President Trump has had an uphill struggle with the “Powers that Be,” since January 20, 2017.
It can be said that Trump’s prime objective is to keep his campaign promises to the people who voted for him. As he stated in his Inaugural address, he will be returning government to The People as it was originally intended by the Founding Fathers.
He has inherited a stagnant economy and a population that is just about evenly split between those who work and are paying all the tax bills, and those who live off of the productive ones who are taxpayers.
He has a badly beaten, disillusioned contingent that want good jobs, fair treatment from employers, affordable healthcare, and an opportunity to advance financially. These are the people who packed his campaign rallies and went to the polls and voted.
The other contingent is the group who has emerged as a snowflake side effect from the last eight year’s administration, basically a generation of loafers. They are the race baiters, entitlement dwellers and under achievers who feel that the world should be fair (as long as it subscribes to their opinions and beliefs, but no others) and rosy. It is only their due as the special little people they are.
These are the same people who did not bother to vote, yet are the loudest in disavowing the duly elected 45th President with “Not my president.”
There was another President who inherited such an awful mess of divisiveness. He was the 16th President and his name was Abraham Lincoln.
While the current situation is not yet to the point of Civil War, Lincoln faced the enormous challenge of holding the Union together against all odds, while suffering an unwillingness to achieve anything like a bipartisan cooperation.
By the time he delivered his first inaugural address, seven states had already left the Union.
Eight other states were hanging in the balance of the decision of stay or go.
His was the delicate task of trying to bridge two separate concepts. Those of the slave holding states, as compared to the Free states whose employers theoretically enslaved their workers in deed, if not by law, with horrible working conditions, long hours and low pay. These Free states basked in the self-righteousness of their slave holding rejection, yet did nothing to uphold the worker.
Some factories and mining companies paid their people in a “script”. It was a special currency good only for the company store and for company housing. So unlike slaves, the workers were “free,” but unable to leave their employers due to the lack of legal tender.
These workers and immigrants were the ones who were drawn to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. They felt that they had an ally in a man who had pulled himself up from his station at birth as a poor dirt farmer to a lawyer to the President of the United States.
They felt that he would champion them as the underdogs and enact laws to improve their situation in the United States.
The press was exceedingly unkind to Lincoln and portrayed his lack of classic good looks as ape-like and ignorant. Lincoln and other politicos at the time employed many strategies for soliciting press and for getting press that leaned heavily in their favor.
Lincoln wrote his own anonymous articles to get his platform out and gain supporters.
Trump writes his tweets and he has a running battle with the (much advanced since the time of Lincoln,) media, who he has correctly dubbed as the “Fake News.”
Lincoln only had to deal with the newspapers, not all the 24/7 constant stream of information we suffer under now.
Lincoln has gone down in history as a wise and prudent leader, regardless of the fact that he was a very unpopular choice for president in his time.
He tried to do the right thing about slavery, even as he was heavily criticized, but he kept his promise to free all those who were in bondage by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which proved a two-edged sword in the arsenal of Lincoln.
He fulfilled his promise to free all as well as use the proclamation to incentivize the Union Army to finish fighting the Civil War as a holy cause, not just a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight”, as it had been billed by many in the army at the time.
How history will hold Donald Trump as the 45th President 150 years from now remains to be seen, but the precedence for greatness is there.
photo credit: Modified from: Jonathan Rolande Lincoln Memorial via photopin (license)
