|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In March 2016, Donald Trump, who was then vying for the Republican nomination for president, sat for an interview with reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa at the soon-to-be-finished Trump International Hotel in Washington. During the course of that interview, Trump fielded questions covering topics such as when and why he decided to run for president, how he viewed the job of U.S. president, and how he expected to appeal to voters. One of the questions the Republican hopeful fielded was why he thought fellow party member Abraham Lincoln had succeeded as a president: This response was eventually encapsulated in a mocking meme circulated via social media: So, the short answer for this fact check is that yes, the meme accurately represents something Donald Trump said, in its proper context. His response was couched in typical rambling Trumpian style, jumping between a number of thoughts without fully explicating them. Trump averred that Lincoln succeeded because he was a man who was of great intelligence, but then Trump allowed that most presidents would be [of great intelligence], seemingly contradicting the notion that this was a distinguishing quality of Lincoln's. Trump also credited Lincoln with doing something very vital that would have been unthinkable ten or twenty years earlier, but he didn't offer any hint about what that vital action might have been. (Opposing the expansion of slavery? Appointing political rivals to his cabinet? Inviting black leaders to the White House?) Trump's following comments about Richard Nixon are not similarly difficult to decipher: Nixon was known to be stiffly formal and deeply insecure (some would say to the point of possessing a persecution complex) with few close friends, and those aspects of his personality shaped his interactions with political opponents and the press, typically in negative ways.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}