Trump is the anti-Lincoln (opinion)

Editor’s Note: John Avlon is a senior political analyst at CNN. Trump’s Lincoln fixation ramped up as he was preparing to run for president, repeatedly tweeting Lincoln quotes, some accurate if ironic and some inaccurate but revealing 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, his supporters on social media likewise spew an array of ahistorical Trump-Lincoln memes, with others waving the Confederate flag. 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.. 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. 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. Join us on Twitter and Facebook 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.