Hillary Clinton got called out during Sunday night’s debate for having both a public and private view on a topic. She responded saying she was using Abe Lincoln as her example.
This of course set Donald Trump in motion suggesting Mrs. Clinton was no Abe Lincoln especially when it comes to honesty.
Monday Trump had Face Book posts showing Lincoln’s picture with “Honest” flashing under it and Clinton’s picture with “Liar” flashing under it!
Nick Fouriezos known as Ozy on Face Book shared historical information that might make Trump slow down trying to associate himself with Honest Abe!
Ozy said “Midway through the 19th century, the country surged with a new political force. Mostly made up of white Protestant working and middle class voters, this emerging bloc despised the elites, whom they felt had rigged the system. They blamed the influx of migrants – namely Irish Catholics fleeing the potato famine – for a diversifying the nation… they began as state groups loosely affiliated by one universal nickname: the Know Nothings.”
Mark Sill from Trinity University said, “They easily could have said ‘Make America Great Again.’”
At one point the Know-Nothings held 8 governorships and had over 100 members in congress. They eventually re-named themselves the American Party. They were described as a “hodgepodge of conservatives united by anti-immigrant, anti Catholic and interestingly anti-slavery views. They believed Catholics could not be trusted – closely paralleling today’s Trumpian view on Muslims.
So now if Trump is planning to continue claiming Honest Abe Lincoln as an ally he’d better bone up on his history.
Here’s what Abraham Lincoln wrote to his lifelong friend Joshua Speed about the Trumpism of the 1800s: “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ ”
Heaven, please help us!
Post script. If you’d like to read a really well written piece on the state of our democracy by David Brooks called “The Governing Cancer of Our Time” go to kvoe.com and type “Brooks” into the search bar and the article should pop up. That’s b-r-o-o-k-s.
