Lincoln, Roosevelt, Trump: Three Profiles in World-Historical Leadership

Transformational leaders are rarely judged correctly by their contemporaries. Thus, our rosy view of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are idealized in retrospect, with their many flaws and errors largely forgotten. Yet these leaders, whom we now judge to be world-historical figures who permanently altered our politics and ushered in a new era in American life, were in their own time intensely polarizing and commonly regarded as dictators. So, what is the truth, and wha...