Donald Trump is the most divisive political figure of our time—perhaps the most divisive since Lincoln. There are supporters who would take a bullet for him, and there are adversaries who cheer when someone shoots at him. This goes beyond the normal polarization of American politics. Lincoln too provoked intensely divided sentiments. And yet with Lincoln the division was over the issue—slavery—while with Trump the division is over the man.

This is the first great Trump enigma—what is it about Trump that produces this extreme bifurcation? And the second enigma is like it: Here is a man who is attacked mercilessly, in and out of office, every single day. He’s faced character assassination, attempted legal destruction, even two actual assassination attempts. And for what? Here’s a billionaire with an easy life available to him. Why does he persist?

If we can unravel these enigmas we will understand not only Trump but also our current situation—indeed, we will better understand ourselves. Fortunately, in this task we have the help of none other than Lincoln himself—who, as one of the greatest students and practitioners of American politics, understood precisely the forces that would one day produce Trump Derangement Syndrome.

On January 27, 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln spoke on the topic of “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. This has come to be known as Lincoln’s Lyceum speech. The Lyceum Address diagnoses a malady of Lincoln’s day that is also a malady of our own. The speech’s main theme is the subversion of law and the danger that an American dictator or tyrant might rise to destroy the foundations of our constitutional republic.

Our system, says Lincoln, is a system of laws—we are a government of laws and not men. And yet, Lincoln warns against a rising trend of disregard for law, which he calls “mob rule” or the “mobocratic spirit.” The underlying issue, of course, is slavery. But Lincoln downplays the specifics. He focuses instead on a whole pattern of recent events in which angry mobs have taken the law into their own hands—hanging gamblers in Vicksburg, burning a black man suspected of murder in St. Louis, committing violence against abolitionists in Lincoln’s own state of Illinois.

One might expect Lincoln to offer some proposed remedies against angry roving mobs. But instead he raises the prospect of an unnamed tyrant who might exploit the mobocratic spirit and channel it to his own purposes. Such a figure, Lincoln says, is not merely possible: his ascent should be expected. In fact, Lincoln raises the chilling possibility that the unnamed tyrant—the would-be destroyer of the republic—is already here.

Astonishingly Lincoln considers the approach of tyranny in America not from the point of view of the people whose freedom is at stake, but from the point of view of the tyrant. Ordinary politicians, he says, might be content with merely upholding the structure the Founders put in place. That, and the perks of office, are for them sufficient gratification. But not for the tyrant, who cannot content himself with such modest ambitions.

“The question then,” says Lincoln, “is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others. Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” Lincoln continues: “What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path.”

What is one to make of this prophetic warning from America’s wisest and most far-seeing leader? Lincoln ascribes an almost sympathetic motivation to tyrants—they are men of such caliber that they seek distinction above the run of the mill; mere human laws cannot contain them; they blaze their own paths of genius and greatness. Yet Lincoln could not be more clear that we should beware of such people.

So who are they? Is Lincoln referring to the man who would become his chief political rival, the Democrat Stephen Douglas? Did he have in mind the powerful South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, avid champion of slavery as a “positive good”? Lincoln does not specifically say. The speech as a whole defies easy application, especially across the distance of nearly two centuries. Yet of course Trump’s critics have triumphantly invoked it to say: here we go, Lincoln was obviously warning about the rise of a tyrannical menace like Donald Trump.

Here’s Never Trump columnist Bret Stephens, writing in the New York Times. According to Stephens, “Lincoln knew in 1838” what America would face in our own time. Trump and his allies represent, in Stephens’ words, “men in the mold of Caesar or Napoleon who would sooner tear down than defend republican institutions in order to slake a thirst for glory.” Writing in The Guardian, Jason Wilson invokes the specter of “Red Caesarism” to describe the ascent of Trump and his Make America Great Again movement. Such people, columnist Damon Linker insists, “are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States.”

The focus on Caesar, rather than Napoleon and Alexander, seems appropriate. Napoleon and Alexander relied on foreign conquests to consolidate their power. Caesar, however, was suspected of subverting the Roman republic from within. He rose from the aristocracy to then ally with the masses against the aristocrats and Roman elites. The people, just as much as his military conquests, were the source of his power. With mobs baying in the streets, Caesar could govern as an emperor in all but name.

Lincoln, like Trump and indeed like Caesar, was a larger-than-life figure. As we see from the Lyceum speech, he recognized the Caesarian temptation, even in himself. Did he succumb to it? Early in the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, which is a core protection of constitutional rights. Quite clearly the Constitution gives Congress—not the president—the power to suspend habeas corpus in the event of a national emergency.

But Lincoln argued that the outbreak of the war had prevented Congress from being able to safely convene. Congress simply could not exercise its constitutional power. And so Lincoln was compelled to do it on Congress’s behalf. When Congress later could meet, Lincoln explained, they did in fact ratify his exercise of that authority. So Lincoln denied that he was acting unconstitutionally, even though a case can be made that he was. In fact, he argued, he was working prudentially to restore constitutional order from the position in which he found himself, which was one in which lawlessness had already broken out.

Likewise today there is certainly subversion of the rule of law at work—the threat of tyranny is real enough. But it doesn’t come from Trump; it comes from the other side. The Democrats today have established a tyrannical regime that not only condones lawlessness on the street, but also incorporates lawlessness into the institutions of government and stokes it by smiling on torrents of illegal immigration. Unlike Caesar, the Democrats don’t ally with the people against the elites; rather, they are elites who carry out their schemes against the people in the name of the people. In their claim to “save democracy” they resemble virtually all modern tyrannies that undermine law and liberty while pretending to march behind their very banners.

The American Founders understood this dynamic well. One might call it the problem of the wolf and the sheep. Lincoln himself, in an 1864 address at a Baltimore fair, expressed the problem perfectly. “We all declare for liberty but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.”

Lincoln is being slightly whimsical here, but he captures the irony that the wolf, no less than the sheep, appeals to liberty. The tyrannical regimes of today insist that their actions are expressions of the highest regard for liberty. Lincoln contrasts the actions of the wolf, whose real concern is only for himself, with those of the shepherd, whose concern is with protecting the sheep from the wolf. The shepherd differs from the wolf, not because he lacks the power to harm the sheep, but because he chooses to care for them and protect them.

Shepherds, however, cannot protect the sheep in their care if they are not stronger than the wolves that seek to prey on them. To put it bluntly, it takes a could-be Caesar to defeat a would-be Caesar! This is the subtle message of the Lyceum Address. Lincoln fully understood that the crisis of 1860 required a leader of titanic ambition and capability to meet the grave threat posed by the powerful forces of lawlessness and sedition. So too, I argue, Trump is the 800-pound gorilla who understands his own titanic powers and is ready to harness them against the formidable forces of evil and tyranny in our society.

Of course Lincoln’s analogy of the shepherd and the wolf can be challenged with a Machiavellian objection. Isn’t the shepherd a disguised wolf? Isn’t the shepherd protecting the sheep only to ready them for the slaughter? Isn’t the shepherd, no less than the wolf, doing what he does with an eye to his dinner?

Lincoln, invoking the Good Shepherd found in the New Testament no less than Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, answers that everything depends on the care of the herdsman for his flock. Analyzing the Lyceum Address in Crisis of the House Divided (1959), political scientist Harry Jaffa makes the point that “the strength of the wolf inspires terror, yet there is nothing wonderful about it because it is joined to the wolf’s predatory nature.” The wolf is selfish—but so, after all, are the sheep. Yet the good shepherd is a mystery, because while he has the power to destroy the sheep, he chooses to protect them. Jaffa argues that “it is the contrast between the shepherd’s gentleness and his strength, and the mystery of why he denies himself human or selfish gratification, that arouses wonder.”

The only explanation for the shepherd’s behavior is that he loves the sheep and therefore acts in the interests of their welfare rather than his own. Here, I believe, is the resolution of the two enigmas I outlined at the beginning of this chapter. The Left calls Trump a tyrant because they recognize in him colossal and titanic power. He could be a Caesar if he wanted to. Yet for all the hand-wringing over January 6, his subsequent legal efforts, his social media posts, and all the rest, Trump has invariably abided by the will of both judges and the public.

And so the Left accuses him of being a Caesar, even though Trump has never acted like a Caesar—and deep down, they know he is not one. What they really fear is his power and his burning passion for the country’s founding ideals. He represents a threat to their own Caesarian project.

Trump has the power to do harm, but he has no intention to use that power. He loves his country and its people; he seeks to protect them in the manner of Lincoln’s shepherd. His MAGA enthusiasts “get” this about him, and they are loyal to him because he is loyal to them.

Ironically there are some Republicans who are made uncomfortable by Trump’s dimensions—by his power—for the simple reason that they don’t possess it. It bewilders them. They would rather be led by a sheep than a shepherd—someone more like, well, themselves. So they are constantly wishing that Trump accommodate himself to their petty demands: stay with the herd, stop seeking out the wolf, be more civil to the wolf, live and let live. These Republicans make a virtue out of cowardice and weakness, and their highest aspiration is to be the sheep that is eaten last. They refuse the assistance of the shepherd “on principle.”

Having resolved the first enigma, we already have the answer to the second. Why, after all, does Trump do it? His motivation is not selfish but unselfish. He has nothing personally to gain from another term in office. It promises him unceasing turmoil, conflict, aggravation. The tyrannical Left, after all, will not go down without a vicious fight. Yet Trump persists—and for that, there is no other explanation than that he wants to do his country good.