President Trump looks small in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln
The President was sitting in Abraham Lincoln’s shadow. Donald Trump took the opportunity on Sunday to reset the needle – or bleach the records, if you prefer – after what was perhaps the single worst period of his presidency last week. He did so in a Fox News town hall, which due to current restrictions, wasn’t held in the presence of the public but in a suitably remote location, which just happened to be the Lincoln Memorial.
The Memorial, with its statue of “Honest Abe” crafted by the Piccirilli Brothers, is one of the very few places in Washington that probably deserves its status as a national shrine. In Britain, our most famous statue might well be that of Nelson, but it sits on the top of a 170-foot column. It’s only when the likes of John Noakes (other TV presenters are available) climb it that you get a sense of the scale. That’s not the same with Lincoln. His Memorial is a place where so many presidents come to be photographed, dwarfed by the greatest of them all.
The effect is usually a daunting one, perhaps even as daunting as being in the presence of the 16th president, who was said to have stood six feet four without wedges in his shoes or friendly doctors to finesse the numbers. Still, being dwarfed by Lincoln is no bad thing. The pictures usually convey a sense of the challenge that all presidents are stepping up to meet.
Yet there was none of that with Trump on Sunday. The Fox News camera was set low and directly in front of Lincoln, with Trump and the two hosts kept apart so they framed the base of the monument. The result was akin to a fireside chat, with Lincoln dominant but in that way a father figure dominates a dinner table. This was Trump inserting himself into the Lincoln mythology – or even, perhaps, Lincoln was made as a feature attraction in Trumpworld.
This President’s obsession with Lincoln has been noted before and to repeat what must be repeated every time Trump indulges his fetish, he is the successor to Lincoln in name only. The Democrats were originally the party of the southern slave owners; the Republicans powerful in the northern states which were advocating freedom. It was this clash that produced the American Civil War, followed by a century of Jim Crow as the two parties navigated the fractured political and racial landscape. It culminated in a post-World War realignment, first under Truman who desegregated the armed forces, and then, more strikingly under LBJ, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Republicans, meanwhile, moved in the other direction, especially when Barry Goldwater paved the way for Nixon, taking the Republicans south to exploit white discontent, advocating what Martin Luther King would call “a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists”.
The perversity of witnessing Trump using Lincoln in a game of crude semantics is therefore the kind of brain-melting nonsense that we’ve come to expect from this president. It ranks alongside his attempts to prove to the world that this arch-materialist is spiritual in private.
Perhaps it was the thought of his evening at Lincoln’s feet that prompted that strange, unexplained, and slightly deranged tweet from earlier in the day. “And then came a Plague, a great and powerful Plague, and the World was never to be the same again!” he (but most likely somebody else) wrote. “But America rose from this death and destruction, always remembering its many lost souls, and the lost souls all over the World, and became greater than ever before!”
People suggested it was biblical but I’m not so sure. Read it alongside the Gettysburg Address and there seem to be deliberate echoes of “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
If the symbolism is meant to look good, it is however merely that. Lincoln faced an existential threat to the nation that was rooted in the tensions between the federal government and the states. This, after all, is what the Civil War was all about. Did the federal government have the right to end slavery when it was supported by so many of the southern states?
Lincoln doubted he had such power yet his legacy rests on his ultimate capitulation to the greater moral authority he saw in the nation’s founders. It is not his doubts we remember but those powerful words at Gettysburg: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln, then, is the father of the modern United States because he finally achieved the balance we now see between federal and state governments.
Lincoln ultimately took the brave, dangerous, and ultimately for him, fatal decision to follow his conscience. Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly failed to step up to the challenge, pushing decisions back to the states in order to shirk responsibility in the face of this pandemic.
Last week, armed protestors flooded the Michigan state capitol protesting the COVID-19 restrictions. Trump responded by calling them “very good people, but they are angry”. It was another marker towards whatever happens in November. Should Biden win, we should expect results to be challenged in court. But if Biden does become president next January and if there are calls to prosecute Trump in the way the Senate singularly failed to do in January and February, then Trump will still have leverage in the name of those “very good people” who we can be sure will be even more angry.
It is hardly the legacy of Lincoln, but it would be foolish to even assume as much. One thought the presidential powers were limited; the other recently announced that the president has “total authority” over the states. One sought to bring unity in the name of a greater moral good. Trump seeks to drive a wedge between the two in the name of his re-election in November.
And that will surely be viewed as Trump’s historical weakness. His willingness to look always for tomorrow’s sunrise has meant that he has ignored all imminent threats. If you look at the tweet again, you might notice how it’s written in the past tense. Trump is the eternal salesman selling that dream home during hurricane season. Ignore the flood water or the alligators currently sheltering in the bathroom. Look at the velveteen ceiling and won’t that view look great once the floodwaters recede?
One can’t help but wonder what Honest Abe would say…