Former President Donald Trump thinks history could have been different, if only Abraham Lincoln had read The Art of the Deal. “The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” he said last weekend. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”
As if the cake even needed icing, Trump added: “Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”
As these things go, the once and perhaps future president’s detractors piled on — most notably historians, who scored his statement as a monument to ignorance. James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, noted that the Southern states’ “declarations of secession explicitly state that the seceding states were leaving the Union to maintain [slavery] and because many northern states were refusing to return escapees from that regime. This could not be ‘negotiated.’” David Blight, a Yale professor and leading historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, agreed, calling Trump’s statement “historically ignorant.”
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