“In the beginning, it’s a life,” says Sidney Blumenthal. “And times.”

For the first 129 pages of Wrestling With His Angel, the second of four volumes on Abraham Lincoln that won strong reviews last year, the times threaten to overwhelm the life. Between 1849 and 1856, as the country reels over slavery, Lincoln isn’t part of the dance. Out of Congress after one term, he is lawyering in courthouses across Illinois. But he is watching, closely, as the figures twirl and spin.

Everything and everyone in Blumenthal’s rich study of 19th-century political life acts upon the man who became the 16th president in 1861. By the end of the book, two years before his Senate race against Stephen A Douglas, he is ready to act himself. Wrestling With His Angel covers years crucial to the making of Lincoln but relatively unknown to the reading public.

“Everyone thinks they know Lincoln,” Blumenthal says. “But what I didn’t know and what I tried to present as best I could is how Lincoln thought, not to impose some artificial construct on him, or attribute to him some determinism, or even, as some of his contemporaries did, a sense of destiny. Even when someone may feel they have a sense of destiny, that’s simply a factor in how they behave. And it can be an illusion as well.”

And with that, the 45th president looms over the conversation. Prompted to do so, Blumenthal refers mostly to “He Who Shall Not Be Named”. Fascination, however, trumps caution.

The other key figure in the book is Douglas, the “Little Giant” of Illinois, pilot of the Compromise of 1850, author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, architect and benefactor of the Illinois Central Railroad, and Lincoln’s opponent in the debates of 1858 and the 1860 presidential race. In conversation, Blumenthal picks out his sentences: careful, considered, perhaps slightly distracted by thoughts of his third volume, being rewritten to take Lincoln to Gettysburg, in the middle-distance of 1863.

“Douglas actually could perform legislative miracles,” he says. “He is the one who managed the passage of the compromise of 1850, not [the Kentucky senator] Henry Clay, who physically and politically collapsed in a failed effort to do it. Douglas understood political men’s motives, understood a lifetime in politics in Illinois and Washington, in a way that Donald Trump never will. Compared to the Little Giant in history, Trump will always be little.”

And here we are, to employ the kind of slightly hard-boiled stylistic flourish that crops up in Blumenthal’s writing, in Trumpworld. Surrounded by the political caricatures of the Palm restaurant in Washington DC, under the gaze of a shirtless George HW Bush astride an elephant, it all feels a little surreal.

Sidney Blumenthal arrives to appear before the House select committee on Benghazi at the US Capitol in June 2015. Photograph: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

Talk of impeachment is gathering. Blumenthal has been there, as a presidential adviser under the fierce spotlight of proceedings against Bill Clinton, the whole thing documented exhaustively elsewhere: in his own book, The Clinton Wars, in solemn histories and in slashing attacks from the right. Notoriety lingers. Last time we met, with Hillary Clinton running for the Democratic nomination, Blumenthal had come fresh from the torture chambers of cable TV, where he fielded more questions about Benghazi than Lincoln.

He was fine with that. “I’m a political person,” he said. “It’s the political season. The Clintons are on stage.” Now, like Hillary, like Lincoln, he’s offstage. But he’s observing and mounting sallies of his own that, in the case of an essay in the London Review of Books that took for real some fake political ads about Trump’s father, can sometimes come back to bite. Any lingering guilt an interviewer might have about discussing Trump in an interview about Lincoln, though, is scotched by the title of the third chapter of Wrestling With His Angel, an evisceration of the woeful 13th president, Millard Fillmore: The Art of the Deal.

“Trump will provide a basis for revisionism of many presidents,” Blumenthal says of the kind of lists that usually put Lincoln on the podium with George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Those at the bottom will rise up from where they sit in historians’ estimation. Warren G Harding appears to be a much more serious and earnest figure.”

He reaches for George W Bush’s now infamous inauguration day whisper, which he calls “the single most succinct and fitting remark to date about Trump”.

“Some day, some historian will write a book entitled: Some Weird Shit: A History of the Trump Administration.”

Blumenthal’s Lincoln

Toward the end of volume two, Lincoln begins to climb from obscurity. In conversation, Blumenthal cites a speech given on 4 October 1854 at the State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, as division quickened towards secession.

“He says many things in that speech,” Blumenthal says, “but one of the things is that the spread of slavery deprives the US of our ‘just influence in the world’. He means that by our example of fighting for democracy in the US, we should be providing an example to the Europeans and those in the west struggling for democracy as well, against reactionary forces.

“He is not making rhetorical points. He means it. And that is what he meant when he talked, later, about the United States as the ‘last best hope of Earth’. It was not some grandiose triumphal expression of so-called American exceptionalism. He meant that the US should be the leading liberal party in the west. Those are the words he uses. That is how we exercise our just influence on the world.”

Lincoln’s words might be seen as father to the idea of the “indispensable nation”, a phrase coined by Blumenthal and the historian James Chace and used under Bill Clinton in the era of third way internationalism and by Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail last year. Blumenthal, who has been fascinated and formed by Lincoln since his Chicago childhood, smiles warily.

“It would be,” he says, again picking his words with care. “And it would also be the sense of liberal internationalism that has been rejected by He Who Shall Not Be Named. These struggles return. We can learn a lot about where we’ve been, and, as Lincoln said, ‘whither we are going’. And what is not the American path of Lincoln.”

Abraham Lincoln in an 1865 portrait photograph by Alexander Gardner. Photograph: UIG via Getty Images

The current occupant of the White House has invoked “the great Abe Lincoln”, even as he completes his hijack of what remains of the party Lincoln helped to found. Earlier this month, Trump caused widespread hilarity by suggesting Andrew Jackson, the seventh president who died in 1845, could have stopped the civil war, which began in 1861. Such public declarations of affinity with Jackson, the populist, lead Blumenthal to perform a surgical dismemberment.

“It’s always a mistake,” he says, “a fundamental error, to attribute even rudimentary knowledge to Trump. And to assume that he is extrapolating from something that might be even a fragment of history. There is nothing there. And nothing comes from nothing.

“He has been told by Stephen Bannon that he is in the mould of Andrew Jackson, which is an absurdity. Because despite the glaringly obvious differences – I don’t recall Trump being the general who won the battle of New Orleans, or having been a senator – he’s precisely the sort of person Jackson would have loved to pull down: a privileged blowhard heir who wants to privilege the privileged.

“That’s not what Jacksonianism was about. And knowing nothing, it’s hard to blame Trump for his pseudohistory. But the Jacksonian persuasion, as one historian called it, a large part of it went into the creation of the Republican party and aligned with Lincoln.”

He’s the person Jackson would have loved to pull down: a privileged blowhard heir who wants to privilege the privileged Blumenthal on Trump

There is Francis P Blair, he of the house across from the White House; Montgomery Blair, his son, a member of Lincoln’s cabinet; John C Frémont, the first Republican nominee for president; Thomas Hart Benton, the colossus of Congress, the “man who was Missouri”. All of them were vehemently opposed to John C Calhoun, beaten back by Jackson in the nullification crisis of 1832 but stoker of the southern fire that eventually fueled secession and from which Bannon appears to draw destructive inspiration.

“There is another Jacksonian tradition,” Blumenthal adds, sliding in the knife. “The tradition of Roger Taney, who was in Jackson’s kitchen cabinet and who became the supreme court justice who issued the Dred Scott decision that said black men had no rights that any white was bound to respect. Maybe he means that Jacksonian tradition.”

Like volume one, A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel contains fascinating portraits of other historical figures. There is the little-remembered William Walker, a soldier of fortune who invaded Nicaragua and Mexico with the aim of founding an empire for slavery, then met his end in Honduras. There is also Jefferson Davis, not yet president of the Confederacy, “Dick Cheney before Dick Cheney” in his power over President Pierce, in private stricken near-blind by venereal disease.

A little before the day we meet, New Orleans has taken down a statue of Davis. The city’s decision to remove its monuments to the Confederacy and white supremacy has provoked protest and praise. Blumenthal’s final volume will consider Lincoln’s legacy in the Reconstruction era and how it was dismantled by a resurgent, racist south that concentrated on the removal of basic rights, most potently the vote. In 2013, the US supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The issue lives.

“Voter suppression has its roots in the war against Reconstruction by white terrorist organisations like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League of New Orleans,” Blumenthal says. “Voter suppression was a factor in the election of 2016 and even today, He Who Shall Not Be Named has appointed a commission to look into so-called voter fraud, which is of course an Orwellian title given to an effort to sustain and advance voter suppression. To that extent, in that effort at least, the civil war is still going on.”

So is Blumenthal’s monumental life of Lincoln. In volume two, there is a brief description of a forgotten event that points to his subject’s death.

In Pennsylvania in 1851, a Maryland slave owner who had come north to catch four runaways was shot and killed in a confrontation with a group of free African Americans and abolitionist whites. One of the runaway slaves, William Parker, was helped to freedom in Canada by Frederick Douglass, another man whose death date Trump muddled. The slave owner’s name was Edward Gorsuch.

Blumenthal is not aware of any relation to Trump’s supreme court justice, the ultra-conservative Neil Gorsuch. He is certain, though, of the identity of the young actor to whom Edward Gorsuch was something of a surrogate father. His name was John Wilkes Booth.