Jon Meacham, who has written about several presidential administrations, knows his history about presidencies. While doing a group panel discussion on MSNBC’s Hardball, he compared Donald Trump to Andrew Johnson in scathing fashion.
This is how he began his comparison:
“What the president has done here is yet again—I think he did it after Charlottesville, and I think he did it, frankly, when he was pushing the birther lie about President Obama — he has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history.”
Meacham continues on to mention the president’s racist attack against the four U.S. Congresswomen and how they are comparable to remarks Johnson made about African Americans:
... “African Americans were incapable of self-government and relapsed into barbarism if they weren't closely supervised."
Historian Eric Foner, he added, "said this was the single most racist statement by a president in a public paper." Johnson also opposed civil rights for African Americans and proved it when he vetoed the Civil Rights Act, that was eventually overridden by the Congress.
Meacham continues on to end his comparison with a big does of reality:
"When people say, 'This isn't who we are,' that's not true. It is who we are. It's who we are on our worst day and it's pointless to try to expiate ourselves from what Trump has been saying. There is a complicity, there is a national complicity in this, and the way America moves forward is 51 percent of the time we're with Lincoln instead of Andrew Johnson."
This is a sobering and accurate assessment of Trump by a presidential historian.
The issue of growing racism in our country being fostered by this “president” and the Republican Party is literally emboldening racists in our country. In my opinion, this may be the greatest threat we face and it must be defeated on November 3rd, 2020. The alternative is unthinkable.