By MARSHA MERCER
If there’s a president Donald Trump
admires more than himself, it must be “the late, great Abraham Lincoln.”
“With the exception of the late, great
Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held
this office,” Trump told a rally last summer.
“Great president,” Trump said of Lincoln
last year at a dinner for House Republicans. “Most people don’t even know he
was a Republican. Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We
have to build that up a little more.”
For the record, Republicans call
themselves the party of Lincoln, and polls show most Americans know Lincoln was
a Republican.
Lincoln’s 209th birthday will
be Monday, but you might miss it. It’s not a federal or even a state holiday
most places.
Only Illinois, Connecticut, Missouri and
New York still observe it in February, according to the National Constitution
Center. Indiana, oddly, celebrates Lincoln’s birthday the Friday after
Thanksgiving.
Tourists who happen by the Lincoln
Memorial at noon Monday will find a free ceremony open to the public with
music, speeches and wreaths. At the Lincoln
Birthplace National Historical Park in Kentucky, park staff will lay a wreath.
The following Monday, the third Monday in
February, is the federal holiday that commemorates George Washington’s
birthday. Congress never officially changed the name, though the holiday became
known as Presidents Day.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY Abraham Lincoln!!!” Trump
shouted via Instagram last year with a picture of the Lincoln Memorial and what
was supposed to be a quotation from Lincoln: “And in the end, it’s not the
years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
But those were not Lincoln’s words. The
quotation came from an advertisement for a self-help book on aging in 1947,
fact checkers reported.
There is a way Trump can honor the 16th
president that has nothing to do with capital letters, exclamation points or
fake quotes, however. He can learn from Lincoln the brilliance of the unsent
letter.
It’s a lesson any of us can apply in our “Tweet
First, Think Later” age.
When he was angry, Lincoln’s ritual was to
write a letter venting his feelings and put the hot letter aside until he
cooled off, when he would decide not to send it.
A famous example is his letter to Gen.
George Meade after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Although the Union Army
was victorious, Meade had let Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and his army get
away.
“I do not believe you appreciate the
magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy
grasp, and to have closed upon him would . . . have ended the war,” the
president wrote Meade.
“As it is the war will be prolonged
indefinitely…Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably
because of it,” said the anguished commander in chief.
Lincoln knew the power of his words and
chose not to demoralize his general in the field. The letter was found decades
later among other Lincoln papers, with a notation that it was never signed or sent.
“Now obviously the opposite of that is
when President Trump gets angry with somebody, that tweet goes out
immediately,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Jan.
24 in an interview.
“I sometimes think if only he had a hot
tweet and a cool tweet, maybe things would be a lot better,” said Goodwin,
author of “Team of Rivals” about the political genius of Lincoln in choosing
political rivals for his Cabinet.
Lincoln was a master of communication in
his time; his Gettysburg Address is recited to this day. Trump is the first
president to master social media. But neither Trump nor anyone else could
remember the content of his impulsive tweets, as ephemeral as his moods.
On Lincoln’s birthday, we can all be glad Trump
admires the president historians consistently rate the best in history.
But if he truly wishes to honor Honest
Abe, he – and we -- should stop and think before we fire off that hot tweet.
©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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