Frost/Nixon, Nixon/Lincoln

Watched it again, tonight, for the second time in a month.

Compared to Nixon, Trump is a lost child, an empty clown, completely out of his depth outside "reality TV".

But anyway.

I admire Lincoln almost unreservedly for his strength of character, for his ability to trust himself, the little nobody from nowhere, surrounded by his cabinet of people vastly his social superiors, and who all knew it.

Nixon, also from the little people from nowhere, was filled with resentment all his life of the big people all around him who looked down on him.

Lincoln actually incorporated his backwoods origins into his political persona, and his devotion to his singular conviction and his singular mission enabled him to keep on, keep on, until victory.

His singular conviction that dominated his entire political life, that slavery ought to be crushed and abolished throughout the entire United States of America, forever.

His conviction and his knowledge that in the end he could only trust himself made him a man prepared throughout those terrible years of war to do the right thing at the moment to get the best result possible at that moment.

He had, for instance, in the beginning, to be ready to stop the war and accept the seceded states back into the Union immediately with no change at all to the status of slavery.

But in a few short years he could and did attack slavery, emancipating all slaves in those states still in rebellion, knowing that now he could do it.

And then in victory he could insist that slavery was over, that it be forever abolished throughout the Union by constitutional amendment.

What a hero he was.

He was as courageous a brilliant nobody with a mission as was Joan of Arc, sent by God himself to save France.

So much smaller was Nixon in that regard, compared to him.

Despite his many and real achievements.

Update.

Between the two of them, LBJ and Nixon sent the South into the Republican Party and out of the Democratic Party.

That made the latter less and the former more sympathetic to racism, shifting the Klansmen, hidden and overt, from the one party to the other.

It also made the Dems more consistently liberal and the GOP more consistently conservative, especially in all things culture war-ish.

Evangelicals and gun rights, you know.

So the two presidents together set the stage for our politics becoming much more polarized and each party more homogeneous as to values and agenda.