Trump: Civil War didn't need to happen, could have been "negotiated"

Oh, he meant the previous civil war.
- And hes blaming the Feds for it.
  The south wanted to force the North to treat escaped slaves as stolen property.
  The North said they were people.
  So the south tried to force the feds into helping them.
  The feds told the south "state rights, the Fed can't do that".
  So the South started a civil war against the federal government, in an attempt to get a more powerful federal government.
  Which actually did work? The federal government went ahead and banned slavery outright during the war. Something Lincoln had spent years saying the federal government couldn't do.
  So by trumps logic:
  When conservatives try to do something, we should just do the opposite because if they fight a civil war over it, that's what'll happen anyways
  
  The feds told the south “state rights, the Fed can’t do that”.
  It's worse. The Feds told the South "Okay, we'll make it law." And that still wasn't enough for the South.
- Yeah I am sure there is no double meaning here....
  
  I don't even think it was a double meaning, he means exactly what he said. The traitor and a whole lot of cultists are going to swing eventually.

Go on... how would you have negotiated the South out of slavery?
- Are you sure that's what he would be negotiating for?
  
  Probably the opposite, but I think he is honestly trying to suggest that the South could have been negotiated out of chattel slavery. He's a moron, let's not forget that.
- This orange asshole is completely surrounded by White Nationalists, Neo Nazis, KKK Members, Confederate Apologists, etc. etc. They all sit around spewing this shite to each other and then he plays their greatest hits on stage to the Qult45 crowds.
  
  Wasn’t Iowa on the side of the north? Lol
- Before the war, Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist. He wanted to stop new states from having slavery, and keep no slavery where it was. He was fine with letting the south keep their slaves for the sake of the Union.
  The problem was the South did not want to limit their potential to grow slavery to new states, and decided to go to war over it.
  Still doubt negotiation could have worked. Lincoln really did not want to go to war in the first place.
  
  I judge people more by their deeds than their desires, especially their desires before the fact. Lincoln ended up doing the right thing. He also ended up successfully seeing the country through one of the most difficult times, if not the most difficult time, in its history. He is, to me, rightfully regarded as one of our greatest presidents regardless of his thoughts on slavery before the war.
  
  The problem was the South did not want to limit their potential to grow slavery to new states, and decided to go to war over it.
  This shows exactly why Trump is wrong.
  The reason they didn't want new states to all be free states is that then Congress would have the votes to make slavery illegal.
- Lol they just redefined the terms of slavery. Slavery is alive and well in the USA.
  
  Correct. Slavery is still legal in U.S. prisons. The public may not be aware of it, but millions of people in U.S. prisons are slaves as permitted under U.S. law.
  
  I assume you mean in a "wage slave" kinda way?
  
  Well, only metaphorically, right?
- I really want to know. We should get Lincoln and Davis impersonators and trick Trump into thinking he time traveled
- Well, obviously only half of the slaves would have been freed.
- The only negotiation option that is moral is "We will shoot you till your stop treating people as property."
  I think it's a fair offering.

They'll sacrifice their lives for a person who is demonstrably the actual biggest loser in history, and he just gets more loser-y, folks, okay... If any of you are starting to have your memories fade, here's a quick refresher to read this morning and then copy and send to your aunt karen in Missouri.
0 re-elections won
1 term president
2 times impeached
3 marriages
4 inch lifts in his shoes
5 kids, from 3 different mothers
6 bankruptcies
7 US Capitol police suing him for Jan 6 terrorist insurrection and murder of police
8 trillion + dollars added to the US debt in a single term
9 trump lawyers sanctioned by federal judge for lying in frivolous election fraud lawsuits and ordered to pay defendant's legal fees
10 years that trump paid $0 in income taxes between 2000 and 2015. ($0 to cops, teachers, roads, prisons, disaster relief, etc)
11 trump associates charged with serious crimes over the past 5 years
12 million votes (the big lie) - trump claims he won the 2020 election by 12 million votes when in reality, he lost by about 7 million votes.
13 of August, 2021 - one of multiple days that trump was supposed to magically become president again according to Qanon and a crack addicted pillow salesman (the two most respected information sources in the gop)
14 year old girl in a youth choir that trump approached in 1992 to say, "Wow! Just think - in a couple years I'll be dating you."
15 originally confirmed cases of COVID in the US trump said would soon be, “down to close to zero.” followed by, “like a miracle, it will disappear.” - over 1,000,000 Americans have since died of COVID and it continues to kill 4 years later.
16 years old - age of daughter ivanka when she hosted "miss teen" pageant and, according to long time trump associate Noel Casler, "trump called her over in the middle of a rehearsal and had her give him a lap dance while he leered at the crew."
17 known trump and russia investigations from local, state and federal prosecutors
18 gop senators that ignored trump threats / warnings and supported Biden admin's infrastructure bill.
19 as in COVID19 - trump was verified as the single largest source of disinformation on the virus, with a Cornell study claiming that 38% of the "misinformation conversation" originated with trump
20 the day in January, 2021, when Biden was sworn in despite trump inciting a violent insurrection to stop election verification at the US Capitol.
21 gun salute that trump ordered for himself when he left office after a humiliating defeat, even though he never served in the military, famously called military members "losers" and "suckers" and actively avoided the draft with a cowardly "bone spurs" excuse.
22 date in August, 2021, when Alabama hate rally crowd booed trump for finally saying people should get vaccinated, only after 700,000 Americans have died due mostly to his failure as president
23 as in wrestlemania 23 in 2007 where trump, a cartoon level failure with no other prospects, participated in a fake bet that a proxy wrestler would win a fake fight on his behalf or he would shave his wig and hair plugs off.
24 day in August, 2021, when trump actually filed a lawsuit in Florida court against YouTube, a private company, demanding that they reinstate his YouTube channel like a desperate, irrelevant embarrassment with no platforms left to abuse.
25 plus credible sexual assault allegations against trump, spanning decades and with accusers starting as young as 13 years old at time of assault.
- The fact that anyone follows this child trauma-born orangutan is proof to me that humanity is NOT an inherently rational species, and that most people don't bother putting in effort to think about anything.
- And a partridge in a pear tree.

At a campaign event in Iowa today, former President Donald Trump explained that the Civil War didn't have to happen. "So many mistakes were made," Trump said. "I think you could have negotiated that."
"This is something that could've been negotiated," he added. "…That was a tough one for our country…. Abraham Lincoln? If you negotiated it, you probably wouldn't even know who Abraham Lincoln was… That would've been okay…. I know it very well… I know the whole process that they went though. They just couldn't get along."
They couldn’t get along,..because one side wanted to keep all their slaves.
- Are those ellipses for skipped text or to represent pauses in his speech?
  
  It's how he speaks. I am a foreigner and when he first came at the head of the USA, the journalists didn't know how to translate his speaches. Usually, the sentences have one meaning that you can translate into one sentence, thanks to the context. With him, it's a couple of sentences with no link and the last sentences have absolutely no context. You just can't translate this.

So I wonder what degree of slavery we'd have ended up with? A little? Almost as much? 50% slavery?
What a fucking idiot.
- Slavery is already legal in US if you arrest a person first. That is an exception of the 13th amendment,
  I assume that is why US has the biggest prison population in the World and is 6th country in the World by per capita incarceration rate (first western country). If China and India would incarcerate it's citizens as much as US, China would have 4 times and India 10 times it's current prison population. And of course white people are about 8 times less likely to be incarcerated then black people.
  "Land of the free"
  
  Jesus, I thought that back guy was wearing a Confederate flag hat for a second...
  
  I agree with your overall point.
  My only quibble is China (and other heavily authoritarian countries that aren't forthcoming with data). I don't know that we can trust numbers coming out of China, given that many subjects are heavily censored. For instance, are the Uyghurs counted as in prison if they're in focible "re-education" camps? Do people that simply disappear get counted in those figures?
  
  I always wonder how did this exception end up there. From what I checked it's not clear who proposed it. I just imagine that after fighting extremely bloody and devastating war over it they sat down to draft the amendments and someone went "Are we sure we want to ban all slavery?". It's crazy that they decided to keep it only giving courts authority over it.
  
  Cuba, wtf?
- The funny thing is that Lincoln pretty much said they could keep their slaves for the sake of keeping the union together. He had made it clear he wanted to abolish slavery, but he wasn't going to risk the nation over it. He basically opened with an offer to let the south have everything.
  The South, however, believed that the day would come where the US would abolish slavery, and they needed to get out before that happened.
  Given the South were handed everything they wanted in the default position, no amount of negotiation would have worked.
  
  So what you're saying is, Trump was Wrong? Holy shit someone needs to tell the Press! Word needs to get out that Trump was wrong about a thing! Nobody will believe it!
- Fucking secessionists already attacked Ft. Sumter before abolishing slavery was even a big issue, they just were stupid drunk on power and thought they had a righteous cause. I have a gaming mouse that has been in use longer than the confederacy existed.
  
  They got spooked by John Brown taking Harpers Ferry.
- Maybe 3/5ths.

It's frustrating that historically lost causes based on hatred, like the slavers of the Confederacy or any form of fascism, are never fully punished for what they do. Each time a war ends the history writers make thousands of exceptions for people who were clearly working for their own self interest at the cost of society.
Any time a right wing, conservative cause loses (which is all the time based on history) they need to be burned bad: take away their money and livelihoods and make them reliant on social services.
- Would that actually work? How long should the north have kept armies raised and occupied the south to completely root out all bad guys? How long of doing that before you become the bad guys? How would you keep the trials from just becoming witch hunts?
  
  You can't throw the book at every vague supporter, but you CAN throw it at participants and organizers as a show of what the next guys will get.
  People would think twice about insurrection if everyone who J6ed faced charges as enemy combatants instead of the slap on the wrist crap most of them are getting.
  
  Oh give me a break with this bullshit. We got almost 100 years of Jim crow because racists and cowards like you were more worried about the feelings of white supremacists than doing the right thing. Reconstruction was working.
  
  Just. Hang. Them. All. Till. Death.

I mean technically yes, the South could have negotiated a surrender any time they wanted.
- I wish Lemmy had a way to high-five people.

That's pretty much what Lincoln tried to do with his inaugural speech after several states had seceded already. He tried to talk them down and promised that the North would not interfere with their life heavy-handedly but that insurrection was too serious for him to ignore. And then they stormed Fort Sumter and forced his hand. He didn't even commit to the cause of abolishing slavery until the third year of the war.

This idiot also wanted to cure your COVID infected body with bleach injections and UV light

I can't wait to read this fascist waste of oxygen's obituary.
- Same.
- I hope it's not as revisionist as Kissinger's was. Or take as long to happen.

Surprised he's not calling it the "War of Northern Aggression" just to really try to suck off his base.
- The north is racist too. He wouldn’t want to alienate them. After all Montana has the highest concentration of white supremacists per capita.
  California apparently has the most hate groups by total amount.
  https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/578513-the-10-us-states-with-the-most-hate-groups/
  I verified Montana with another website. If you want to know the full list of per capita. Just google it. But all that hate isn’t trapped in the south. Though, I admit that there is more than enough to go around down here.
  
  Montana was not a state until well after the end of the civil war so it isn't a northern or southern state.
- I know They call it that but it's a low he hadn't discovered he could sink to yet.

It's never good to negotiate with fascists.
You hear that, Democrats?
- They never hear that. It's always about "bipartisanship." And these are who we're stuck voting for to stop the Republican agenda. Fucking hell.
  
  The other thing I hear from status quo warriors is "We want things back to normal."
  No, we fucking don't! Normal sucks donkey ass for a lot of people.
- The Democrats are getting rich.
  They couldn't care less what you and I think about their paid inaction at the federal level.

I love the photo they used. Saving that for future memes.
- Looks like he might be in the middle of filling his diaper. My kid used to make the same face.
- I only came to the comments to see if people were discussing the picture lol.
  I can think of so many memes to 'improve'.

Photo is not altered.
- This dude looks like Gritty. And that's an insult to Gritty.

Maybe my vote could have been 2/3 of a white vote? And we could negotiate with women. Maybe they could just tell us who to vote for but not actually do any voting and we could then have a family vote?

Negotiate? He's suggesting things would've gone better if we'd agreed to mostly keep slavery but soften it a little in exchange for concessions? Well, that's horrifying.
- That precise negotiation is how we got the civil war, as well as a number of other completely busted, antidemocratic US institutions like the Senate. Making compromises with slavers.
  
  It's all so bad. The House should have thousands of members to give states proportional representation, but instead Alabama votes count for more than California votes. In turn, this makes the electoral* college unbalanced too in the same way. There's a huge bias towards rural voting power.
  *damn auto correct 😠
- Hard to know with Trump.
  His usual way of "negotiating" is to demand what he wants is the limit, while demanding that the other party capitulate to whatever is best for Trump.

This is one that I deal with all the time with the extreme right, the extreme left, the extreme LGBTQ..., the extreme vegans etc.
You have to negotiate!
No, we don't. Some starting positions are so ridiculous that they leave no room for negotiation. No one is owed a negotiation. Sometimes the answer is, "No."
EDIT: A couple of pedantic extremist apologists and a small brigade of their friends tried to shout and insult me down. They failed. They weren't interested in a conversation, just silencing someone whose message they didn't like. Do you know how I know this? Not a single one of them asked me to explain myself. Not a single one asked me why am extremist is an extremist.
All extremists have a pathological belief that they are somehow superior and that that superiority justified their anti-social behavior. So neo-Nazi extremists have a pathological belief that they are racially superior and that that superiority justifies harassing, intimidating, and threatening people they believe are racially inferior to leave. Vegan extremist believe that they are morally superior and that that moral superiority justifies their harassing, intimidating, and bullying restaurateurs butchers, grocers, farmers, and their customers to change their diets to comply with the extremists beliefs.
So, the (pedantic) details may be different but the underlying pathology is the same.
An extremist is an extremist. They're all pathological assholes with grandiose delusions.
- Some of those are not the same
  
  Extremists are extremists.

Translation: I am going to negotiate a new civil war

Just like he negotiated with those people on January 6th.

Technically, he is right in "The Civil War" being avoided BUT it would have just deferred conflict in the long run. There was no way the US would have continued with slavery. Absolutely zero chance due to an economic perspective.
The federal government would have 100% stroked a deal where select southern states could have kept slavery but the other states and especially the newest states would not be able have slavery. Not being able to negotiate this is what actually led to civil war. The confederates did not want to negotiate.
The North is industrial and made products to sell and export. The south used slavery for agriculture. If the slavery states would use that free labor to go industrial it would be a DISASTER for the slave free sates. Conflict would then arise to make sure the south no longer has that "economic advantage" over the north.
tldr: Any market with legal slavery will go "capitalism full bloom" and create a market where free Americans have no chance to compete.
- What is ironic is that the civil war could have been avoided by the South just realizing they're wrong, and letting slavery be banned. Instead they freaked out and attacked US military installations while declaring secession.
  So he's right, but not in a way any conservative would want to hear.

He’s propping himself up to be a victim of the next one.
- Something tells me he wouldn't survive Civil War 2, Election Boogaloo. And I'm not even talking from our side.

Fits completely in line with his intentions to appease Putin.

Oh boy! 1939 all over again!
- 33*
  no wait im wrong

Just another attention grabbing word salad to entertain his mindless cult zombies.

Thanks for making clear that MAGA is in reference to the 1860s. Any Republicans with lots of support speaking out against this? No? Then the message is clear: Vote Blue!

In other words, Trump thinks continuing slavery would have been a better outcome. On brand for his base.

The actual source is this video where he spends almost two minutes trying to say how the conflict itself was bad and thinking if it was negotiated there wouldn't have been a war.
Don't know the full video, but I would like to believe he was trying to show sympathy for the actual losses and casualties. It's Trump so he was probably going on a tirade on how if he had negotiated that there wouldn't have been a need for a civil war, or something along those lines.

Took me a moment to realise he was talking about the last one.

That one the next one?