Gary Franks: Lincoln's pardon and Trump's victory

In politics, there are some things we have seen before and some things we have not.

Abraham Lincoln was criticized for giving a pardon to a family member. So family pardons are not new.

How about President-elect Donald Trump’s recent victory over the legacy press? Now that is different. It was historic. Trump settled for $15 million, plus a million dollars in legal fees, from ABC News in a defamation lawsuit.

But first, let’s start with Lincoln.

If you have been in politics long enough you will have a family member who would vocally oppose you, despite your having the same parents or grandparents. That just happens.

Abraham Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Benjamin Helm, was asked to assist the Union during the Civil War, but the West Point and Harvard grad from Kentucky (Lincoln’s original home) rejected his brother-in-law’s offer and became a general for the Confederate army. So, while Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were fighting to keep the Union intact and end slavery, the husband of Mary’s sister was trying to secede from the Union.

After Helm was killed in battle and after the Union prevailed in the Civil War, offers of pardon went out to southern residences, as part of Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction Act. The pardons excluded military officers, unless they promised to take a new oath of allegiance to the United States of America. Well, the general’s wife, Emilie Todd Helm, refused to do so.

She made her way north to join her sister and brother-in-law in the White House, however. Blood is much thicker than water, right President Biden? Emilie Todd Helm lived in the White House with the man her husband fought to defeat.

Critics and military officers of the Union were outraged that a “rebel” was living in the White House. Lincoln replied, “General Sickles, my wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.”

Soon thereafter, Lincoln granted his sister-in-law a full pardon, and she returned to Kentucky.

Now for the unexpected.

Trump had a very unusual victory of sorts, one that was not widely reported by the legacy or liberal media outlets. He forced ABC News to settle a defamation lawsuit caused by one of their high-ranking reporters, George Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos claimed Trump had “raped” a person. The evidence, however, pointed toward a sexual abuse accusation. Calling someone a rapist just prior to an election is apt to chase voters away from that candidate, especially women . To no avail, however, as Trump did well with the female vote, except for the near unanimous Black women support for Vice President Kamala Harris.

It takes a lot to be able to pull off that kind of success with the media. Here’s one common saying during a different political era: “Do not fight the media; they buy ink by the barrel.” In other words, the media will write story after story on the controversy, only making matters worse for you. Media personalities had positioned themselves over time as the ultimate arbiters of information. If you have read it in the newspaper or heard it reported in the broadcast media, it had to be true.

Yes, history often repeats itself, but sometimes, just sometimes, you get to see something that has never happened before.

I commend Trump for this victory. But we all get the omnipresent bias of the media.

I just want Trump to devote all of his energy and resources to fighting for Americans — for their prosperity, well-being and peace in the world.