History rhymes, with presidents great and small
“With malice toward none, with charity for all,” the first and greatest Republican president of the United States — indeed, the greatest president of them all — called on his countrymen to “bind up the nation's wounds” after four years of bloody civil war.
The enduring words of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address were delivered March 4, 1865, in the dying days of that “mighty scourge,” and just 42 days before Lincoln himself became one of its 620,000 fatal casualties, at the hand of assassin John Wilkes Booth.
Now, after four years of charity for none and malice toward all but those who do his vile bidding, the last and worst Republican president of the United States — indeed, the worst president of them all — will, by all that is still good and decent in America, not deliver a second inaugural address.
Nor will Donald Trump attend the inauguration of the man who beat him, Joe Biden, who must now attempt to bind up the nation's wounds, carved deep in the American psyche by the out-going president himself.
Trump will be the first American president to miss his successor's inauguration since Richard Nixon left Washington in disgrace before vice-president Gerald Ford took the presidential oath of office.
That was 1974. Trump is a disgrace who will get out of town the night before Biden swears to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and ... preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
While Biden can be reliably trusted to uphold that oath every day he's in office, for Trump the oath was just the first of more than 20,000 — and counting — documented lies he told as president.
Like Trump, Andrew Johnson, the 17th president and first to be impeached, refused to attend his successor's inauguration.
Like Biden, Ulysses S. Grant, who followed Johnson, was pleased by his predecessor's absence.
By a single vote in the Senate, Johnson was saved from the further ignominy of removal from office.
Trump, who may become the first president to be impeached twice, survived removal from office — the first time — because, among the 53 Republicans in the Senate, just one, Mitt Romney, could locate his backbone.
Lincoln's second inaugural address was just 701 words and delivered in just over six minutes, yet it ranks among the best and most memorable in U.S. history, alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt's first in 1933 — “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” — and John F. Kennedy's, “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”
If there is an enduring line in Trump's mercifully one and only inaugural address, it will be remembered only for its irony.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said on Jan. 20, 2017.
A week ago today, miscreants misled and manipulated by Trump's lies about the election he lost, inflicted carnage on the U.S. Capitol itself, unlike anything you've ever seen, as the outgoing con-artist-in-chief might say.
Abraham Lincoln was, of course, speaking of slavery, when he said: “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war.”
The insurgents who stormed the Capitol last week, and those who threaten more violence in support of their malevolent master on Jan. 17 and 20 — the day Biden takes office — are motivated by Trump to perpetuate and extend his only interest — himself. Personal aggrandizement and furthering his own self-interest was the point and purpose of the Trump presidency.
Trump's inaugural address
— labelled the worst ever by American conservative intellectual George Will — was a rambling, 1,433-word study in grandiloquence that went on for 16 miserable minutes.
His failed attempts to achieve soaring rhetoric included this: “We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease ...” Again, the irony is unmistakable, for Trump's inaction and indifference brought greater miseries of disease to America from the pandemic than almost any other nation on Earth has endured.
Lincoln's eloquence came, as it must, with apparent ease. Of Americans north and south, Lincoln said: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” then, again pondering the sin of slavery, Lincoln asked how “any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces.”
Of Lincoln's address, Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery, but who broke its bonds to become an iconic American abolitionist and social reformer, said simply, “it is a sacred effort.”
Of Trump's, George W. Bush, the 43rd president and a fellow Republican, was heard to utter, “that's some weird shit.”
American presidents are great and small; none greater than Lincoln, none smaller than Trump. History doesn't repeat itself, but as I hope the foregoing illustrates, it surely rhymes.