"Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice."

Robert Frost, the great American poet, did not know the world could end in spitfire — hateful noises spewing from a president's mouth and tweets from the first day. He puts the bully in the bully pulpit.

The Amazon rainforest fires are raging. The burn is a global tragedy. What a metaphor for American democracy under siege this third summer of Donald Trump, the hottest yet. The race riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, two Augusts ago, was only the beginning of our heartburn.

The American economy is feeling heat from Trump's one-man grudge trade war with China. In a rare moment of candor, he said at the G-7 summit with world leaders, "I have no plan right now." Nobody knows what he'll do next, perhaps not even him.

Trump's tariffs are tantamount to lighting matches at Midwestern factories and farmers' harvests and the anxious stock market. He really doesn't care. Do you?

American carnage. Such was Trump's vision in his inaugural address. The next day, he declared war on the press; that month, on Muslims; soon after, on his own Justice Department. Immigrants were not far behind. Women and people of color always made his enemies list. He insulted the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, by soldier graves at Normandy, France.

Lately, it's an outlandish snub of Denmark and an attack on the Federal Reserve — one of our best allies and a nonpartisan democratic institution.

Something is rotten but not in the state of Denmark.

The question comes up all the time: Is Trump the worst president ever? It's a liberal parlor game. There were several spectacular failures as president before and after the Civil War.

However, one single disruptive force could have been as bad as, or worse than, Trump, had the famed "Little Giant" realized his ceaseless ambition to become president. Let it be cold comfort. In light of our fix, we can see how much damage Trump's political identical twin would have done.

Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was, as The New York Times put it, "an evil genius ... (with) a truculent audacity of language." Douglas lost for president in 1860, just before the Civil War broke out.

A vile racist, Douglas spoke the N-word often on the Senate floor. His political nemesis, Abraham Lincoln, an unknown Illinois lawyer and state legislator, defeated him for president as the nation neared the brink of war.

Douglas berated Lincoln as a "black Republican" in prairie debates during a Senate race, which Douglas won in 1858. Like Trump, he flogged his seething white supremacy all over this land and never got sick of himself.

Our first American demagogue.

The country was akin to a powder keg, as now, but was bitterly divided over slavery. If Douglas had won — and lived — let me assure you, the stain of slavery would have spread farther and faster. He specialized in throwing matches on the powder keg, inflaming the "sectional divide."

Like Trump, Douglas was wealthy and identified with the South more than his region. Like Trump, he had vast real estate holdings, in Chicago along with a Deep South plantation in Mississippi.

Ironically, leading Southern senators, such as Jefferson Davis, scorned him as a no-class narcissist. Douglas was not "one of them," hard as he cast himself as the best agent for expanding slavery in his quest to become president.

Sidney Blumenthal's wise new volume on Lincoln's political life in this crisis period, "All the Powers of the Earth," reveals a mean-spirited, divisive Douglas during the "gathering storm."

Two roads diverged.

Lincoln argued the founders intended slavery to end. As senator, Douglas authored an incendiary bill to let new states decide to be slave or free. Lincoln and the North wanted none of that stain spreading West. The bill backfired on Douglas, on both sides of the divide.

Douglas summed up Lincoln well: "The best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry joke ... He is as honest as he is shrewd."

Lincoln gave Douglas his hat to hold before giving his inaugural address. History note: It takes a great like Lincoln to vanquish a vicious Douglas.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the website creators.com.

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