Donald Trump on Sunday had the audacity of comparing himself to the man many historians rate as the U.S. greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, and just couldn’t control his tendency to make every issue — even in the midst of a national tragedy in which tens of thousands of Americans have died — about himself.
After admitting US coronavirus deaths could hit 90,000, Trump decided that the best way to defend his failures is complain that he has been treated worse than Lincoln, who was assassinated.
Trump’s comments, at the memorial in Washington to a president killed after emancipating the slaves during the Civil War, are likely to further polarize the raging politics of a current crisis that is stretching national unity.
“I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump said at the Fox News town hall Sunday night.
The closest would be that gentleman right up there,” Trump said, pointing to the 16th President’s statue. “They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
Trump also claimed that he has accomplish more than any other president in their first three years, in U.S. history.
Watch:
At the Lincoln Memorial, Trump says he's being treated worse than Lincoln. pic.twitter.com/psZwWRE6WD
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) May 4, 2020
It was striking that the President who has consciously torn at the nation’s political fault lines should make such a partisan argument under the marbled gaze of the man who warned “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
