Has a U.S. presidential candidate ever faced as much public opposition as Trump has?Originally Answered: Has any US president in history faced as much public opposition as Trump has obtained?

Has a U.S. presidential candidate ever faced as much public opposition as Trump has?

Originally Answered: Has any US president in history faced as much public opposition as Trump has obtained?

Yes. Did he ever.

No U.S. President ever faced the public opposition that Abraham Lincoln did when he was elected in 1860. And no one ever will. The next Presidential election that engenders that kind of division among the American people will be the last one the country ever has; a second conflict like that would destroy the country.

I presume most everyone already knows the background of how and why the 1860 election was so problematic and divisive for the country, and I won’t go into the debate about the continued existence and spread of slavery. The main point about Lincoln is that he was so unpopular and mistrusted in the slave states that he wasn’t even on the ballot in several of them—voters didn’t even have the option to vote for Lincoln unless they just wrote his name in. And no one complained about that; he didn’t get a single vote in a few states, even by way of write-in.

When he won, with less than 40 percent of the popular vote because the election had four legitimate, serious candidates who all won states, the southern states all seceded, several of them doing so before he even took the oath of office. One of them, South Carolina, actually did it before the year was out, on 20 December 1860.

The Southern states were so intractably opposed to Lincoln that they refused to rejoin the Union even when Lincoln publicly stated he was in favor of a Constitutional amendment ensuring their right to slavery. They refused to rejoin even in February of 1865, when he offered them the right to keep their slaves if they would return—and this was when the Confederacy was on the verge of total defeat, and had less than six months to live. When the war was over, Lincoln was murdered by a pro-Confederate fanatic, even though he fully intended to accord the South incredibly moderate Reconstruction terms.

The Southern states were so opposed to Abraham Lincoln that they armed more than one million men and waged total war for more than four years, most of it on their own soil, and at least 258,000 of them lost their lives. They willingly suffered the destruction and impoverishment of their homeland to such an extent that it didn’t fully recover for a century.

Abraham Lincoln has forever retired the proverbial “Most Opposed U.S. President of All Time” trophy.