

The smoking absolutely kills me, as someone with asthma who has gotten very used to the fact that most things in the US are non-smoking now. It felt like there was a cloud of smoke basically everywhere I went in France and, to a lesser extent, England.
I’m 100% confident that at the time that’s how this was interpreted. After the guy talked about how he was the least racist person in the room (lol), calling him Abraham Lincoln doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.