We end the week with social media still rumbling to the mockery being directed towards Donald Trump who, it was revealed, has a painting hung on the wall of the White House that some have compared unfavourably to “Dog’s Playing Poker”. Yet to compare the work by self-taught artist Andy Thomas to Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s kitsch classic seems terribly unfair. Dog’s playing poker is, at least, a somewhat believable scenario…
By contrast, the painting hung in the presidential dining room is an even more outlandish conceit that shows the President enjoying himself in a happy gathering of former Republican residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
At his side sits a slightly giddy-looking Dwight D. Eisenhower. Over his shoulder, there’s a beaming Gerald Ford. Beside him is Richard Nixon, happily cradling what appears to be a glass of his favoured 1957 Château Lafite Rothschild. Then there’s a jovial Teddy Roosevelt and a grinning Ronald Reagan. We see George W. Bush smiling in profile, his father standing beyond him, the consummate administrator-in-chief looking relaxed in an open collar. Deeper into the picture are thumbnail sketches of Coolidge, Harding, Hoover, Taft, and Ulysses S. Grant. Most telling of all is the figure that Trump is gazing towards. It’s the only figure we see from the rear. That figure is Abraham Lincoln and one might be forgiven for thinking there might just be a frown hidden somewhere on the face of the sixteenth president.
Ignoring the picture’s aesthetic sense, it’s remarkable how little political sense it makes. It’s simply a fallacy to believe that Lincoln would be a fellow traveller with Trump. Lincoln was the very thing that the current president parodies on an almost a daily basis: the truly self-made man who worked through every hardship to become a remarkable orator and, through that, the leader of the nation at the time of its greatest crisis. Lincoln was born into appalling poverty on the Kentucky frontier, reaching adolescence before he earned his first full dollar (compared with Trump whose father made him in a millionaire by the time he was eight). “I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day” Lincoln would later recount of the day he earned his first “fortune” ferrying passengers to a passing steamboat.
The non-parallels don’t simply stop there. Lincoln was scruffy and generally indifferent about his appearance. Trump seems to have been conveniently born wearing a suit and is clearly obsessed with his own appearance and the appearance of others. One was a voracious reader from childhood in a time when books were a scarcity; the other has probably never read a book in his life, despite claiming to have written the bestselling (but ghost-written) “The Art of the Deal”. Lincoln was a gifted wrestler in his youth, rather than stooge in the grotesque sham that is the WWE. Lincoln was also, by all accounts and judgements, loyal to his wife and gentle with his children.
Most of all, Lincoln was an advocate of a politics guided by reason whereas Trump is all gut-based emotion, all preternatural insights that lead him to come out with such ridiculous claims as this week’s comment on climate change: “I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture”.
Lincoln also lived in a deeply religious America but did little to hide his own atheism. He was at best/worse (depending on your inclination) a deist and, though he would often defend religion and even cite the Bible, he certainly never used religion to pander to evangelicals. Reason, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, was the keystone to his arguments against slavery. It gave him the strength to lead America through its Civil War, despite the personal danger to which that exposed him and would ultimately claim his life. Indeed, it’s impossible now to know his opinion of gun ownership (though he professed a distaste for hunting) but hard not to believe he would follow Trump and accept donations from the NRA given that tragic night at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865.
Lincoln might be the father of the Republican Party yet it is difficult to believe he would today be fighting for modern Republicanism as expressed in Trump’s nationalist populism. He was certainly conservative in the most traditional sense, believing in slow changes that would not upset the social equilibrium. It informed his belief that slavery should be contained in the South, where he was convinced it would die due to its inherent corruption. Yet behind this lay a deeper belief in civil rights and the role of government in shaping the course of the nation through investment in infrastructure known at the time as “internal improvements”. He believed in taxation and, with the Revenue Act of 1861, brought in the first federal income tax.
Meanwhile, it was the Democrats, the party of the Southern States, that defended slavery on account of their federalist belief that central government did not have the power to dictate to states on this and other matters. As Lincoln’s great rival, Stephen A. Douglas, put it: “There is no man in the State who would be more strenuous in his opposition to the introduction of slavery than I would; but when we settled it for ourselves, we exhausted all our power over that subject. We have done our whole duty and can do no more. We must leave each and every other State to decide for itself the same question.”
It’s one of the great tricks of American politics that the two parties eventually embraced many of the values for which the other party initially stood. Lincoln might not have been a Democrat in the modern sense, but other than trade where his protectionism does sound mildly Trumpian, Lincoln no more belongs in that picture than Roosevelt, a man now remembered for his love of guns and approach to foreign policy (“speak softly and carry a big stick”), but whose progressive politics would be anathema to many modern Republicans.
Not that any of the above matters. In Trump’s mind, none of this will be about policy but, rather, the liberty taken by an artist who has indulged the President by shedding a few of Trump’s pounds and knocking off a few years. It’s also to be expected that Trump would want to see himself sitting with the man who is routinely feted (along with Washington) as the greatest of all the American presidents. This is about appropriation and self-image, living in the present through the past glories of men who can no longer support nor denounce those that would claim them as their own. Trump embraces Lincoln like he embraces Kanye West. It comes from an insatiable thirst for fame, even if that means robbing it from Abraham Lincoln, to whom it was, quite properly, an unwanted by-product of deeply held convictions.