President Donald Trump suggested that he could have handled the Civil War better than then-President Abraham Lincoln in a meeting with reporters at The White House on Wednesday.
“The Civil War, it always seemed to me maybe that could've been solved without losing 600,000 plus people,” Trump said.
Trump: "The Civil War -- it always seemed to me maybe that could've been solved without losing 600,000 plus people." pic.twitter.com/58jd0br4de
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2025
Trump is right to have civil war on his mind. The president recently took the nearly unprecedented step of deploying American troops stateside. Though the courts eventually ordered Trump to return control of the National Guard to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, he recently deployed even more National Guard members to Los Angeles.
The overstepping of states' rights led Newsom to accuse Trump of wanting a civil war, which Trump denied earlier this month.
"I don't want a civil war. Civil war would happen if you left it to people like him," he said.
In a recent episode of "The Daily Show" from earlier this week, comedian Jon Stewart agreed with Newsom’s assessment.
“He doesn't want to deploy the military overseas. He wants to save the military for the real threat: us,” Stewart said. “The MAGA mindset appears to be, ‘We didn’t vote for foreign war. We voted for civil war.’”
https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1934945041266471216
