Donald Drump James Buchanan ?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Moments after taking the oath of office in 1861—on the same bible that Donald Trump used Friday—Abraham Lincoln stepped back inside the U.S. Capitol building to exchange a few private words with his predecessor, James Buchanan. John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, stood close by and observed the scene “with boyish wonder and credulity to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weathered head. Every word must have its value at such an instant.” It was to be a thorough disappointment. Buchanan’s parting advice was that “you will find the water on the right-hand well at the White House better than the left,” and other such “intimate details of the kitchen and pantry.” Hay recalled that Lincoln stood politely at attention, “with that weary, introverted look of his, not answering, and the next day, when I recalled the conversation, admitted he had not heard a word of it.”

Friday’s inauguration flips the script. It is the outgoing president who embodies the sagacity and temperament of a great leader, and the incoming president who seems blithely detached from the sobering challenge before him. There is no real historic precedent for Donald Trump, who is unmatched in his disregard for American democratic norms and institutions. But the age he has ushered in—or that produced his presidency—bears some resemblance to the 1850s, an era in which American politics was deeply polarized and in which one party, Buchanan’s Democrats, openly flouted democratic norms and institutions. In the process, they brought the American republic to its breaking point.

The bitter debate over slavery nearly ground Congress to a standstill in the 1850s and, on several occasions, brought it to the brink of knife and gun fights. The decade saw a Southern Democratic congressman, Preston Brooks, beat Republican Senator Charles Sumner nearly dead on the Senate floor (the Democratic-controlled House subsequently refused to expel Brooks from Congress). It was a decade when Democrats abrogated the longstanding Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had established a dividing line between free and slave territories, and when Democratic politicians colluded openly with border ruffians who deployed widespread violence and voter fraud to steal multiple territorial elections in Kansas. Even in his last days in office, Buchanan, by then a lame duck, looked the other way as his secretary of war moved large stockpiles of weapons behind Southern lines, after the secession of South Carolina.

Slavery was the driving force behind disunion, but the steady ruin of democratic norms and institutions made it possible. Of course, today’s political divisions don’t map so easily to geography. No state or group of states is going to secede. But there are other ways to destroy a democracy than to tear it in two. No less than in the 1850s, the country stands on a steep precipice.


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/can-history-prepare-us-for-the-trump-presidency-214676

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Many historians consider Buchanan to have been our very worst president

(even worse than W). I think he's about to lose that distinction.