Posted Tuesday night, October 27, 2020.
The lobby of the Dan Grable Museum at the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa. The mural in the foreground depicts young Abraham Lincoln's wrestling match with local champion Jack Armstrong in 1831.
"I have done more for the black community than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Nobody can dispute it. Nobody can dispute it. Nobody can dispute it." Trump speaking from the White House balcony like the wannabe dictator he is at his illegal campaign rally at the White House, Saturday, October 10, 2020.
Just going by how often he mentions them, it seems as though Trump doesn’t know there were any other presidents before him besides Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Abraham Lincoln. Sometimes he’ll invoke the name of George Washington, but that’s all it is, an invocation. Same with his occasional nods to Ronald Reagan. With Washington, he’s just engaging in a form of flag-waving practiced by every American politician, civic leader, and high school principal who’s had occasion to make a patriotic public address of no matter since 1776. With Reagan, he’s simply touting his Republican bona fides. He long ago gave up on comparing himself to Andrew Jackson, whom, for all the worst reasons, Steve Bannon tried to make the role-model for Trump’s presidency. As for any of his other 37 predecessors worth remembering, I haven’t seen or heard him invoke their names or even mention them except in passing. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson---they’re just names to him, and brand names at that. He admires Robert E. Lee more than he does the future president who defeated him. Carter has come up only to be disparaged in the usual Republican fashion as the example of presidential weakness and failure, and Bill Clinton, his supposed one-time friend, he uses as a weapon against his obsession, Hillary Clinton. Nixon is he who shall not be named.
Trump’s hatred and resentment of Obama stems from a personal malice long and well-understood. He can’t forgive any of the Bush family for not forgiving him for his scorn for them. That includes George Herbert Walker about whom he may not have said “I like war heroes who weren’t shot down even if they weren’t captured” but he probably lists him among the veterans, particularly the disabled, and the war dead, he regards as losers and suckers. But it’s Lincoln who haunts him.
Writing in an op-ed for the Washington Post, journalist and Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal (who just published the third volume in his planned five volume biography of Lincoln) makes the case that it’s a sign of Trump’s imposter syndrome. Trump knows he’s not up to the job of presidenting. Not only isn’t he up to it, but even how to go about is incomprehensible to him. He's afraid to even try because he’s scared of failure. But he’s aware that Lincoln was a great president and a great human being in ways he’s never come close to and it irks him. It’s a wound to his vanity and that always brings out his instinctive competitiveness. Nobody is as presidential as him. Nobody has done as much or black Americans. He even competes with Lincoln as a martyr. “They always said Lincoln — nobody got treated worse than Lincoln,” Blumenthal quotes Trump mixing whining with boasting, as is his style, “I believe I am treated worse.”
Trump’s grandiosity [Blumenthal writes] often betrays a bitter and pathetic undercurrent of self-pity. Usually, he plays his victimization as a crowd-pleaser at his rallies, appealing to the shared sense of persecution at the hands of assorted demonic elites, the “lamestream media” and the “deep state.” Lincoln occupies an awkward place in this paranoid firmament....
[But] as “great” as Lincoln might have been, Trump, with his martyr envy, has felt a compulsion to diminish him whenever he raises his name. Even murdered, Lincoln was treated better than Trump. Again, Trump wins.
There are five listings for Lincoln in the index of Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage. Three of them take you to Trump boasting to Woodward how he’s done more for black people than any president since Lincoln. The fourth is Trump varying the line a bit: “I’ve done more for the Black Community than any president in American history with the possible exception of Lincoln.”
Possible exception! Forget LBJ and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. In Trump’s estimation, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th and 14th Amendments, the whole goddamn Civil War and the defeat of the Slaveocracy only earn Lincoln a possible exception.
In the first days after Trump was admitted to Walter Reed, a bunch of journalists and pundits who should have known better felt obligated to express their sympathy for the irresponsible dope who brought it on himself. Trump, self-destructive and careless of others as always, did his bit to dissipate the get-well sentiment with his stunt drive-around Walter Reed. But one of those journalists, reportedly, was Woodward who said of Trump, “There's almost universal agreement that he's a warrior." (Reportedly. I've only found one source reporting it, and it may be an old quote, something Woodward said or wrote in another context.] If he said it, it makes me wonder: Didn’t Woodward read his own book?
“Rage” is a portrait of a bloviating, boastful, vainglorious coward, a 392-page elaboration on Jimmy Breslin’s pegging of Trump in his salad days in New York as a “loudmouth who couldn’t fight his way out of an empty lot.” Woodward lets Trump show himself up again and again as being afraid to make hard decisions because he’s too scared of the consequences of being wrong. He leaves the responsibilities that should be his to others, taking credit when they succeed and assigning blame when they don’t. Far from a warrior, Trump comes off as a chronic retreat artist, sniveling and complaining as he skedaddles, leaving a rearguard of lawyers and PR flunkeys to cover him as he heads for the hills. Woodward finishes “Rage” with a characteristically understated statement of the obvious:
For nearly 50 years, I have written about nine presidents from Nixon to Trump---20 percent of the 45 U.S. Presidents. A president must be willing to share the worst with the people, the bad news with the good. All presidents have a large obligation to inform, warn, protect,, to define goals and the true national interest. It should be a truth-telling response to the world, especially in crisis. Trump has, instead, enshrined personal interest as a governing principle of his presidency.
When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.
Hardly a profile in courage. There’s nothing in there that implies Trump has anything of a warrior’s spirit. Nothing to suggest he’s the least bit Lincolnesque.
This upcoming anecdote is telling. It’s not indexed under Lincoln, but it could have been, if Woodward had thought to include one bit of information.
Brad Byers was the liaison between the White House and the Defense Department when James Mattis was Secretary of Defense. He’s a former Marine fighter pilot who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also a wrestling star when he was in college.
[On July 21, 2017,] Byers was in the Oval Office, seated by the Resolute Desk...as Trump signed an executive order to assess how to strengthen the manufacturing and defense industrial base.
“You were a wrestler?” Trump asked Byers.
“Yes, sir, I was,” Byers replied. He had been the captain of the North Carolina wrestling team for two years and qualified three times for the NCAA championships. “Why would you ask?”
“Those ears,” the president said. “You have wrestling ears.” This was classic cauliflower ear, the buildup of fibrous tissue from repeated impacts. “Were you any good?”
“Yes, sir. I can hold my own.”
“I bet you were good,” Trump said. “You know what? I would have been a great wrestler. You know why?
“No sir. Why?”
“Because I’m tough,” Trump said. “And you’ve got to be tough to be a wrestler.”
I’ll give Trump an undeserved benefit of the doubt here and assume he knows the difference between olympic-style college wrestling and pro wrestling, a world in which he has financially dabbled. I’ll even accept that when he was in high school, where he played football and basketball, he might have made the wrestling team if he’d gone out for it, although his height would have put him at the mercy of truly tough kids with much lower centers of gravity. But, leaving aside the fact that wrestlers have to be more than just tough---In my high school they had to be on the honor roll. It wasn’t a requirement. They just all were. My high school was weird---how full of yourself do you have to be to brag about your toughness to a champion-caliber wrestler and combat veteran, especially when your self-flattery is based on your assessment of how you’d have done at something you never did at all. He might as well have bragged to Byers that he’d have been a World War I flying ace.
But you know what president was tough? And who did wrestle? And was good at it despite his height and long legs and took on and whupped opponents with lower centers of gravity?
You got it.
This from David Herbert Donald’s biography “Lincoln”:
When [Denton Offutt, the owner of the grocery store in New Salem, Illinois where the young Abe Lincoln worked as a clerk], enchanted with his new assistant, began boasting that Lincoln was not merely the smartest man in New Salem but also the strongest, the Clary’s Grove Boys called his bluff. They cared not at all about Lincoln’s mental superiority, but they dared him to test his strength in a wrestling match with their champion, Jack Armstrong. Lincoln was reluctant, because he said he did not like all the “wooling and pulling” of a wrestling match. But the urging of his employer and the taunts of his rivals obliged him to fight. In the collective memory of New Salem residents, the contest was an epic one, and various versions survived: how Armstrong defeated Lincoln through a trick; how Linclon threw Armstrong; how Armstrong’s followers threatened collectively to lick the man who had defeated their champion until Lincoln volunteered to take them all on, but one at a time. The details were irrelevant. What mattered was that Lincoln proved that he had immense strength and courage, and that was enough to win the admiration of the Clary’s Grove Gang. Thereafter they became Lincoln’s most loyal and enthusiastic admirers.
It’s not hard to imagine Trump into that scene as the loudest mouth at the farthest edge of the ring, egging on Armstrong and the other members of the gang. What’s impossible is to see him in Lincoln as Donald presents him in the passage immediately following:
At the same time, the better-educated, more stable residents of New Salem came to think highly of this new arrival. Though the village was close to the frontier, a surprising number of the inhabitants were people of some culture and education…
[These] town worthies grew convinced that [Lincoln] was a young man with a future. They noted his painstaking attention to his duties at Offut’s store, which were presently extended to include management of the nearby grist mill and the sawmill. “He was the best clerk I ever saw,” [Mentor Graham the schoolmaster] recalled. “He was attentive to his customers and friends and always treated them with great tenderness---kindness and honesty.” They took satisfaction in the great interest he showed in town affairs. For instance, he regularly attended the sessions of the local court, over which the corpulent Bowling Green, the justice of the peace, presided. Always looking for amusement, Green initially allowed the awkward young man to make informal comments on cases before the court because he told anecdotes that, as one contemporary recalled, produced “a spasmotic [sic] shaking of the fat sides of the old law functionary.” But soon he came to recognize that Lincoln had not merely a sense of humor but a strong, logical mind. Presently neighbors came to rely on him for legal advice, and, following a book of forms, he was able to draft simple legal documents like deeds and receipts.
At one point in “Rage”, Trump laughably tries to sell himself to Woodward as “a student of history”. There is a true student of history in the book, and it’s of course not Trump.
The fifth listing of Lincoln takes readers to a this passage in a chapter devoted to Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, James Mattis:
A longtime student of history, Mattis knew from memory one of President Abraham Lincoln’s codes of war from the midst of the Civil War in 1863: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings responsible to one another and to God.” ...
President Lincoln also had said, Mattis knew, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”
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