Finding solace in history
Many voters felt last November that Donald Trump was unfit to serve as president. They have been feeling worse ever since. There is some solace in history.
Look at Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce before the Civil War. The issue wasn’t nuclear war, but whether slavery should be abolished or expanded. Hatreds were freely expressed.
In politics, no politician really came close to Trump for consistent lying. But insults! Calling your hated opponent “Crooked Hillary” makes Donald Trump seem like a choir boy. If as a student Trump had read books at the University of Pennsylvania, he could have learned how to make his tweets sound sophisticated.
Back then, “enraged imbecile” was about the minimum insult. Trump could get more attention if he described Democrats as “swaggering braggarts and cunning poltroons.”
Pierce was a pro-slavery Democrat from New Hampshire. Though not a perfect resemblance, Trump also comes to mind in this description of President Pierce by a fellow Democrat, Hannibal Hamlin, who years later became Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president:
“He was dazzled by the pomp and splendor of his great office, and received the tributes paid to him as due him as an individual. He seems to have had a fatuous idea of his power. ... He soon learned to listen only to the voice of the sycophant. ... Mr. Pierce easily fell into the hands of those who wanted to use him.”
Most especially, Pierce was used by his secretary of war, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, future president of the Confederacy.
John N. Rippey, Zion
This story was originally published August 15, 2017 at 11:36 PM with the headline "Finding solace in history."