Every once in a while, I have to admit that Donald Trump is right. Now he does it in a way that makes me think about the things he says, and our reaction to them - both as individuals and as a society.
But, before we get into deep water, let’s just look at what he said. To paraphrase, he told a cheering crowd “I’m more popular than Lincoln.” He admitted that he didn’t know if they took public opinion polls in Lincoln’s time, but said he would simply assume they did. Otherwise, how could he be more popular?
Now, no one who was working for a newspaper when Lincoln was elected president - not even the ace reporters at the failing New York TImes - yes, it was around in those days - picked up a phone and began calling people to ask what they thought of him. Mostly because the telephone hadn’t been invented yet.
There is also no mention that Samuel Clemens, whose articles were being printed in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise - a newspaper in Nevada - at the same time ever wrote about it either.
Let's Not Forget The Obvious
Trump was right about being more popular than Lincoln. At least during his first year in office. So was almost every other president. Remember all those people living in Virginia and North Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee and Florida and the rest of the 11 states which decided to leave the United States and form their own country? No, Lincoln wasn’t very popular with them.
In fact, after four years in office, he was opposed for re-election by one of his generals -a very popular one, in fact - who campaigned on a pledge to end the war, which a lot of people were saying was only started to - let’s polish up the language used at the time - to free the slaves.
Now the issues around slavery are complex - anything built into the Constitution when our nation was born and which lasted almost a century before the Civil War has to be complex. But, those issues were also simple. Slavery was wrong. Ugly. Cruel. Damaging to us as a nation unto this very day.
But, we are talking about popularity. And, after four years, it looked very much like retired Gen. George B. McClellan, the Democrat, would defeat Lincoln, who was running on the National Union Party line.* Call him a Republican, although a lot of Republicans at the time didn’t.
Lincoln won big, getting a 212 to 21 margin in the electoral college (a much bigger margin than Trump’s) and won the popular vote, 2.3 million to 1.8 million (better than Hillary, and her margin was better than Trump’s). Part of the reason Lincoln did so well was that no vote from a state at war with the Union counted. Jefferson Davis never complained the vote was rigged.
Now, all of this goes to the question of what, exactly, does it mean to be popular. Or unpopular. Donald Trump is certainly very popular with his base - the core Republicans who support him - with approval ratings hovering around 90 per-cent. The best ever!
But he’s done it because the Republican Party has been shrinking before our eyes. Our nation used to be about a third Republican, a third Democratic and a third independent. Not any more. We have gerrymandered election districts so well that the popular vote becomes almost meaningless - just compare Pennsylvania’s popular vote with the number of Republicans who won seats in the House of Representatives there - and political affiliation seems to be going the way of the Dodo for people under 40.
So Trump is more popular with fewer people, and he is supported by a lot of people in Congress who have already decided not to run for re-election. What do you think that means?
Well, for Trump it means a victory. He won! Of course, Winston Churchill won World War II against a bigger, more powerful opponent than Hillary Clinton or even Bob Mueller. He stood up to Adolph Hitler and won. And, what did he get after winning that long and painful war? He got voted out of office.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
About the same time - well a couple of decades later - we had a president named Lindon Johnson, who had his flaws and who took over as president at one of the most painful times in the life of our nation - the killing of President John F. Kennedy. Our nation was being torn apart by racial strife, and by the war in Vietnam.
As the racial protests grew across the nation, Kennedy made passing a new civil rights bill a key plank in his election platform. Nothing to that time seemed to work. The Supreme Court had ruled a decade earlier (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954) that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. But, not much had changed in the south.
When Johnson became president, he pressed for and signed that new civil rights bill, warning his fellow politicians that their party, the Democratic Party, would lose their hold on the southern states for a generation. Well, he was mostly right. The Democratic solid south became the Republican solid south, but it lasted a lot longer than one generation.
Want an example? Richard Nixon did really well in the south. He might have even been more popular with the Republican Party in his time than Donald Trump says he is. I just haven’t looked it up. It seems like a waste of time.
Footnote - don’t you just love them?
- Politics is often crazy. In 1864, Lincoln ran as a Republican, sort of. The Republican party at the time was split between the War Republicans and the regular Republicans. The War Republicans joined with some Democrats in creating the National Union party, the slate which Lincoln ran on, while most of the Democrats went with McClellan.
Footnote to the footnote -
Those Democrats, in fact, were part of the Copperheads political movement, and they adopted a Democratic Party Platform calling for peace with the Confederacy. McClellan rejected it, but a lot of people didn’t believe him. Most of the Union soldiers were sent home on leave to vote - not all at once, of course - and it is widely accepted that they gave the victory margin to LIncoln. After the war, most people no longer saw a need for a National Unity Party, and it went back to being Republican. The question of national unity - what it means and whether that is a good or bad thing - remains with us to this day.
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