SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Four parties and seven years from now, the mysterious memory chords may recall how Donald Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, praising him one day and bashing him the next. It is entirely appropriate and proper that our descendants investigate why the 45th president, who hopes to be the 47th, keeps mentioning the 16th.

“This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” Trump said in a video introducing “Trump digital trading cards” in December 2022, shortly after announcing his third run for the presidency.

The Republican has often taken up the name of the great emancipator and compared himself or others to him – he has been treated worse than Lincoln, he has done more for blacks than anyone since Lincoln, and so on. It has become a recurring refrain in Trump’s unique brand of oratory, the meandering stream of random cultural references, dire warnings about the dangers of electing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, personal grievances and self-promoting narratives he has come to describe as “the web.” .”

In California on October 13, Trump invoked Lincoln to criticize Harris.

“What the hell is wrong with our country? Look, we used to have the greatest — Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “Now look at this. Can you believe what we’re doing? She’s so bad.”

Later that week, a 10-year-old from Tennessee called “Fox and Friends” to ask who Trump’s favorite president was when he was a kid. Trump cited GOP role model Ronald Reagan, despite being in his 30s when Reagan was first inaugurated in 1981. He then swung at Lincoln, but tempered his praise with some belated second guesses about the war that broke out six weeks after Lincoln’s first inauguration.

“Lincoln was probably a great president, although I’ve always said why wasn’t it decided?” said Trump, who has repeatedly claimed that if he had been at the helm, the wars in Ukraine and Israel would never have happened. “You know, I’m a guy who—it doesn’t make sense. We had a civil war.”

Harold Holzer, a noted Lincoln biographer and chairman of the Lincoln Forum, marveled at the development of Trump’s peculiar version of history.

“The problem with Trump’s use of Lincoln is that it’s kind of malice toward some, and then malice toward many, and ultimately malice toward Lincoln as well,” Holzer said.

Countless political hopefuls have tried to grab Lincoln’s long coat. The difference, Holzer said, is that most people associate themselves with the humble Illinois rail splitter without drawing comparisons.

Barack Obama sent a stunning message on Lincoln’s birthday weekend in 2007 when he stood at Springfield’s Old State Capitol, where Lincoln served in the House of Representatives for eight years, to announce his campaign for president. And at this year’s Democratic National Convention, Obama summoned “the better angels of our nature,” whom Lincoln had summoned in his first inaugural address, to urge the nation to come together.

Gerald Ford, who reluctantly stepped in to serve as vice president during the Watergate scandal, tried to temper expectations by declaring after his swearing-in, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.” When asked how he felt after losing the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, another Illinoisan, Adlai Stevenson, recalled Lincoln’s response from a similar circumstance: He was reminded of the little boy who stubbed his toe—he was too old to cry , but it hurts too much to laugh.

“It’s not a new phenomenon. There’s a whole history of presidents referencing other presidents in this kind of way,” said presidential scholar Justin Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University. “Trump’s approach to doing that is unique, as is everything about Trump. It is often less nuanced or sensitive.”

Trump himself is not particularly fixated. While President Joe Biden was still in the race, Trump suggested that Jimmy Carterwhose presidential history has not been treated gently, was relieved that Biden fared worse.

Trump’s apparent love-hate fascination with Lincoln is a function of his desire to preserve and build on his legacy, Vaughn said. (The The President’s Grand Project(a poll of political scientists co-authored by Vaughn and last updated in December lists Lincoln as the greatest president in U.S. history with Trump dead last, a rating Trump and Biden sparred over during their June debate).

As for the Civil War, Vaughn said it’s the dealmaker in Trump that suggests the broken union could have been repaired from war. But the entire history of slavery in the United States was built on compromise.

Holzer said the War Between the States was likely inevitable to purge slavery and ultimately create a unified nation.

“Better negotiators than Donald Trump, including Henry Clay, tried to resolve the sectional crisis without success,” he said.

Trump has consistently claimed that he is did more for black Americans than any president since Lincoln, citing his work as president on criminal justice reform and the creation of so-called opportunity zones designed to draw investor dollars to underserved communities.

By comparison, Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in rebellious states, a bold if political document that shocked both the Union-loving North and the secessionist South. And his relentless and masterful lobbying was instrumental in Congress’s passage of the 13th Amendment, which forever abolished involuntary servitude in the United States, just weeks before his assassination.

Based on the Emancipation Proclamation alone, “there is no comparison to be made between former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Trump,” said Daina Ramey Berry, dean of humanities and arts at the University of California-Santa Barbara and an expert on the history of slavery. Although the proclamation had no immediate effect, Berry said once slavery was abolished, “people saw Lincoln as the great emancipator and an advocate of unity and liberty.”

How the self-effacing Lincoln might react to the dust-up is anyone’s guess, but it does recall an incident when he was a circuit-riding lawyer.

Once, in Bloomington, Illinois, fellow lawyer Ward Hill Lamon, who would accompany Lincoln to Washington and become his self-appointed bodyguard, ripped his pants just before the court sat for the afternoon. The other attorneys kindly raised a collection to replace Lamon’s pants.

When the hat was given to him, instead of a coin, Lincoln dropped in a scrap of paper on which he had scrawled: “I can contribute nothing to the end in view.”

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Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed.