Donald Trump: The Inverse Abraham Lincoln?

On the Feb. 16, President Donald Trump, in a press conference, asked journalist April Ryan if she could put him in touch with members of the Congressional Black Caucus because she, too, is African-American. Earlier in the month, Mr. Trump, at his now infamous Black History Month breakfast, commented, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more”—thus revealing that the current President of the United States believes the leading abolitionist of the 19th century America to be alive and well.

Immediately before Mr. Trump’s faux pas, both Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, the president on whom Douglass had such a profound influence, celebrated posthumous birthdays. Mr. Douglass’s birthday on the fourteenth evidently went unnoticed by the White House. Two days earlier, however, on Lincoln’s birthday, Mr. Trump, taking to Instagram, misattributed to Lincoln words by the 20th century gerontologist Edward Stieglitz. One cannot help but wonder: what, if anything, does Mr. Trump know about Abraham Lincoln, whom many Americans called “The Great Emancipator”?”

Indeed, it may be fair to say that Mr. Trump, who is by all accounts not a reader, and who has repeatedly offended African-Americans, lays claim at present to being the inverse Lincoln. Mr. Trump’s style is so far from that of the sixteenth president that he appears to be reversing Lincoln’s two greatest traits: his capacity for empathy and his capacity for moral growth.

Lincoln’s empathy was legendary. Of the slaves he once saw chained on a steamboat, Lincoln recalled, “That sight was a continued torment to me.” He also humanized the very Confederates he later instructed his armies to strangle. Coming upon a Confederate soldier in a hospital late in 1862, Lincoln, tears welling in his eyes, was said to have asked the wounded man, “Would you shake hands with me if I were to tell you who I am?"

Trump by comparison has yet to learn genuine empathy. He refers to African Americans by the objectifying term, “the blacks.” Congressman John Lewis, one of the most courageous civil rights activists in history, is according to Mr. Trump, “All talk, talk, talk―no action or results.” Such tweets by the President are virtually always ad hominem. As Mr. Obama’s advisor David Axelrod has observed of Trump: “He has the ability to destroy people in 140 characters.”

It is true that Lincoln could be, like Trump, a man of withering words. The victims of Lincoln’s vituperative missives were errant generals such as George B. McClellan. If Lincoln were alive today, he would be a genius at Twitter. Lincoln, as historian Garry Wills and others have shown, was so entranced by the telegraph and the condensed communication it required that he pared his own language down to a pithy, 272-word endorsement of American freedom in the Gettysburg Address.

It is also true that Lincoln’s actions did not always match his moral philosophy. Despite his lifelong aversion to slavery, he was not free of racism and, before he embraced abolitionism, Lincoln hemmed and hawed. First, he deluded himself by believing that slavery would die out on its own with westward expansion. In his first inaugural address, he tried appeasing the seceding states by reiterating his promise not to tamper with slavery where it existed. Next, he embraced colonization and made condescending and racist remarks to African American leaders who visited the White House. He even flirted with compensated emancipation for slaveholders. In the end, however, influenced by his unflagging conscience and by military expedience, he wrote and signed the Emancipation Proclamation, armed the freed slaves, and won the respect of Frederick Douglass.

With less than forty percent of the popular vote, Abraham Lincoln, nominee of the newly formed Republican Party, won the presidency in 1860 via the Electoral College. While Lincoln presided over the formation of the Republican Party, many of whose diverse members were disaffected Americans opposed to the spread of slavery, Trump has presided over that party’s dissolution. In its wake, a modern Confederacy of sorts seems to be emerging, one based in part on neo-white nationalism.

Trump’s response to that nation within a nation will, in large measure, define his presidency. One can only hope that he soon walks into the Lincoln study, a room that became the White House telegraph office in 1865, shuts the door, and reads every bit of Lincoln’s writings. In those texts, he would find in Lincoln a president who frequently disappointed many Americans but who saved America in spite of itself. Mr. Trump would find a president who advised all Americans to approach the world “with malice toward none.”

Thomas Underwood, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, and an Instructor at the Harvard University Division of Continuing Education.