Denis O’Neill: Our greatest president and our worst
Musings 2025 ~ Presidents Day
By Denis O’Neill, essayist, memorist and screenwriter
How ironic that on this Presidents Day, the two Republicans widely considered to be our very best and worst Presidents presided/preside over a nation on the brink of Civil War. The irony goes deeper. Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, led the Union against the one and only President of the Confederacy (1861-1865), Jefferson Davis. The issue was slavery.
Today, America’s 47th President, Donald Trump, a man who along with father, Fred, was sued by the federal government in the 1970’s for not renting Trump apartments to Blacks in Queens, and who after the 2017 Ku Klux Klan march in Charlottesville, Va., said, “There were good people on both sides.” (Fred Trump marched with the Ku Klux Klan in New York City in the 1920’s, so the Trump family’s fondness for white supremacy is longstanding.) Son Donald, who is basically supported now, and was elected by the states that lost the Civil War, and who is partial to the cause that led to it, would have more in common this Presidents Day with Confederate President Davis.
It is surreal to realize that our country is capable of electing two human beings that reflect bookends of intelligence and humanity. The current President, of course, is the only convicted felon and twice-impeached president. He also dodged serving in Vietnam by dint of “bone spurs’’ in his feet. He also stole top-secret government documents and plotted the overthrow of our democracy. As he takes a two-handed axe through the power of executive action to federal programs that support women, the environment, poor people, gay people and the arts, his Vice President, J.D. Vance, has been in Europe defending the neo-Nazi political party in Germany and laying the groundwork to sell out Ukraine to the Russians. Brown is the color of his shirt, and that of the man he works for.
His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and his longest serving Chief of Staff, John Kelly, said that Donald Trump is the most ignorant human being either man had ever encountered. Here is but one scrap from the horse’s mouth:
“Trees fall down after a short period of time abut 18 months they become very dry they become really like a matchstick and they get up, you know there’s no water pouring through and they become very very uh... they just explode. They can explode.” ~ DJT
Because it’s Presidents Day... and because once upon a time we had a President whose greatness reflected the brightest beacon of message and eloquence... here is but one brief passage from Abraham Lincoln, truer today than ever before. (Note: my father, Charles O’Neill, was a Civil War historian and a Lincoln scholar. His dear friend, Bill Speed, was ta descendent of Lincoln’s closest friend, Joshua Speed. As a kid, we spent many a happy outing at the the Speeds’ Pound Ridge, N.Y., home, on occasion touching and reading letters from Lincoln to his friend Joshua. My father believed that Lincoln was not only our greatest President, but quite possibly our greatest writer.
“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true – I am not bound to succeed but I am bound to live up to what light I have - I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him when he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.” ~ A.L.
I am not a religious person, but if there is a God, I hope she helps us on this 2025 Presidents Day. I will give the last words of this Musing to the sentiment once uttered by Scopes trial lawyer Clarence Darrow... a quote at one time attributed to Mark Twain. “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
As a country we will forever mourn the obituary of President Abraham Lincoln. As a liberty-loving American, I look forward to reading with great pleasure the obituary of the Trump presidency.