Educating Conservatives: Today's Lesson: Why Donald Trump is NOT a 'Modern-Day Lincoln'

-
Is Trump a "modern-day Lincoln"? Some of his fans think so. But trust me, he's not. Photo Credit: NBC
Nope. Not in the slightest.
The only things in common that Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln are:
  1. Party affiliation: Republicans
  2. Ethnicity: Caucasian of European origin
  3. Last Job Held: President of the United States
  4. Gender: Male
Other than that, besides the fact that neither Lincoln nor Trump were shoo-ins during their first run to the White House, they are dissimilar in most areas.

An 1863 portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States. Photo Credit: Moses Parker Rice. Mead Art Museum collection 
"I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong."  Abraham Lincoln

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? It's, like, incredible."  Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, as the audience laughed, January 23, 2016
Consider:
  1. Abraham Lincoln was from modest, rural origins, born in a humble house in Kentucky in 1809. Donald Trump was born into a wealthy New York City family in 1946 and has never been poor.
  2. Abraham Lincoln was married once, was a loyal husband,  and never divorced Mary Todd Lincoln (even after Mary's fall into a depressive state following their young son Willie's death in 1862 at the age of 11), with whom he had four sons, (Robert, Edward, Willie, and Tad, two of whom died during his lifetime; Tad, the youngest, died at the age of 18 from heart failure); Trump has been married thrice (to Ivana, Marla, and Melania), cheated on all three wives, and is the father of five (Donald Jr, Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany, and Barron (three with Ivana, one each with Marla and Melania).
  3. Abraham Lincoln was a combat veteran (having served in the Illinois militia, the precursor to today’s Army National Guard, during the Black Hawk War); Donald Trump famously did not serve during the Vietnam War. First he got four deferments from the draft while he was in college from 1964 to 1968; after that, he was classified as 1-Y (unfit for military duty unless in case of dire national emergency) due to “bone spurs” on both feet. Before the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, Trump was reclassified as 4-F (unfit for military service in all circumstances.)
  4. Abraham Lincoln was a self-educated man who later studied law, passed the Illinois bar exam, and had a successful career as a country lawyer and, later, a politician. Donald Trump worked in the Trump Organization at his father’s side and eventually earned a somewhat murky reputation as a real estate mogul and businessman.
  5. Abraham Lincoln was a voracious reader, a gifted writer, and a fine public speaker with great wit and a sense of comic timing. Donald Trump is an indifferent reader, an average-level writer, and - at least in his present capacity as President, an often inarticulate public speaker.
So, no. Donald Trump isn’t a 21st Century Abraham Lincoln.
He’s not even a 21st Century Richard Milhous Nixon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more