Similarities Between Lincoln and Trump

[L Verge]

The media recently had a brief feeding frenzy on Trump's announcement pertaining to the imposition of raised tariffs on imported products. I just stumbled onto this (from bbc.com) that shows Trump has lots of precedence for his decision - dating back to the beginning of U.S. government actions:

"But despite the outcry, Trump has pointed out that raising the economic drawbridge is thoroughly in keeping with his party's historical roots. It wasn't just McKinley who believed protectionism key to American greatness.

"Tariffs were the Republican creed from the Civil War to the Great Depression, and a fundamental doctrine of its preceding party, the Whigs.

"Going even further back, the first US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, now a Broadway musical hero, pioneered tariffs to protect infant American industries from foreign competition. So did fellow Founding Father James Madison.

"Republicans from the mid-19th Century onwards continued to champion this fiscal firewall so northern manufacturers could compete with European imports, according to Charles Hankla, professor of political science at Georgia State University.

"Democrats, he says, espoused free trade as they were aligned with southern slave-owning plantations that exported cotton to British mills.

"It was Abraham Lincoln who inaugurated the Republican party's economic nationalism. Yes, the Great Emancipator was also the Great Protectionist. 'Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth,' he said in 1844.

"While Trump is sometimes accused of economic illiteracy, Abe himself once apparently exhibited a flimsy grasp of his pet policy while campaigning for Congress in Illinois.

"Tariffs would only be collected from 'those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompt them to spurn the manufacturers of our own country and strut in British cloaks and coats and pantaloons', he insisted, according to a biography of him by David Herbert Donald.

"Lincoln didn't have a quick answer for why import tariffs would make things cheaper. A journalist challenged Lincoln on the stump to explain why he thought these duties would make everything cheaper for farmers. The candidate is said to have replied that he 'could not tell the reason, but it was so.'"