Stupid Shit Donald Trump Says: The Civil War Edition
He could’ve saved 600,000 lives, but not his own credibility
There’s an old expression we used to use where I grew up in New York:
Every time you open your mouth, you weaken the nation.
It’s the polite way of saying, “How ‘bout you shut the fuck up.”
And few have embodied that phrase more comically, yet more alarmingly, than Donald Trump, who this week decided to add “Civil War historian” to his list of imaginary qualifications...
That’s right. It’s time for another episode of “Stupid Shit Donald Trump Says,” the ongoing docuseries where our current Commander-in-Bullshit reminds us that history, like reality, is just another reality TV show to him.
In this latest installment, during a meeting with reporters at the White House between riffs about Israel and Iran, Trump laboriously mused that the Civil War could’ve been “solved” without all that messy dying. Just a quick chat, a handshake, maybe a golf cart summit at Appomattox, and boom: no 600,000 deaths. Just great ratings and a new Trump Hotel in Richmond, Virginia.
“I wonder if, ya know, the Civil War—always seemed to me that maybe that could’ve been solved without losing 600,000-plus people,” he said.
Well, sure. For starters, he would have his troops capture all the airports early in the conflict.
No wait… (pondering…) no, that wouldn’t work.
Maybe Lincoln should’ve used drones! (Mmmmmnah… that wouldn’t have worked, either.)
It’s as if he were negotiating a hotel merger, rather than commenting on the bloodiest conflict in American history.
Move over, Abe; Trump’s got this! Next thing ya know, he’ll tell us he could’ve negotiated peace with the dinosaurs before that pesky meteor hit.
Naturally, the internet went haywire, reacting with the only rational response: mockery. Because who wouldn’t laugh at the idea that one of the most deeply entrenched, ideologically existential conflicts in Western history was just a missed Zoom call away from a peace treaty?
And this is not Trump’s first foray into Civil War fanfiction. Here he is, talking about the Civil War at a campaign stop in Ohio in January 2024. And I edited this for brevity so you wouldn’t fall asleep somewhere in the middle of the parts I cut out:
It was negotiated, you idiot, which is why the Civil War was postponed as long as it was. It could have happened much sooner, but they kept kicking the slavery can down the road with one compromise after another, such as adding one slave state for each free state when creating new states. That was the “Missouri Compromise” in 1820. That’s how we got Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.
Long before that, the framers of the Constitution tried to figure out the problem with something called the Three-Fifths Compromise. Little did they know that it would provide a political incentive for Southern states to expand slavery because it gave them more political power.
There was the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott Decision, each one a failed band-aid on a festering national wound.
The Civil War was the culmination of decades of negotiations, arrangements, and tensions that finally collapsed in 1861.
Trump says he finds the war fascinating? He doesn’t even know its history, because it’s about more than the four years between 1861 and 1865; it’s also about the 70 years leading up to it. History doesn’t happen in a vacuum. History is about cause and effect, because nothing in history happens without something else happening before it, and whatever happens in the present day, invariably leads to what happens in the future. History is an evolving entity, a living, breathing organism.
Yet he thinks Lincoln could have negotiated his way out of the war, as if slavery were just a zoning dispute, a minor misunderstanding, not a moral abomination worth fighting over.
It’s like that old vaudeville joke:
Did you go to school, stupid?
Yeah, and I come out the same way.
Basically, what he's saying is he would have just allowed people to continue to be property. That is entirely his view of the world, and how he tries to solve everything. You know, dealmaking. You’re not a human being; you’re just another asset. Because in Trump’s world, there are no moral absolutes—just poor branding and missed marketing opportunities.
Too bad his deal-making prowess didn’t extend to things like a coherent COVID response. He says he could’ve saved 600,000 lives in 1861, but couldn't even save 400,000 Americans in 2020 despite all the advancements in medical science at his disposal. No, he was too busy suggesting we all inject bleach and watch “the numbers go down magically.”
It’s the same “negotiating” skill that brought us failed border walls, the longest government shutdown in history, chaotic trade policies, and vindictive lawsuits filed against anyone who offends him. Never mind that his current tactics of deploying troops against political enemies and calling for the removal of elected officials are inching toward precisely the kind of autocracy the Confederacy fantasized about.
Mr. Trump, I believe General William Tecumseh Sherman would like a word.
Personally, I'm still waiting for that better healthcare plan he promised in 2016.
Yeah, any day now, right? Just like Mexico was going to pay for the wall—after they stop laughing their asses off.
Goodness, I’d be afraid to ask him to talk about Juneteenth.
Oh God—can you even imagine the word salad?
Juneteenth—nobody had heard of it before me. I made it famous, like I did with the blacks and the economy. Lots of freedom. Tremendous freedom. Some say it’s the best freedom. Frederick Douglass was a big fan.
The man is offensively ignorant, patently ignorant, the embodiment of every drunk uncle’s bad take at Thanksgiving. His spectrum of historical understanding is so narrow you couldn’t slide a QAnon bumper sticker through it. Pick any defining moment in history—D-Day, the Cuban Missile Crisis, hell, the invention of the spork—and Trump would insist he could’ve handled it better. Bring up Albert Einstein and he’ll say, “Great physics, just tremendous physics. But nobody knows more about physics than me.”
By the way, it wasn’t physics. It was theoretical physics.
The sad part is, it’s not just him. He’s got a cult-like fanbase that laps this up and enabling lawmakers terrified to speak out against him, let alone criticize him. Or they’re like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the vapid harpy whose grasp of U.S. history begins and ends with reruns of Little House on the Prairie and half-baked Facebook memes.
It’s the blind leading the deluded.
Call me crazy, but maybe—just maybe—we should require every candidate for public office to pass a college-level U.S. history and civics exam before they’re allowed within 100 feet of a ballot. Sure, we’d lose half the field. And sure, Trump would never reveal his test results, but then tell us he got the “highest score, people say it’s unbelievable.”
But the upside? Fewer clowns rewriting history to fit their TikTok-sized understanding of the past.
And let’s be honest: Trump, our self-proclaimed Civil War whisperer, would have crashed and burned taking such a test. Ask him about Robert E. Lee, and he’d probably call him “low energy.” Ask about Lincoln, and Trump would say that Abe “never got the ratings I did.”
The man doesn’t want to lead, he wants to LARP—live-action role-playing his way through American history like a delusional Renaissance fair escapee with the nuclear codes.
He wants the costume, the credit, but none of the comprehension. He doesn’t just wanna be great. He wants to tell you he’s great, which is why he isn’t and never will be.
Greatness doesn’t shout itself hoarse in front of the nearest live mic or on social media. It doesn’t need to remind you it’s great every 15 minutes. It doesn’t seek out affirmation from shallow-minded sycophants. Greatness just does the work and lets the work speak for itself.
Trump? He’s a straw-man tantrum with straw hair to boot. He’s either a shrill little snowflake playing the victim using insults as a defense mechanism, or he’s a walking fanfiction embarrassment talking out of his nether regions. A feeble, whining clown clinging to a spotlight that only ever highlights his intellectual void and complete lack of character. He’s not a dealmaker; he’s a spiel-maker—less Art of the Deal, more Fart of the Spiel. Whatever he says, whatever he does, it either amounts to nothing or makes things worse.
Like I said… Every time he opens his mouth, he weakens the nation. It’s funny, and it’s sad. He is both a punchline and a problem.
So here’s a modest proposal: in the next election—assuming we manage to dodge another civil war—how about we choose someone who understands that the Civil War wasn’t just a personality conflict that got out of hand. Maybe pick someone who respects the 600,000 who died for a cause they believed in. Someone who understands that history is the greatest teacher for the present. Someone who won’t mistake revisionist cosplay for statesmanship.
Until then, we endure this nonsense—and pray the next Civil War he bungles remains strictly rhetorical. Because if not, it won’t just be 600,000 lives lost. It could well be the last flickers of American credibility and democracy, snuffed out one dumb word at a time.
I hear that. I've run across that saying several times. Doesn't have quite the same ring when said in a New York accent, but still, so true. If Trump was a nobody like the rest of us, nobody would take him seriously.
Thanks for reading and for commmering!
Bruce
Rick Wilson said it best, 'Everything Trump touches dies'. I would add that everything he says is lies.