Listen as Larry spoke with Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich regarding his #1 New York Times best selling book, “Understanding Trump”.
O’Connor: You actually spoke with a Lincoln historian and talked about some of President Trump’s speeches compared it to the Gettysburg Address, well actually I think to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address if I remember…
Gingrich: The First Inaugural.
O’Connor: Sorry, I’m trying to go off memory but I think may people would fid that audacious that you would compare Trump to Lincoln but please expand on that because there are some pretty legitimate points.
Gingrich: Well, what happened was [inaudible] and I went to the inaugural and we got to thinking about the inaugural address afterwards that there was a very clear restatement of the campaign, the core principles were exactly what he campaigned on and the reaction, of course, the next day with that huge march on Washington and people saying that they dreamed of blowing up the White House and so forth. And the hostility we saw during the day of the inaugural where there were groups of protesters who were really hostile and in some cases violent. And I got to thinking about that whole environment and it reminded me of Lincoln in 1861. So I wrote a very good friend of mine, Allen Guelzo, who teaches Civil War history at Gettysburg College and is a real expert on the Civil War Era and he said it’s really remarkable, he had the same feeling. And so he wrote me back and says – of course this whole text is in the book Understanding Trump – he wrote back, and is a Civil War historian, how he thought the two inaugurals were very similar and why. And then he did some more research because I had gotten him curious and he came back with the South Carolina newspaper coverage of Lincoln which was exactly the hostility of the American left towards Trump. You can read these words and almost transfer one name to the other. The southern slave owners hated Lincoln with the same passion that the left hates Trump. And you can see it in the language patterns. And what I was going to say is that it’s really very eerie to look at these kind of parallels.
A synopsis of “Understanding Trump” is below:
The presidency of Donald Trump marks a profound change in the trajectory of American government, politics, and culture. Like his administration, the movement that put him in office represents a phenomenon that is worth studying. [Read More]
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