Trump has apparently criticized Lincoln for not making a deal that would have made the Civil War unnecessary. What should we take from that?
About 600,000 men died in the Civil War. Their lives have disappeared into the mist of history. Nobody alive today knew any of them. Trump is saying that, even from today’s perspective, their lives were worth more than the freedom of millions of black Americans. The end of slavery, in the long run, just wasn’t worth a war.
It’s easy to imagine someone who had suffered personal loss saying that in 1870, but today?
If you’re a black American and you are thinking about voting for Trump, you need to keep that in mind.