Donald Trump’s critics say there has only been one president to cause such discord in America and it is him, but Manisha Sinha, author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition” and a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, there was another president who did as well. And it was Andrew Johnson, who followed Abraham Lincoln into the office. It was Johnson, wrote Sinha in an opinion piece in The New York Times, who “pioneered the recalcitrant racism and impeachment-worthy subterfuge the president is fond of.”
Ironically in defense of her father Ivanka Trump tweeted out this quotation: “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.”
Although Ivanka wrongly attributed the quote to Alexis de Tocqueville it actually came from an 1889 book called “American Constitutional Law,” which defends Andrew Johnson against his impeachment in 1868.
“By the time the book was written, emancipation and the attempt to guarantee black rights lay in shambles, and conservatives rallied to the defense of Johnson, one of the most reviled presidents in American history,” wrote Sinha.
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But there’s more than impeachment that Trump and Johnson have in common.
“No one expected either man to enter the White House. Both presidencies began with a whiff of illegitimacy hanging over them: Johnson’s because he became president when Lincoln was assassinated, Trump’s because he won the Electoral College despite having nearly three million fewer popular votes than his opponent, the largest losing margin of any president who actually won the election. The size of the gap did not bode well for American democracy,” Sinha wrote.
She added more evidence of their similarities.
“Both Johnson and Trump amply displayed their unfitness for the presidency before getting the job. Johnson so fortified himself with whiskey on taking his oath of office for the vice presidency that his rambling, drunken speech mortified all who were present…Trump is a teetotaler but ran a presidential campaign full of grotesque insults, ridicule, lies and vulgarity. His crude and cruel pronouncements after his ascent to the presidency are too many to recount…Both Johnson and Trump, neither blessed with literary or oratorical skills, succeeded two of the most gifted presidential wordsmiths,” Sinha wrote.
But race — or racism — is the most significant likeness, she noted. Johnson was the president who vetoed all federal laws that had been made to protect ex-slaves from racial terror and from the “Black Codes” (laws governing the conduct of free Blacks) passed in the old Confederate states.
Sinha pointed out that “both men made an undisguised championship of white supremacy — the lodestar of their presidencies — and played on the politics of racial division. For Johnson, it was his obdurate opposition to Reconstruction, the project to establish an interracial democracy in the United States after the destruction of slavery. He wanted to prevent, as he put it, the ‘Africanization’ of the country…Johnson peddled the racist myth that Southern whites were victimized by Black emancipation and citizenship, which became an article of faith among Lost Cause proponents in the postwar South.”
According to Sinha, Johnson and Trump are cut from the same cloth.
“Both Johnson’s and Trump’s concept of American nationalism is narrow, parochial and authoritarian. Johnson opposed the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, that guarantees equality before the law to all persons and citizenship to all born in the United States. Trump has threatened both to revoke its constitutional guarantee of national birthright citizenship and have the entire amendment overturned,” she wrote.
