Former President Donald Trump said Saturday at an Iowa campaign event that the Civil War was ‘something that could’ve been negotiated.’
The quip came during an early afternoon campaign stop at a community college in Newton, Iowa.
And it happened after the conflict already tripped up one of his 2024 Republican rivals, former U.N. Amb. Nikki Haley, who was criticized for neglecting to mention slavery when a New Hampshire town hall attendee asked her the cause of it.
‘The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,’ Trump said. ‘I’m so attracted to seeing it. So many mistakes were made. See there was something that could’ve been negotiated, to be honest with you, I think you could have negotiated that.’
He added that President Abraham Lincoln ‘if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.’
Former President Donald Trump claimed at an Iowa campaign event Saturday that Abraham Lincoln could have ‘negotiated’ and prevented the Civil War
‘He would have been president … but he wouldn’t be “the” Abraham Lincoln, but that would’ve been OK,’ Trump added.
Trump spent several moments remarking about the terrible death toll – estimated to be 620,000.
‘So many people died. That was the disaster. If you got hit by a bullet in the leg, you were essentially going to die or lose the leg, that’s why you had so many people – no legs, no arms … because the infection, gangrene – it was just such, sort of a horrible time.’
He added that it was a ‘vicious, vicious war’ and a ‘tough one for our country.’
A man dressed like Lincoln attended Trump’s Saturday afternoon event.
The Civil War became a hot topic on the Republican campaign trail in the days following Christmas, when Haley was asked about its cause at a December 27 campaign event in New Hampshire.
‘Well don’t come with an easy question or anything,’ Haley told the town hall attendee.
‘I mean I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,’ Haley then answered.
A man dressed like President Abraham Lincoln attended former President Donald Trump’s event Saturday afternoon in Newton, Iowa in which he suggested that the Civil War ‘could’ve been negotiated’
Trump commented about the bloody conflict during a campaign event Saturday in Newton, Iowa, noting that if soldiers ‘got hit by a bullet in the leg, you were essentially going to die or lose the leg’
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, asked the man for his opinion on what started the Civil War and he then commented that he found it ‘astonishing’ in 2023 that she wouldn’t mention the word ‘slavery.’
‘What do you want me to say about slavery?’ Haley then said.
The cringe-worthy response was almost immediately criticized, including by Haley’s rivals.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at an Iowa campaign stop shortly thereafter: ‘You know, I noticed that Nikki Haley has had some problems with some basic American history.’
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called her comments ‘dishonest’ because she’s trying to have it both ways with voters.
Haley continued to play clean up this week, saying she ‘had black friends growing up’ during her CNN town hall in Des Moines, Iowa on Thursday.
Trump has paid more attention to Haley at his recent Iowa campaign events – as he traversed the state Friday and Satruday – but tended to focus on the fact that she said, at one point, that she wouldn’t run for president against him.
The ex-president didn’t elaborate on how Lincoln could have negotiated with the Confederacy – the southern states that left the United States over the issue of slavery – to avoid the 1860s conflict.
He made similar eyebrow-raising comments during an interview with conservative journalist Salena Zito in 2017.
During that Q&A session, Trump suggested that had President Andrew Jackson ‘been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.’
Jackson, the country’s seventh president, died more than a decade before the Civil War started.