year, Lincoln finished first. Trump was last, leaving him with work to catch up.

Yet Trump may feel a certain kinship with Lincoln, having faced assassination attempts during his second presidential campaign and, like Lincoln, pulling off an upset during his first.

Trump “gives his all to the office in his view, and that's what Lincoln did,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston and co-director of the project that ranks presidents. The parallels are therefore interesting, perhaps not perfect. Both men governed a very divided nation and tried to use their life experience to solve the problem.

Trump's habit is to treat Lincoln not only as a historical giant, but also as a political contemporary. And imperfect too. Was Lincoln beatable? Trump says his pollsters told him he could have defeated George Washington and Lincoln if the two men whose faces are engraved on Mount Rushmore came back from the dead and ran against him in 2020.

One of the pollsters vetted by Trump, John McLaughlin, said in an interview that Trump may have been the one who first said he could have beaten the Washington-Lincoln ticket.

He could have talked about it and I might have agreed with him,” McLaughlin said with a laugh. He [Trump] is definitely the best I have ever encountered. He could have brought it up and I might have said, “Sure.”

Could Trump have reached a deal that eluded Lincoln, thus avoiding civil war altogether?

None of this is known, but Trump likes these kinds of counterfactuals. He likes to say that neither the Hamas attack on Israel nor Russia's invasion of Ukraine would have happened if he had been president.

It is therefore not far-fetched to assume that the author of The Art of the Deal may believe that he possesses the singular skills necessary to achieve what pre-war politicians could not achieve.

President Trump is fully confident that in any situation he can enforce his will and bring about a positive outcome, Bannon said. He absolutely believes that he could have taken the situation between the North and South and negotiated an agreement that would have ended slavery and avoided civil war.

Historians will consider this era the era of Trump, Bannon added. We will all be forgotten: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon. What people will remember is Trump and the MAGA movement.

By the time Lincoln took office, the nation was already in ruins. Seven southern states seceded from the union between his election and his swearing-in. Confederate forces fired on the American garrison at Fort Sumter in South Carolina the month after his inauguration.

Trump has not explained how a peaceful settlement could have been reached, but at least one historian says the price of a settlement would have been to leave slavery intact.

Many people wanted Lincoln to settle in 1861 and they were all Confederates or ambivalent Americans who had business dealings with the South, said Ted Widmer, historian and author of the book Lincoln on the Verge.

There was no way to settle down unless you were willing to live with permanent slavery in the United States or give in to extremists who didn't even care about the country.

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