The Republican Party was dragged and given a quick history lesson after the GOP's official Twitter account published a misleading tweet honoring Abraham Lincoln, the United States' sixteenth President.
The GOP posted a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial and declared Lincoln the country's "first Republican President" in a tweet published December 5.
You can see the tweet below.
The tweet is misleading because while Lincoln was indeed a member of the Republican Party, the Republicans of his day bear no resemblance to the Republicans of today.
In fact, the claim Lincoln was a "Republican" is about as misleading as a claim Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul made last year about Democrats bearing responsibility for the creation of Jim Crow laws, which were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States.
Lincoln's opposition, the Southern Democrats, defended slavery in the 19th century and proposed the racist laws that were on the books for decades well into the 20th. The United States presidential election of 1860 formalized the split in the Democratic Party and brought about the American Civil War.
The monopoly Southern Democrats held in the southern states after the war fractured as support for desegregation and civil rights reforms took center stage and many White southerners switched to the Republican Party at the national level subsequent to the passage of civil rights legislation.
Many were quick to point out the Republican Party of today is nothing like it was back in the 1860s.
Republicans' use of Lincoln is pretty well known, and former Republican President Donald Trump compared himself to the man more than once.
In 2018, Trump falsely claimed the media "excoriated" Lincoln when he gave the Gettysburg Address in 1863, suggesting Lincoln had also been the target of "fake news." Trump said the speech only came to be revered as one of Lincoln's finest 50 years after he gave it, even though a New York Times review of the speech at the time was quite favorable.
In 2020, Trump claimed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic he believes he's been "treated worse" than Lincoln was during his presidency, a mighty claim given Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
Oddly, Trump once said no one knew Lincoln was a Republican "until [Trump] came along," underscoring his lack of historical knowledge.
And in a bizarre turn, Trump claimed he could beat an undead Lincoln and Washington in a presidential race.
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