Government for the people, BY the people, FOR the people, OF the people, HAS vanished.
What we can say about James Buchanan, who was generally considered the worst President in US history, was a least the crisis that he failed miserably to address, the horror of human slavery, existed before he took office.
There had been many threats to break up the Union because Southern racists hated and exploited African Americans with more enthusiasm than they loved their country, just as Trump today hates Mexicans more than he loves Americans. (He loves nothing, save his withered self.)
It was fortunate that the United States has a man like Lincoln - from whose famous Gettysburg address the title here, of course, is modified - to succeed Buchanan.
Lincoln of course, cared what history would think of him, and Lincoln had something missing today in the party he helped found, intelligence and integrity and patriotism.
The two new candidates for succeed Buchanan in the minds of future historians, should historians exist, Trump and Bush Jr, manufactured crises, Bush in Iraq, Trump, even more mindlessly, at the Mexican border.
When Trump is done, I should not be surprised if the Mexican army could kick down the walls, take back Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, he is so weak, so ignorant, so vicious.
He is destroying this government, with the complicity of many of those in it. It is interesting that the same general area responsible for the Civil War, is also responsible for the destruction of the American Government 150 years after the fact.
