The worst president in American history is back at it, comparing himself to the best. But this is nothing new — the endless repetition of falsehoods is how propaganda works.

Last week, in his now-infamous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, Donald Trump first questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity and then literally claimed he was “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

Trump started comparing himself with Lincoln at least four years ago. During the 2020 campaign, he began regularly informing us that Lincoln was a Republican — his ever-so-endearing way of boy-splaining a basic and well-known fact he thinks he has discovered.

During that campaign against Joe Biden, Trump started saying that he, like Lincoln, had been treated terribly by the press and probably belonged up there on Mount Rushmore with Lincoln and those other great leaderss. (Not that I believe he could name the other three.)

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Trump’s since-discarded vice president, Mike Pence, who hails from Indiana — where Lincoln lived for most of his early life — was enlisted to bolster this specious comparison. He recorded what I recall as a strained, somber video at the site of Lincoln’s boyhood cabin in Spencer County. That video seems to have been purged from the internet, but it was widely noted in the news at the time.

In an interview with Fox News that same year, Trump boasted that he’d done more for “the Black community” than any other president, except maybe Lincoln, though the “end result there,” according to him, was “questionable.” (I have no idea what he meant, but none of the possibilities are good ones.)

In the same interview, Trump helpfully noted that Lincoln had a nickname: According to the most prolific liar in the history of U.S. politics, Abraham Lincoln was “Honest Abe, as we call him.” Earlier this year, facing massive defeats in both civil and criminal cases looming, Trump actually tried out calling himself “Honest Don.”

Schoolchildren learning about the Civil War should first study Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered Nov. 19, 1863, and then, if they dare, listen to Trump’s incoherent, stream-of-unconsciousness “Gettysburg! Wow!” Address, given there last April, in which he briefly adopted a pseudo-Irish accent while supposedly quoting “Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor.”

Perhaps children learning about the Civil War should first study........

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