Trump and Lincoln Are Opposite Kinds of Presidents

With his poll numbers looking wobbly, President Donald Trump wants the Lincoln Memorial as backdrop for a Made-for-Fox-News event today intended to portray him as the kind of leader he is not. It won’t work — not just because the juxtaposition of Trump with Abraham Lincoln is so spectacularly unflattering to the current president.

When historians rank American presidents, the Civil War features prominently in their deliberations. Nearly all historians consider Lincoln one of the paramount examples of presidential leadership. Lincoln presided over a nation broken in two; his chief competitor for the top ranking, George Washington, guided a messy quasi-nation that included loyalists who had opposed the rebellion Washington had led. Both presidents made great efforts to realize the American ideal of E Pluribus Unum.