‘Presidential Historian’ Compares Biden to Lincoln, Claims Election ‘Most Important’ Since Civil War

Presidential historian Jon Meacham compared President Biden to Abraham Lincoln and suggested the upcoming midterms are the "most important" elections since the Civil War.
Screenshot: @TODAYshow

Presidential historian Jon Meacham – who just coincidentally is a speechwriter for Biden – compared the current President to Abraham Lincoln and suggested the upcoming midterms are the “most important” elections since the Civil War.

Meacham was promoting his new book, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, in an appearance Tuesday on CNN Tonight.

CNN co-host Alisyn Camerota asked the former editor-in-chief of Newsweek to tell viewers “why you think that this is the most important election since 1850.”

Meacham argued that democracy is “at stake” today as it was then.

“Well, I think it’s the most important election easily since that period because we are facing a stress test for the rule of law and democracies run not just on policies, not just about what a particular policy or tax rate is,” he said.

“It’s about an overall context of our mutual respect for each other as fellow citizens and a sanctity of law and custom that means that people who win elections legitimately get to serve in office,” added Meacham.

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Most Important Election Since the Civil War

Presidential historian Jon Meacham proceeded to take a jab at former President George W. Bush in promoting the idea that trust in elections is eroding.

“When you deplete the trust in the system, which is what is unfolding today around the country, and I will confess, as George W. Bush might say, I mis-underestimated the power of the big lie here,” he said.

“But it’s burrowed in and democracies do not long endure if everything becomes about power at the expense of winning humbly and losing graciously.”

It is utterly perplexing that an alleged historian is citing George W. Bush in his reasoning for the importance of election integrity and not realizing Bush is a prime example of how Democrats have perpetuated their own version of the ‘big lie.’

Meacham must have completely forgotten about Al Gore and his attempts to fight election results in 2000. Which would make him very bad at his job as a historian.

Following the 2000 election, Gore refused to accept the free and fair election results and would not concede defeat. He instead tied up the election process through litigation in the courts for months.

Gore consistently lost his bid to overturn the election results in the lower courts and kept fighting in the Florida Supreme Court. He would not concede until mid-December of that year, a month and a half after Election Day.

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Historian: Biden and Lincoln Similarly Fighting the ‘Big Lie’

Co-host Laura Coates noted the similarity between Biden and Lincoln “grappling with their own version of the big lie.”

“In Lincoln’s case, it was the big lie that slavery was a justifiable institution that ought to be maintained,” Coates said, while obviously Biden’s fight involves fighting misinformation about the 2020 presidential election results.

Meacham replied that the central question in elections is whether we vote “for the continuation of the constitutional experiment” or “do we put our own interests above everything else?”

“If we go entirely political, if it’s entirely, every moment is this battle where it is cataclysmic, then the system doesn’t endure,” he said.

Lincoln, Meacham argued, could have put his own self-interest out in front and “could have made several different decisions that would probably have sustained slavery.”

Aside from “forgetting” that Democrats fought the election results in 2000, 2004, and 2016, he must also have forgotten that that Lincoln was a supporter of the Corwin Amendment, which would have enshrined slavery. 

Meacham, of course, is much more than a simple Presidential historian. He’s also a speechwriter for Joe Biden.

He ran into a bit of trouble when he was exposed as having helped write President Biden’s acceptance speech in 2020, then appearing as a contributor on MSNBC where he repeatedly praised said speech.

“You know, Vice President Biden, I think, represents a kind of tonic for a toxic politics,” Meacham said in a glowing review of his own speech. “He’s not perfect. There are vices, but there are a lot of virtues, too.”

In his latest appearance, Meacham failed to mention that President Biden has been spreading his own ‘big lie’ by promoting the idea that midterm election results could be “illegitimate.”

Biden was questioned by a reporter as to whether or not the President felt we would have free and fair elections in 2022.

“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “I think it easily could be illegitimate.”

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Rusty Weiss has been covering politics for over 15 years. His writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, Fox ... More about Rusty Weiss
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