The cantaloupe colored conspiracy crackpot strikes again. Donald Trump read a piece by the Gateway Pundit, which declared that the last time the Democrats took a Republican off the ballot in a key election was in 1860 when Democrats kept Lincoln off the ballot in southern states.
Lots of Civil War references from the Divider-in-Chief lately. pic.twitter.com/Om1yMSbouy
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 21, 2023
This nonsense got researchers going and UpWorthy wrote an article which I suggest you read in full. Here’s their summation.
So to sum up, while it’s true that ballots were not distributed for Lincoln in the 10 slaveholding states mentioned and he didn’t receive any votes there, it’s not true that those states barred or removed Lincoln from the ballot. In 1860, there was no such thing as a ballot with multiple candidates to choose from, candidate-specific ballots were issued by political parties and not state governmental authorities, and Lincoln and the Republicans simply didn’t bother to try to distribute ballots in the states where they knew he didn’t stand a chance.
The voting laws were very different then from what we have now. Trump, of course, has never read a history book in his life and so knows nothing of the topic of elections nor of the history of the Republican party. The Whig party had finally collapsed, due to its insistence not only on the continuance of slavery but the expansion of same westward. The official Republican party was only a few years old when Abraham Lincoln became its first candidate. There was no support for Republican politics in the South, nor any party infrastructure in place there. It was a world which is beyond Trump’s imagination, mainly because it didn’t contain television, Fox News, or right-wing media. These are the only cultural cornerstones Trump understands. A world without them is utterly beyond his comprehension.
The Gateway Pundit was being misleading, as usual, when it said this:
Democrats attempted and failed to stop Abraham Lincoln from becoming the U.S. president. That didn’t work.
Today, this same party of slave owners and the KKK is hoping to block President Trump from the ballot.
It’s now up to the Supreme Court to shoot them down.
The UpWorthy article also noted: As the History Channel reports, “By the mid-19th century, state Republican or Democratic party officials would distribute pre-printed fliers to voters listing only their party’s candidates for office. They were called Republican and Democratic ‘tickets’ because the small rectangles of paper resembled 19th-century train tickets.”
Isn’t that intriguing? And right about this same time in history, a “shot” of whisky became the nomenclature of the day, because a lot of cowhands were too broke to come up with actual currency, so they traded a bullet for a small glass of whiskey. And that’s how the “shot glass” was born and later a shot became a standardized measurement of one and a half ounces. You learn wonderful things when you write about politics all day.
The story continues: “If you wanted to vote for a party’s candidates, all you had to do was take the ticket they gave you to the ballot box and drop it in. Otherwise, you used a blank ballot and wrote in who you wanted to vote for.” Simply put, Lincoln wasn’t kept “off the ballot,” because such a thing didn’t exist then. It was a different kettle of fish back in that day.
And yes, Lincoln didn’t bother to try to get the Southern vote. That he gave up on early in the game and threw all his efforts into the rest of the country and succeeded in getting elected. Lincoln had been in office only a few months when the first shot of the Civil War was fired on April 12, 1861. He had defeated Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge, both pro-slavery candidates, but now he found himself in the middle of a war.
And now in the last days of 2023 a total joke of a man, the last person elected to the presidency on the Republican ticket, dares to compare himself to the first Republican president. Donald, you’re not fit to empty Abe Lincoln’s chamber pot or hold his horse. And the only one who doesn’t know that is you.
drumpf tells another totally asinine lie. Must be another day ending in “y”. What a putz.
Minor correction time, Ursula, but Lincoln wasn’t even in office “a couple of months.” You have to remember that, until the 20th Amendment changed the terms of office, the President didn’t take office until March 4th. When the shots were fired on Ft Sumter, Lincoln hadn’t even been in office for 6 full weeks (April 15th marked the start of his 7th week in office).
Another point about the 1860 election, it was a bunch of states that are NOW absolute GOP strongholds that “kept Lincoln off the ballot.” Interestingly enough, a few Northern states, including NY and NJ, that kept off EVERY name except for Lincoln (in those two states specifically, a “fusion” ballot existed as the opposition).
Since Trump claimed our Revolutionary troops had taken over the airports…why didn’t Lincoln just drop flyers from the sky? I guess they were afraid of the space lasers the plantation owners kept under the straw in their barns for exactly that purpose. By the time the Germans bombed pearl harbor, John Kennedy was asleep at the wheel. Too bad the south was blamed for the job training program that raised the nigras out of poverty in Chyna and gave them a good life. If only they hadn’t brought viruses with them. Trump will straighten everything out when he cleans out the vermin as Jesus instructed HIM to do in his famous manuscript…Lo Mein Unkempt. You can purchase a copy for 100,000 dollars signed with a sharpie. There’s a free pic of a naked babe who sits in congress and her rack isn’t plastic.
gooblygook…history according to trump
And who can forget DON THE CON’S rendition of the Gettysburg Address in front of the Lincoln Memorial?
I find it interesting that a Supreme Court judge doesn’t understand the 14th amendment. There are several sections of this amendment including “The Due Process Clause.” He Trump been convicted of anything? If the news says that an insurrection happened does that make it a fact? How about when BLM riots set part of the White House on fire is that an insurrection? Have we arrested anyone for this? I get you hate Trump I don’t vote for him. That said this removing him, is insane. All the comments I’ve read are why you don’t like him but are not good reasons to destroy the Due Process Clause of anyone. You reap what you sow.
It’s a widely held view in conservative circles that the three amendments known as the Reconstruction Amendments “don’t really count” and I won’t go into their bullshit reasoning on whey they try to make the claim. What I will say is that the view is shared by the bulk of the Federalist Society groomed judges and Justices that have been appointed in the past couple of decades or so. It shows up in code (so to speak) in questions raised ruing oral arguments at the appellate/SCOTUS levels and even in some rulings. However, these same assholes wiil shamelessly charry pick from the 14th and the other Reconstruction amendments when ut suits them.