Donald Trump’s 2nd Amendment Rhetoric—The Case of Lincoln and Johnson

Donald Trump’s remarks about 2nd Amendment supporters and their potential impact on a Hillary Clinton presidency need not be rehashed. If we cannot hold a politician accountable for the words he is saying, despite the fact that many statements that are extremely misleading withstand scrutiny by the barest of margins, then we give up any measuring stick of intention known to man other than direct action.

The most recent example is Trump’s statement that he believes “Obama literally founded ISIS”. While this is being spun by supporters—and I use the term “supporters” so as not to do a tremendous disservice to either Republicans or conservatives at large—we must not give ourselves license to allow subjective fancy to hold sway over the objective test that forms the basis of our entire legal system.

But is there real danger in his phrasing regarding Hillary Clinton? Of course. While many assume politicians to be liars, they also exist to elicit real change; what they say matters because by definition they at least express a desire both to accomplish a goal and to gain the power to do so. The danger of this cannot be overestimated. It is of vital importance to acknowledge that mankind has and always will tend towards the sword before parliamentary procedure, and this can be made no clearer than the comparative attempts at removal from the office of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and his vice president Andrew Johnson—one successful, the other nearly so.

Lincoln was the first presidential candidate who could truly be said to have a running mate, in the sense that he selected for the 1864 presidential election a senator from Tennessee as a show of solidarity with the South and a dedication to Reconstruction and reconciliation.

It will be forever enshrined in our nation’s history, and must never be forgotten, that a vitriolic and bitterly divided people produced an assassination of a president before an impeachment. This is precisely the result of the irrational nature of man feared by the Founding Fathers, who sought to minimize its impact through checks and balances.

Both Lincoln and Johnson were hated by their geographical opponents, and in both cases it was a single individual who made the great difference in American history between the political—not to speak of the fatal—execution of both Lincoln and Johnson.

It took nothing more than the will of one person convinced by rhetoric, fear and hatred to be willing to risk his own life to kill Lincoln. In Congress, it took the courageous willingness to risk political death by junior Kansas Senator Ross in the face of threats and bribery to avoid Johnson’s removal from office, which would have produced a fundamental negation of those carefully considered Constitutional constructs laid forth by the Founders.

In both instances, the willingness to sacrifice was required. However, John Wilkes Booth was no courageous man beyond what a liquor bottle imparts to the best and worst of us. While he found it within himself to shoot Lincoln in the back of the head—an act of cowardice by any measure—he further betrayed his convictions by fleeing, unwilling to stand and face justice in the name of principle. Ross, on the other hand, knew exactly what was in store for him when he drank the hemlock goblet poisoned by his fellow senators. Hence, while Booth is reviled for taking from us the greatest president we have ever had who saved our Union, Ross is enshrined in Profiles in Courage by another assassinated president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, for saving the Union by preserving in office of one of the worst.

That is why Donald Trump’s actual words, regardless of intent, cannot be ignored or minimized. Presidents are far, far too easily removed from office by individuals who are moved by all manner of instabilities, than they are by what James Madison repeatedly termed the “cooler heads” of a republican system. Hillary Clinton, if elected, may find herself facing impeachment or removal from office for acts committed before she was elected. Personally, I doubt she would if she is elected unless they are of the first order. However, if she is removed from our highest office, it will be by the machinations of our great charter that this will be accomplished, in concert with the will of the people, not at the point of one man’s pistol.