WASHINGTON — Autumn sun lights the city after President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, except the civil war he started isn't over yet. The part Trump's playing in this tragic drama: the traitor, like despicable Jefferson Davis, who conducted the Civil War over slavery.

Trump's historic refusal to concede is the perfect parallel to the Confederate president, the Mississippi senator and enslaver who tore the country apart. He nearly succeeded but for prairie giant President Abraham Lincoln.

Like Trump, Davis never surrendered his white supremacist lost cause.

After the ravages of the Trump term, the American people must brace for a defiant last stand from the worst loser in the world, for history does rhyme all the time.

Even as the Civil War ended, after Richmond fell, Davis was captured in Georgia while fleeing by Union cavalry soldiers. He was dressed as a woman. By 1865, the Confederate states were weary, shattered by four years of war.

These were Trumpian red states in 2016, except Virginia. So, Davis still had his fingerprints on the American political map. The evil men do lives long after them, said Shakespeare.

Davis was imprisoned after the Civil War, a fate that may await the outgoing president. Too bad they can't be cellmates. They're soul mates.

We just got word Trump fired his Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, because he resisted sending in the military to peaceful protests. That's more serious than the inmate running the White House asylum. There's no telling what our own hateful Confederate might do, after cutting jagged rifts of resentment across America.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., declared, "The abrupt firing of Secretary Esper is disturbing evidence that President Trump is intent on using his final days in office to sow chaos in our American Democracy and around the world."

Heed her words. As the top Democrat who stood up to him, Pelosi knows her Trump. In the first Oval Office meeting, he claimed he won the popular vote. One of myriad lies. She confronted him in front of all his men.

Then came the House impeachment, with witnesses on presidential plotting in Ukraine.

Pelosi told the president, "All roads lead to (Vladimir) Putin." To his face.

Her ripping up his State of the Union speech was elegant resistance. Trump hasn't spoken to the Speaker since.

To review, the rule with Trump is there are no rules. Second, he desperately has to win — and lies, cheats and steals to achieve that. Third, he does his best to bring out the worst in people, the greatest talent of these three things.

All along, he cunningly courted the "old South" block and solidified it, building racial strife. The deadly Virginia race riot in Charlottesville showed whose side he was on. He equated the sides as "very fine people."

Taking revenge, Trump could smash the body politic into smithereens. Just as Davis sowed seeds of Southern rage for a century-and-a-half toward Yankees.

Did the Civil War, North and South, ever end?

I like the symmetry of Pennsylvania and Georgia, then and now. Biden won the state where he was born, as Pennsylvania took him to the mountaintop on Saturday noon. I happened to be in Delaware, biking through pine forest and salt marshes to the ocean.

In 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg changed everything. The Union victory, after three days, happened July 4 on Pennsylvania farmland. Confederate general Robert E. Lee lost big on his Northern gambit.

A high-class traitor, Lee later showed grace in meeting Gen. Ulysses Grant for "The Surrender."

The hated phrase "Marching through Georgia" is Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's campaign to burn Atlanta and march to the sea, where he claimed Savannah. Sherman broke the civilian Confederacy.

At last count, Georgia is the only Deep South state Biden carried — a hopeful sign the late hero, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., galvanized Atlanta voters and helped racial healing in the age of Trump. The morning after his 2017 inauguration, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me Trump was like "a Confederate." Prescient moment.

Burning candles, Davis played martyr to the bitter end of his long life.

Jamie Stiehm writes on Washington politics and history. She may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To read her weekly column and find out more about Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

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