WASHINGTON, D.C. — Most every American can name its 16th president. That’s because he happens to be, probably, the most famous one, and millions of Americans consider him to be the best in history. While “Honest” Abraham Lincoln may have been 16th in line to occupy the presidency, he was the very first president from a political party you might just have heard of — The Republican Party.
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Lincoln didn’t form the Republican Party, but he was one of its earliest members. Formed from the vestiges of the Whig Party — ironically enough to combat what they saw as a tyrannical President Andrew Jackson, who Trump admires enough to hang his portrait in the Oval Office — the Republicans officially formed in 1854. However, almost 170 years later, the party that was formed to fight Jackson is fighting to keep a statue of him in D.C. intact, and is fighting to keep the monuments to confederate generals that literally fought a war against Lincoln and the country itself up as well.
America was a country formed in the pursuit of liberty and freedom for all, but while still holding fast to the practice of slavery. A compromise that only counted slaves as 60% of a white person was written into the Constitution. Even after the Civil War and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, racists in state and local governments sought to enforce a “separate but equal” doctrine in which forcing the races to remain segregated — with different water fountains, entrances, and exits for whites and blacks — and ushered in the Jim Crow era that still saw African Americans lynched, forced into economic servitude under sharecropping, and generally treated as less than equal to white Americans.
During a great time of civil unrest around the turn of the last century, racists in the south started getting anxious about growing efforts — largely spearheaded by Republicans — to register black people to vote. That’s when statues to confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson started being erected. They weren’t built in the time of the Civil War to “honor the fallen,” instead, they were built to strike fear into those pushing for racial equality.
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From the time of the Civil War, there have been efforts made to soften the public perception of people like Lee and Jackson. However one views them, though, it can be understood that in many ways, they were traitors to America, and even if one chooses not to apply that particular adjective to them, the fact remains that they were sworn enemies of Abraham Lincoln, the party that Donald Trump now leads.
Yet, Trump and his supporters are the ones fighting hardest to keep statues of Lincoln’s enemies — indeed, perhaps America’s enemies — intact. This morning, while “walking the morning farts off” President Trump was spotted on the White House grounds. The subject of monuments and statues was brought up by one of the pool reporters.
“I’m glad you asked that. I really am quite glad,” Trump said, a smell of burnt hair and three day old Big Macs wafting up from his adult diaper. “We’re fighting to keep our glorious statues up, it’s true. And it’s true that Lincoln was their enemy, but I want to make something very clear. You ready? I don’t give a fuck. About history. About your feelings. About their feelings. I don’t fucking care, okay? Do you know what I do care about?”
Trump squeezed out an enormous, booming fart that sounded like an entire family of ducks trying to burst out of his rectum at once.
“I care about me. And people who like me want those statues up. So I say the statues stay up,” Trump said. “If my people woke up tomorrow and decided they hated statues, I’d issue an executive order taking them all down before lunchtime. Okay? It’s not that hard a concept. I’m an empty-headed moron who does everything I can to please people who say they like me while I pretend to not care if people don’t like me. I do what I think I need to do to maintain power and some vestige of popularity.”
Another fart.
“So there, you got your explanation on statues,” Trump said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the Ventilator King of America has a date with his iPhone on the shitter, and my Twitter bots don’t like it when I keep them waiting!”
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Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook, Spotify, and Instagram, but not Twitter because Twitter is a cesspool.
