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With Trump, so Dies the Republican Party
The Party of Lincoln has had a slow agonizing demise
Abraham Lincoln was not originally a Republican. He also wasn’t religious, was considered cowardly, may have had Marfan Syndrome and definitely suffered from severe depression. And he was a giant among men. For all Lincoln’s faults — and he would have reported many, such was his character — he navigated the country through its worst conflict and most morally trying chapter in history. Some argue that Lincoln was murdered at the most ideal moment to cement his legacy, but I take the opinion forwarded by Michael Bechloss that Lincoln was sufficiently learned and humble to have built a truly “more perfect union,” and integrate the newly free even alongside those who had fought for their enslavement.
The death of the Republican Party, which Lincoln joined after declaring the Whig Party largely deceased, began the moment John Wilkes Booth fatally shot him.
But if the compassionate, scholarly, and humble Lincoln was the birth of the Republican party, the hateful, ignorant, and self-aggrandizing Trump is it’s final demise.
When Lincoln died, he had just won the Civil War. But Reconstruction headed by his now elevated Vice President Andrew Johnson would serve to undo many of the principles Lincoln and Republicans of the…
