Donald Trump is now neck deep in media controversy again. After Rich Lowry suggested on the Fox network that candidate Carly Fiorina has surgical removed Trump’s private parts (Lowry used a more graphic term), Trump shot back on Twitter that he was boycotting Fox for unfair coverage, and that Lowry should be banned from further appearances and fined by the FCC (which lacks the power to do so).
Trump’s thin skin and quickness to strike back in anger—hence his low blows against Jeb Bush (and family), Megan Kelly, Carly Fiorina, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, and others—are striking and lead many observers to dismiss him as a pathological symptom of our new age of reality television “mad as hell” entertainers. But in fact Trump’s tantrums have remarkable historical antecedents.
According to his law partner William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln was a great man with notable psychological traits. These included a personal ambition “like an engine that knew no rest,” an obsession with women (kept under control, however, by the Victorian inhibitions of his time), and an explosive anger that he first expressed in frontier wrestling but then found an outlet for in invective and satire. Out of his teens, Lincoln took offense at a leading local family, the Grigsbys, into which his sister Sarah, who died in childbirth, had married. He “skinned” one Grigsby in a pseudo-biblical satire, The Chronicles of Ruben, that accused him of being so unsuccessful courting women that he had married a man. In 1840, when he was 32 years old, Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for Congress. (He was later elected for one term in 1846.) He again “skinned” his Democratic opponent, Jesse B. Thomas, mimicking him “in gesture and voice, at times caricaturing his walk and the very motion of his body” so cruelly that Lincoln made a rare apology.
Trump also caricatures his critics—and avoids making apologies.
During the 1830s and 1840s, Lincoln skewered a number of rivals including prominent Methodist preacher and politician Peter Cartwright who had attacked him. Lincoln was reputed to be a religious freethinker, and this time in his public dispute with Cartwright he sided with anti-Methodist Baptists who accused Cartwright of trying to build a religious-political “Methodist Machine” and then use it to stack the new public schools in Illinois with teachers of their religious persuasion. In the 1850s, Lincoln emerged as a staunch opponent of bigoted Know Nothings inside and outside the new Republican Party. As President during the Civil War, he revoked General Grant’s order banning Jewish peddlers from Tennessee.
Lincoln may never have changed in his defining character. One biographer, Edgar Lee Masters, describes him metaphorically in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas as still using the tactics of a frontier wrestler—though masterfully and within the rules—without eye gouging. Starting in the 1840s, however, as historian Douglas Wilson has demonstrated, Lincoln matured and eschewed his use of raw, sometimes scabrous invective. In his own terminology, Lincoln decided not act like a lowly scavenger, but to hunt political game bravely with “the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle.” In this way, he redefined himself both to himself and to the public as a worthy son of America’s Founding Fathers.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Donald Trump possesses any of Lincoln’s maturing transformative powers.
