Last week, in his now-infamous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, Donald Trump first questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity and then literally claimed he was “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
Trump started comparing himself with Lincoln at least four years ago. During the 2020 campaign, he began regularly informing us that Lincoln was a Republican — his ever-so-endearing way of boy-splaining a basic and well-known fact he thinks he has discovered.
During that campaign against Joe Biden, Trump started saying that he, like Lincoln, had been treated terribly by the press and probably belonged up there on Mount Rushmore with Lincoln and those other great leaders. (Not that I believe he could name the other three.)
Trump’s since-discarded vice president, Mike Pence, who hails from Indiana — where Lincoln lived for most of his early life — was enlisted to bolster this specious comparison. He recorded what I recall as a strained, somber video at the site of Lincoln’s boyhood cabin in Spencer County. That video seems to have been purged from the internet, but it was widely noted in the news at the time.
In an interview with Fox News that same year, Trump boasted that he’d done more for “the Black community” than any other president, except maybe Lincoln, though the “end result there,” according to him, was “questionable.” (I have no idea what he meant, but none of the possibilities are good ones.)
In the same interview, Trump helpfully noted that Lincoln had a nickname: According to the most prolific liar in the history of U.S. politics, Abraham Lincoln was “Honest Abe, as we call him.” Earlier this year, facing massive defeats in both civil and criminal cases looming, Trump actually tried out calling himself “Honest Don.”
Schoolchildren learning about the Civil War should first study Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered Nov. 19, 1863, and then, if they dare, listen to Trump’s incoherent, stream-of-unconsciousness “Gettysburg! Wow!” Address, given there last April, in which he briefly adopted a pseudo-Irish accent while supposedly quoting “Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor.”
At an Iowa campaign event in January, Trump suggested that he could have outdone Lincoln by negotiating some unspecified solution to the Civil War. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you,” he said. Speaking of that fratricidal slaughter that cost more than half a million American lives, Trump said: “It was, I don’t know, it was just different. I just find it — I’m so attracted to seeing it.” Sounds a lot like Lincoln to me!
Trump’s absurd Lincoln comparisons are, of course, only one example of the poor-me whining and ahistorical nonsense that comes out of his mouth 24/7, which continues in his third campaign of sowing disharmony and mistrust among Americans.
During a typically tense exchange at the NABJ event in Chicago, Trump was asked about Republican claims that Harris was “a DEI hire,” something he has hinted at himself without actually saying it. He called such questions “rude and nasty.” (In a recent appearance on David Pakman's show, lawyer and Lincoln Project founder George Conway quipped that Trump is the actual DEI candidate: deranged, egomaniacal and incompetent.)
After I wrote about Trump’s weird self-comparisons to Lincoln back in 2020, I reflected that it was actually Joe Biden who might be able to claim some similarities with our 16th president, who spoke so movingly of the better angels of our nature and tried to bind a fractured country. Biden would never make such a comparison, but I think it has only gotten stronger.
Biden has tried to be a president for all Americans in terribly fractious times, as Lincoln did. Despite the loathing and excoriation of his foes, Biden has managed to push through several important accomplishments, most notably the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which are bringing critical jobs and investment to rural counties (most of which didn’t support him). Like the president under whom he previously served, Biden has made clear that he refuses to see a “red” America or a “blue” America, perhaps to his political detriment.
Donald Trump has never tried to appeal to all Americans or truly address their economic needs. He just wants their votes, even if it kills them. His only goal is self-glorification, although he certainly seems to enjoy discrediting and demolishing our democracy.
No legitimate American historian would call any of Trump’s behavior during his chaotic occupation of the White House Lincolnesque. If anything, he appeared to be acting more often as the president of the Confederacy might.
Beyond a deep respect for the rule of law and knowing the importance of governing for all Americans, Biden is most akin to Lincoln because of how much both men suffered in their lives. The experience of tragedy and grief almost always deepens a person’s empathy and challenges his faith. That certainly happened with both Lincoln and Biden.
Abraham and Mary Lincoln saw three of their four sons die, one of them while they were in the White House. Lincoln lost his mother when he was nine years old. In 1972, Biden lost his first wife, Nielia, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, in a car accident that also severely injured his sons Beau and Hunter. Beau Biden, of course, died of cancer at age 46 in 2015, which was perhaps the main reason Joe Biden did not run for president the following year.
George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo” is a brilliant fictional examination of Lincoln’s mind-bending grief at losing his son Willie. We know that Biden grieves whenever he visits a cemetery, and can’t help thinking about Beau. (Do we remember a Trump spokesman mocking the Bidens’ Memorial Day cemetery visit? We certainly should.)
Donald Trump appears pathologically unable to express sorrow or empathy, even at the deaths of those closest to him. He reportedly went to a movie while his older brother, Fred, was dying in a hospital. He chose to bury his first wife, Ivana, behind the first tee at his New Jersey golf course, possibly as a tax dodge.
Whatever his flaws, Joe Biden is soft-spoken, humble, thoughtful, generous, profoundly decent and good-humored, qualities he shares with Lincoln, whose character was forged in poverty, struggle, grief and solitary study. He too was known for his humor, often considered a clear sign of intelligence.
Trump does not possess any of those qualities and doesn’t seem to understand humor, beyond the low art of mocking others and old-guy grousing about things like low water pressure in the toilet. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte writes, “Trump is not a fan of women laughing, which is no doubt one reason his wife rarely even cracks a smile.” To those not in his cult, Trump is sometimes inadvertently funny, to be sure, but almost always in cringeworthy fashion.
In the most fractious era of our nation’s history, Lincoln steadfastly believed in the Union and urged Americans to see each other as friends, not enemies. As we have heard many times in the past four years — and during his passing-the-torch speech from the White House — Biden also steadfastly believes in the unique strengths of America. He warns us, “History is in your hands.”
One thing I couldn’t possibly have known when I wrote previously about Trump’s ludicrous and self-serving Lincoln comparisons was how Biden would be viewed by presidential historians. Of course his term is not yet over, but that thinking has begun to emerge.
Lincoln invariably ranks at the top of any such list, but historians already recognize Biden as a consequential president, ranking him at or about No. 14, ahead of both Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. By a different measure, “overall greatness,” Biden stands shoulder to shoulder with John Adams, our second president. His recent negotiations to gain the release of hostages, dissidents and political prisoners held by Vladimir Putin marks another of his many successes during a presidency that began in the worst single month of the COVID pandemic, a disaster outrageously mishandled by the previous president, who also refused to accept his own defeat in a free and fair election.
Trump incessantly brags about being the best president ever — remember what I said about repetition and propaganda — but he knows he is ranked at or near the very bottom, even by historians who identify as conservative. He was utterly unqualified and twice impeached, he tried to stage an insurrection, he has been convicted of paying hush money and found liable for sexual assault, and he still faces an array of criminal indictments I hardly need to enumerate here.
After more than a half-century of distinguished service as senator, vice president and now president, Joe Biden’s legacy as a public servant will conclude with his selfless decision to pass the torch to Kamala Harris and finish out his single, remarkably successful term. That may well be the act for which he will be most revered.
