Nonsense. Youu can draw plenty of parallels with the rhetoric flying around these days. I need to finish up my work but here’s a quick google search of the rhetoric of 1860. Again, I’m not saying Trump is Lincoln, I’m just saying that Democrats are being Democrats.
All of the quotes I’m lifting are from this article. It’s pretty easy to see the similarity of the rhetoric we’re dealing with today, with another Republican stirring the pot in the Office of the President.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0004.103/--anti-lincoln-tradition?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Confederates called Lincoln a “tyrant,” a “fiend,” and a “monster”
In speeches, sermons, and songs, in books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, they also portrayed him as a simpleton, a buffoon, a drunkard, a libertine, a physical coward, and a pornographic story-teller.
Hatred of Lincoln sometimes crystallized into threats against his life. For instance, soon after the firing on Fort Sumter, he received from Mississippi a newspaper clipping in which a reward of $100,000 was offered for his “miserable traitorous head.”
Of course the rankest abuse came from the copperheads, among whom none was more inventive in his vituperation than a Wisconsin editor, Marcus M. Pomeroy. Lincoln, he wrote, was “but the fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism”—indeed a “worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher than has existed since the days of Nero.”
As the election of 1864 approached, Pomeroy editorialized: “The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor and murderer… And if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”
Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist, declared in his monthly magazine that Lincoln had become the “miserable tool of traitors and rebels,” and had shown himself to be “a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred.”
I only got through the first third or so of this one article and I really need to finish up work and get to bed. My point is that any examination of 1860’s rhetoric from the Democrats and even the Whigs (the modern parallel to the “NeverTrump” conservatives, I suppose) will show that it is very much of the same flavor we see today.
Again, I’m not saying Trump is Lincoln. I’m saying Democrats are being Democrats, carrying on their centuries old traditions of promising the fruits of other people’s labor, sowing racial divide and failing to deliver on any of the promises they make.
