Lincoln’s First 100 Days – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Among the most fatuous exercises engaged in by the Fourth Estate after the voters elect a chief executive is the publication of the dreaded “first 100 days” editorial. Having endured a protracted and usually acrimonious political campaign, the long-suffering public is subjected to utterly predictable screeds penned by the new president’s enemies and equally inevitable encomia written by his supporters. All of this blather is predicated on the preposterous notion that it is possible to divine the ultimate success or failure of a presidency a little more than three months after inauguration day.

It’s hardly a surprise that, when President Trump reached this imbecilic benchmark, the nation’s most prominent “news” publications predicted that he was doomed to failure. The Washington Post, for example, cheerfully declared, “America gave Trump another chance. He’s blowing it.” The New York Times confidently explained, “Why Trump’s 100-Day Blitz May Lead to a Historic Bust.” The Wall Street Journal solemnly intoned, “At 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Is in Trouble.” For a sense of how much these learned opinions are actually worth, here’s a representative sample of what was printed in the northern press about our first Republican President:

The illustrious Honest Old Abe has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation. His speeches have demonstrated the fact that although originally a Herculean rail splitter and more lately a whimsical story teller and side splitter, he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion … His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world.

This diatribe appeared in the Salem Advocate, a central Illinois newspaper, as Lincoln traveled to Washington for his 1861 inauguration. The Advocate was not alone among northern newspapers whose editors heaped scorn on the first Republican president. Nor were they limited to the Copperhead (so-called peace Democrat) publications. As author Mark Bowden has pointed out, “Henry Ward Beecher, the Connecticut-born preacher and abolitionist, often ridiculed Lincoln in his newspaper, The Independent.” The northern press routinely slandered Lincoln as a “lowborn, despicable tyrant,” a “traitor” and a “cringing, crawling creature.”

This brand of “journalism” continued throughout his presidency. The editors of the Chicago Times panned his greatest speech — The Gettysburg Address — as follows: “The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances.” The Patriot & Union in Harrisburg was equally scathing. “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” That publication did eventually issue a contrite if dilatory retraction — 150 years later — in 2013:

We write today in reconsideration of “The Gettysburg Address,” delivered by then-President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the greatest conflict seen on American soil. Our predecessors, perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink, as was common in the profession at the time, called President Lincoln’s words “silly remarks,” deserving “a veil of oblivion,” apparently believing it an indifferent and altogether ordinary message, unremarkable in eloquence and uninspiring in its brevity … In the fullness of time, we have come to a different conclusion.

Well, better late than never, as they say. This does, however, raise a question: Will it take the corporate media 150 years to voluntarily retract the slanderous coverage they have heaped on President Trump since 2015? And no, the ABC example doesn’t count. Last December, in order to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by President Trump, that network was forced to pay $15 million and issue this apology: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s ‘This Week’ on March 10, 2024.”

But that won’t cut it. Instead of grudging apologies — Stephanopoulos was furious that he was forced to admit he lied about Trump — the legacy media must acknowledge the ever-decreasing trust with which the public views them. As Gallup reported in February, “Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades.” If the Fourth Estate fails to admit it is facing an existential crisis, its fate is sealed. President Trump won’t need to shut down legacy “news” outlets as Lincoln did pursuant to his war powers. All he has to do is assure that twenty-first century media thrives and control the prevailing narrative.

Lincoln and Trump are radically different presidents. Yet, both were outsiders, inherited dangerous dilemmas created by incompetent predecessors and faced hostile press coverage. No one in the nineteenth century wrote about a president’s “first 100 days.” This nonsense was invented, like so many bad ideas, during the FDR administration. Nonetheless, the beginning of Trump’s second term seems oddly similar to Lincoln’s first 100 days.